Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,rec.arts.comics.strips
Subject: Re: xkcd: Neighbor-Source Heat Pump
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2025 02:03:26 -0500
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On 6/12/2025 7:54 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> Lynn McGuire  <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> wrote:
>> The production of crude oil in the USA is probably going to drop in 2026
>> due to reduced capital investment in oil wells (we are in a oil bust
>> again since 2009).
> 
> When I was a kid, heating oil and heavy oil were byproducts of gasoline
> manufacture, and when gasoline sales went up, heating oil prices went
> down.  In the modern age when they have cheap cracking is that still the
> case?
> 
> I can say that commodity lubricating oils are way more pure than they
> were when I was a kid.  Light machine oil used to have black gunk at the
> bottom of the can and smelled like gas.  Now it has no deposit and no
> smell.
> 
>> The USA natural gas production will meet of all the USA's needs easily
>> for the next 100 to 200 years as we are flaring about 1/3rd of our
>> natural gas right now due to lack of customers and/or storage.  Most of
>> the 100% natural gas wells are closed in at this time.
> 
> Storage is a big deal.  And transport.
> --scott

Cracking heavy oil requires hydrogen to fill in the spots where the 
carbon chains used to be.  And lots of catalysts, mostly alumina. 
Expensive, very expensive.  My PhD Chem Eng father did his 1960 - 1963 
thesis at Princeton using chaos theory on an IBM 360 to make longer 
retubing runs on cat crackers.  Shell sponsored his thesis and he got 
them to 12 month runs from the previous 9 month runs.  Cat crackers have 
constant temperature excursions (runaway exothermic reactions) and have 
to be retubed frequently.

One of my customers sells a dedicated reactor that converts asphalt into 
gasoline.  When the price of asphalt drops, their customers turn on the 
reactor until the asphalt prices go back up.

Lynn