lubes are a tiny fraction of our oil use, but sure oil isn't going away - it will just be reduced over time ( a much longer time period than coal)

then there's the issue of how you get oil - plants make oils, or you can syn it up your self instead of cracking it down

but I see no reason to worry about lubricant usages - such a small impact on GHGs and there is plenty of oil in the ground so no supply issues for centuries, or millenia

Refineries make lots of products, and the bottom of the barrel is the black goo left behind. That gets refined into Carbon black that makes tires black, and is used in lots of products. How do we make tires without a ready supply of carbon black.

just get it from VMware

Here's a good article that explains why oil and natural gas are going to continue to be dominant players in our energy future for a long time, and why natural gas is essential to lowering the world's pollution/carbon footprint - without government interference.

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/11/03/environmentalists_unwittingly_cause_oil_producers_ to_disprove_peak_582638.html

Modern refineries have delayed coker units that take vacuum resid (tar) and turn it into gas oil that can be turned into diesel and gasoline. The remainder is petroleum coke used in the smelting process.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1604513300.jpg

Older or simple refineries that don't have coker plants have left-over resid (similar to coal tar) either from a vacuum or crude distillation process, depending on the plant complexity. That resid is typically sent to asphalt plants.

To make carbon black they take tar like described above and quick burn it in an O2 manipulated atmosphere.
It's basically soot from the incomplete combustion process.

My brother in law works at a carbon black plant in Oklahoma. He said they have a huge furnace the size of a high school gymnasium that burns anything to black soot. They get in trainloads of the tar residue and turn it into large piles of carbon black. The clients are paint factories to tire makers. They each have a particular "flavor" or recipe for what they want. They ship it out by the trainload. It is like black baby-powder, only finer particle size.

Now THAT would be a good job for Mike Rowe.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1604513864.gif

Hope he wears good respiratory protection.

One thing about petroleum resid and petroleum coke:
It's the end of the trail, the bottom of the crude oil barrel.
As such it has lots of nasties entrained. Anything that can be found in the earth, only more concentrated.
Things like heavy metals and radioactive stuff.
Anything non-combustible that is in the resid will end up in the carbon black soot.

It's not uncommon for people who work with that stuff for a long time to end up with colon cancer.
I knew four former maintenance co-workers from one plant who died from colon cancer. The maintenance building was directly across a small road from the coke drums.
There were maybe 200 maintenance staff at that plant, and I worked there for 9 years.
4 out of 200.

Yea, he said the furnace runs pretty much 24/7 because it takes so much energy to heat up. When the shut it down to do maintenance it is done as a top priority item and get it fired up.

He said the piles of carbon black that sit in large piles outside quickly get a crust on it and it looks solid. One FNG stepped off into the train car and just vanished. He managed to hold his breath long enough to walk to the end of the car, and climb out. Of course he was coated in pure carbon. He survived fine.

My BIL works in the heavy equipment repair shop. So mostly he works on BIG yellow machines from Cat. Front end loaders and bulldozers. He is the longest term employee at the company. He started right out of high school 48 years ago. It is the only job he has ever had.

Hard dirty work, but it is an honest living.
I tip my hat.

He sent me a picture once of a rear end he was rebuilding. The ring gear was several feet across, and hanging from a shop crane.

At one point he had injured his hand and went to a rehab place. First off they had him squeeze a meter to get a reading of hand strength. With his injured hand he was higher than any woman ever and in the range of healed men. After several weeks of rehab all the employees gathered around to see him set a final mark. It is the record for place.

Do NOT get in a handshaking hand squeeze contest with him. He can crush a guys hand. Working with large tools and parts for a lifetime has made his hands like iron.

It is like arm wrestling with a professional lumberjack in Oregon. Just don't try. Those guys are STRONG.

A few things

I agree with the second poster on the fuel efficiency reducing oil consumption. But Electric is not going make an impact until there is a better/cheaper alternative to Lithium-ion batteries. This is not enough readily available lithium or the other minerals in the batteries to make all the mandated electric cars (Europe and California).

Roads. If the oil industry shuts down, we lose one of the most important sources of material for roads: Asphalt. How you gonna make roads without asphalt?

Concrete: The making of concrete makes a LOT of CO2. If this is the alternative to asphalt, and CO2 is bad, then this is not the alternative.

One other really, really important thing to consider:

the oil industry is a HUUUUUGE revenue generator for the gubmint, one of the biggest cash cows they have. It pays for most of our infrastructure.

When you factor in ALL the fees, taxes, regulations and other shenanigans, close to half of the $$$ we spend at the pumps ends up in the gubmint coffers.
There's no need for asphalt if you don't have any money to fix the roads.

Take away a big part of that revenue and they'll have to get it somewhere else.
Logic tells us that they'll have to double the cost of spark-tricity and then some.
Then they'll triple of the cost of natural gas, institute a road use tax per miles regardless of what you drive, etc.
No free lunches here.

This would bother me more if we’re talking about oil going away in a few years. Since we’re actually looking at oil volumes declining a percent or two a year - at most! - none of this concerns me.

If your income depended on Oil it would concern you. On a side note, Shell Refinery in Convent La is closing by month end. 1100 employees out of work......

oil, per se - yes

fluid flow control is not going away

red-beard succinctly encapsulated 3 problems in reducing CO2 emissions from the transportation sector

the cement makers are not sitting on their hands tho:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cement-producers-are-developing-a-plan-to-reduce-co2-emissions/

also, oil use does not have to be reduced to zero; a level equal to that in the 1960s should be fine (if other GHG sources are also reduced)

https://www.ranken-energy.com/index.php/products-made-from-petroleum/

- the above doesn't account for the amount of refining to get each product (much less the fact that asphalt is a residue from other refined products)

The plans to switch to renewable fuels plants is a hail Mary pipe-dream, something to keep the major investors off their backs.

My guess is thats Saudi's come in on the last minute and pick up some of these facilities on the cheap. They already control the movement of diesel in the south.