Crude Oil is Like Raw Milk and Diesel Fuel is the Cream

Stop Stealing the Cream So I Can Afford a Vacation

The worldwide Rube Goldberg Machine—Wind-Solar-Battery—deployment is the biggest Fossil Fuel sucking monster the world has ever seen at the planned scales. And the looming Diesel Fuel shortage will wreck everything.

If Wind-Solar-Batteries were mined and manufactured using only the energy produced by Wind-Solar-Batteries, I would have no objections whatsoever. But I like food. (imagine trying to produce anything of value with only the red electrical energy—Chinese “trashy power,” but that’s a different story).

Trashy Power

Crude oil is a mixture of all sizes of liquidy-sludgy hydrocarbons. Think of it like raw milk. The cream rises to the surface. Being the most valuable part of the raw milk, the cream is skimmed. Modern processing methods allow us to easily remove butterfat. What’s left over is Skim Milk—lots of water with just a little butterfat.

Crude oil is the same. The heaviest, thickest parts of crude are the most useful. That is where we get all the energy products humanity needs to survive and thrive. These products comprise the “Heavy Distillates” or Cream of Crude:

• Bunker Oil for Ships

• Asphalt Oil for roads

• Diesel Fuel

• Kerosene - Jet Fuel

• Fuel Oil for home heating

When the Heavy Distillates are removed from crude oil, that leaves light Gasoline (USA) or Petrol (most of the world). Gasoline/Petrol is like Skim Milk.

Crude Oil Grades - Heavy Means More Cream

Crudes come in many grades, generally described by the amount of “cream” the crude has. Heavy crudes such as from tar sands or black wax crudes in Utah have a lot of Cream (heavy distillates). Problem is that heavy crude is hard to handle and expensive to refine. Refineries need specialized processing methods, permitting, and so forth. It is much easier to process “light” crudes. There are also terms - sweet and sour - meaning whether the crude is high in sulfur (sour). Light Sweet Crude is the benchmark standard because it is low in sulfur, flows in pipelines, and is easy to process. But it is low in Cream of Crude.

Crudes are separated through refining or Fractional Distillation. In that process, the crude is heated up and the products separate based on their weight. Heavy hydrocarbons accumulate on the bottom as the lighter hydrocarbons float up.

The other thing is that heavy hydrocarbons can always be “cracked” or broken up even more to make lighter products. Refiners can heat up and crack tar and diesel fuel if they want to make more gasoline. But it’s a one-way street. We can’t turn gasoline into tar or diesel fuel.

Who Cares About Cream?

Civilization's entire industrial and agricultural base is 100% dependent on "heavy distillates" (diesel-kerosene-jet fuel-tar-bunker-heating). Imagine a world without:

• Farming equipment

• Ships

• Jet aircraft

• Locomotives - trains

• Mining equipment

• Long-haul trucks

• Construction equipment

• Diesel generators

• Drilling equipment

Heavy distillates—especially the Diesel Fuel fraction of the Crude Cream—is like Civilization’s blood. Without it, most modern humans would die in short order. We can’t live on Skim Milk. We do enjoy cars but these are toys compared to the real work required to sustain Civilization.

Heavy Distillate is a precious form of chemical energy battery. Do not waste heavy distillates. Diesel and jet engines, combined with hydraulic fluid, perform perhaps 85% of all civilization’s work. Without these engines, we would be reliant on manual labor, horses, mules, oxen, water-wheels, and sailboats. Diesel and jet fuel, hydraulic fluid, and lubricating oil are Civilization’s Life Blood. Protect it. Preserve it.

Movements like this will bleed out Civilization almost immediately by making heavy distillates prohibitively costly without replacing them first, specifically with synthetic diesel fuel, jet fuel, and lubricating oil via thermal energy provided by fission (Nuclear Power). The motivations behind movements such as these would be much better spent trying to figure out how to produce heavy distillates from a feedstock other than crude oil than trying to commit worldwide suicide.

Ever wonder how that banner was made? Nearly 100% petroleum.

Shale Gas Liquids

We have all heard about fracking shale gas and how the dual technologies of horizontal drilling and fracking (known as the “technolution”) have transformed the US economy and the world. Shale fracking makes a lot of methane.

Problem is that the technolution produces gas and light fluids (pentanes) that do not make heavy distillates, just lots more Skim Milk - gasoline. As a result, U.S. refiners are starving for heavy distillates.

So let’s say Congress passes a magic law to reduce inflation by building things that require prestigious volumes of metals and other minerals that need mining. What does mining need? Oceans of heavy distillates. But for every barrel of light crude, we can’t make diesel, just as we can’t make cream from skim milk. What happens to the excess skim milk? It’s cheap! Animal feed and other markets. What happens to cheap gasoline? Same thing - it gets used somewhere. The US exports millions of barrels of finished gasoline.

So naturally the price of diesel, metals, and everything else “reduces” just like the law told them to do.🤔Reduce inflation. Laws are Magic! Meanwhile, the USA is now literally out of heavy distillates. Mission Accomplished.

Focusing on reducing the use of gasoline - petrol via EVs while demanding oceans of Diesel Fuel that we don’t have serves what purpose? Gasoline is a byproduct of the blood supply. Spilling more blood for things we don’t need, like thousands of miles of new electric transmission, is patently absurd.

Utah has exceptional heavy black wax crude oil that’s ideal for making heavy distillates and avoiding gasoline. We already have too much gasoline.

The crude is stranded because the paraffinic crude is so heavy it solidifies below certain temperatures. So it cannot be put in a pipeline. Trucking crude to Salt Lake has logistic bottlenecks. The citizens of lovely Heber City have to put up with thousands of trucks on Main Street almost 24/7.

There is a proposal to build a new rail line in the Uinta Basin to haul huge volumes of crude to other refineries. Rail is orders of magnitude more efficient and safer than trucking.

So of course the Biden Administration and Greenies detached from objective reality hate it.

These are the same people trying to double the world's copper production in 10 years while deflating the cost.  Where is the Diesel Fuel?

Meanwhile, in the real world, the black wax crude feedstock is like a blood transfusion to a patient bleeding out. And the Virtuous greenies are making darn sure the transfusion never comes. Inflation?

MAIN POINT: Investing trillions on EVs to SAVE GASOLINE will greatly expand the demand for HEAVY distillates, the production of which naturally makes prestigious volumes of MORE GASOLINE. 

To me, this is idiotic energy policy that will produce much more gasoline than it will ever save.

Cream thieves say they have to take all the Cream and leave us with even more Skim Milk than we ever had before so the Cream thieves can somehow save lots of Skim Milk.

Meanwhile, your state legislature is planning on making new oceans of gasoline through Rube Goldgerg-style energy policy--to rid the world of Evil Gasoline. Can't get diesel without gasoline. Matched set.

Source

Cream thieves just keep leaving us with lots and lots of Skim Milk aka Gasoline. Thieves say they needed all the Cream to save Skim Milk somehow. Go figure.

Nuclear Power Makes Affordable Diesel Fuel from Not Crude

To Support Nuclear Power is to Support Civilization. Orders of magnitude more production of what we need with orders of magnitude less burden on Mother Earth who provides for us all. Nuclear Power actually makes diesel fuel from non-petroleum feedstocks. More diesel fuel. More vacations. More cheap food. Cheaper everything. We are wasting time and resources chasing our tails for no good reason.