Showing posts with label transport. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transport. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

What Congress Can do about Oil Now

The USA is currently consuming 20,000,000 barrels of oil per day or about 25% of the global supply. No one is in a better position to reduce consumption on a scale that matters to everyone else. And where the USA leads the rest of the world will surely follow.

The auto industry is now gearing desperately up to transition away from oil based products. Pricing alone is driving this move as consumers have been forced to forgo the pleasure of driving their mobile fuel hogs. No one seems prepared to buy a vehicle for the pleasure of parking it. I certainly expect the advent of a very inexpensive electric for short haul work. It makes eminent sense to use the SUV to haul; the kids to work while using the electric to go into work a lot further away. This is a new version of the two car family that everyone was excited about in the fifties. Yes, I remember all that.

The only problem with that is that it can only be a transitional process and may actually have little net effect on the oil supply even over several years. What is more, any attempt to legislate an outcome will be resented and paid for at the poles.

This again brings me back to the subject of diesel fuel. It represents about half of our consumption and it is primarily used by industry. It has never been very popular in the automotive industry.

It is thus possible for Congress to mandate a crash program to replace diesel with LNG or liquid natural gas. Apparently diesel engines can be converted easily over to LNG and the manufacturers are already prepared to produce LNG engines directly. That means fleet conversion and industrial conversion is possible within a very short time line of between two to five years. I would expect actual completion by the end of the five year cycle.

I would expect that the first two years will be needed to establish the necessary infrastructure.

LNG supplies are not in short supply, although a lot of the easiest supplies are again offshore. In any event, we have massive global supplies available to keep costs down for the trucking industry. It is also the cleanest possible hydro carbon and will go a long way to cleaning up the atmosphere.

California has seen the light and is already well down this road.

What Congress can do today is to mandate a swift conversion of the nation’s diesel consumption over to LNG ASAP.

This can release a possible ten millions of barrels of oil per day back into the global market. And our industry is even using a cheaper fuel.


Gallons of Oil per Barrel
42

U.S. Crude Oil Production
5,102,000 barrels/day
Texas - 1,088,000 barrels/day
U.S. Crude Oil Imports
10,118,000 barrels/day

Top U.S. Crude Oil Supplier
Canada - 1,802,000 barrels/day

U.S. Petroleum Product Imports
3,589,000 barrels/day

U.S. Net Petroleum Imports
12,390,000 barrels/day

Top U.S. Total Petroleum Supplier
Canada - 2,353,000 barrels/day

U.S. Total Petroleum Exports
1,317,000 barrels/day

U.S. Petroleum Consumption
20,687,000 barrels/day

Crude Oil Domestic First Price (2007 wellhead price)
$66.52/barrel

Motor Gasoline Retail Prices (2007 U.S. City Average)
$2.85/gallon

Regular Grade Motor Gasoline Retail Prices (2007 U.S. City Average)
$2.80/gallon

Premium Motor Gasoline Retail Prices (2007 U.S. City Average)
$3.03/gallon

U.S. Motor Gasoline Consumption
9,253,000 barrels/day (388.6 million gallons/day)

U.S. Average Home Heating Oil Price
$2.37/gallon (excluding taxes)

U.S. Refiners Ranked Capacity (1/1/2006) #1 - Baytown, Texas (ExxonMobil) 562,500 barrels/day Top
U.S. Petroleum Refining States #1 - Texas 4,337,026 barrels/day
U.S. Proved Reserves of Crude Oil as of December 31, 2006
20,972 million barrels

Top U.S. Oil Fields (2005)
Prudhoe Bay, AK

Top U.S. Producing Companies (2006)
BP - 827,000 barrels/day

Total World Oil Production (2005)
82,532,000 barrels/day

Total World Petroleum Consumption (2005)
83,607,000 barrels/day

Monday, November 5, 2007

Fast pyrolysis and Wood Chips

I attached a link here to a critical review paper on the pyrolysis of wood and other biomass that was published last year in Energy and Fuels(2006, 20, 848 - 889). As I have recently posted, our two options for the production of transportation fuel that can use our current engine technology without a massive overhaul is algae derived biodiesel and wood chip derived oils using heat and or pressure.

Algae, though largely undeveloped offers the promise of a very labor efficient oil and cattle fodder production system operated even on otherwise non agricultural lands. It really lends itself to automatic pumping systems, filter presses and the like with potentially very high yields.

Wood chip processing will produce oil and char through the process of heating. The article gives us an approximate 25% yield for a slow pyrolysis with a 24% char yield as well. Fast pyrolysis promises to give us nearly 75% yield with a 13% char content. Obviously, fast pyrolysis needs to be perfected. Without question pyrolysis will produce a liquid component that I am loathe to call oil as yet but can obviously be processed into a working fuel.

The difficulty of course, is that wood chip production is never going to be particularly labor efficient. We have discussed the need to properly manage woodlands throughout this blog. If woodlands can now produce an economically viable crop in the form of wood chips, we go a long way toward the restoration of the productivity of these woodlands.

The optimal annual yield of an acre of temperate woodland will still be around one ton per year per acre of woodland. The value to the owner operator of this ton of wood chips will need to cover its cost of recovery and removal. With fast pyrolysis we are suddenly looking at around five barrels of oil equivalent production per year per acre. This may actually be financially viable for the owner a participate in with oil in the $100 plus range.

Other occasional agricultural bio waste can also be fed into the system, although the direct value of most of these feed stocks as local bio char will surely dominate.

Again, we face a very significant haulage cost component. A 1000 ton per day processor needs to draw from 365,000 acres of woodland. This quickly looks like 500 net square miles or in country with a minimal woodland component, a draw radius of thirty miles at least. That is a lot of haulage.

And that 1000 ton per day facility will produce perhaps 5000 barrels of oil equivalent and some charcoal. By oil industry standards this is significant but still fairly modest.

The principal benefit of a wood chip conversion system is that it can be easily tweaked to drive good woodland management practices, which has been sorely missing to date. It may even end up been completely self sustaining.

The benefit for the owner operator is that his woodlot is economically self sustaining while he is growing a profit in the form of sawn wood and any fruit production.

The technology will also be easily implemented in the tropics were the wood waste content per acre is several times what can be achieved in the temperate zone. Of course, moisture content will be difficult to manage.