Rationing Motor Oil
During a Climate Crisis
GOOD
Rationing Motor Oil
During a Climate Crisis
GOOD
This is just the beginning peeps. Things are going to get way worse. The strategic petroleum reserves are at record lows and we're draining it everyday. If we were "energy independent" would we be using up our rainy day fund? Well the rainy day isn't stopping but the fund will run out. That's when panic sets in. Stock up on food now. Invest in a portable solar battery back up (or solar panels for your house if you can afford it). We're about to experience another "once in a lifetime event"
What is expected to happen that would need solar backup?
Realistically the largest risk I can see is fucked economy and job losses. So if anything I need enough money to cover mortgage payments for a while.
Anything that runs on petro is about to explode in price due to trumps stupidity.
And its not just gonna be food and manufactured goods, which depend on diesel for harvesting and transporting.
Its gonna be power too. And not just oil and gas plants, but coal, nuclear, wind, etc too.. because they all use diesel to get men and materials where they need to be. Not to mention petro-chemical derivatives like grease and plastics.
even raw material extraction is gonna skyrocket, because all those machines also run on diesel.
We've used the strategic stockpile to kick the can down the road, but once thats tapped out the significant reduction in oil is gonna hit home, and its gonna hit hard, and shits gonna skyrocket across the board because everything relies on gas and diesel in some form or another.
Your mortgage is a long term concern, being able to afford to eat with price increases due to petro costs rising across the board is the more immediate concern.
Most Fertilizer is made from Oil.
Most farming (especially in the US, which is hugelly dependent on hybrid corn, which requires fertilizer since it grows with such a high density of plants that the natural fertility of the soil isn't enough) uses fertilizer.
So the lack of Oil will hit Food Production upstream from transportation, especially in the US.
any power plants running on certain fuels would in theory need to charge more or even shut down in the worst case. I don't know how much oil accounts for generation, but some countries still have a lot of gas and coal.
Very little oil is used for generation of electricity. It's inefficient and expensive, and can be more profitably refined into transportation fuel.
... as was foretold.
Once you've got the basics squared, do make sure you have a local copy of a suitably appropriate soundtrack.
Your Republican party is destroying the federal government. All that will be left when they are done are the guns and jackboots.
They're probably trying to prevent bulk buying from people running their old Diesel engines off of it
There's no way that synthetic motor oil, a lubricant manufactured to very demanding characteristics, is a cost effective fuel. It'd be like burning new furniture for heat.
Wouldn't cooking oil be cheaper? A biodiesel conversion is supposed to be cheap, isn't it?
sadly it's not. everyone caught on. in 07' it was great. here take my kitchen oil for free so I don't have to pay someone to dispose of it. the filtering systems and storage didn't cost much. conversions were easy but they still did a lot of engine damage. now where it gets complicated is citations if you're caught using it (tax bullshit) and well it's hard to mask the smell of French fries driving down the street.
Oh shit... The price on Amazon is about $10.00 higher than last time I bought it... Like a month ago.
One of my friends is a mechanic and also a life-long Republican. He posts to Facebook several times a day, so the last few months have given me a fascinating view into his thoughts.
At the beginning of the war, he laughed because he had a customer ask if they should stock up on motor oil to avoid price increases. His post was really dismissive - calling the customer a nut job for being concerned about the price of oil.
A few weeks later, he made a post asking other mechanics for advice. He'd noticed that oil prices shot up, but he was still sitting on some oil he'd purchased previously. He asked if he should keep his oil change prices low, or if he should raise his prices to prepare for when he had to buy oil next.
His recent posts have been about leaving MAGA. So maybe there is some hope for him yet? However, he still doesn't seem to be leaving the Republican party. Just maybe realizing the Trump is not his lord and savior. I suspect in a couple more years, there will be no one left that claims to have lived Trump. Kind of like how Republicans now denounce George Dubya, even though they were all in at the time.
This oil thing is gonna slap hard in November. People still use oil burners in some places as the main means of heating. Too bad this year will be a wet winter with no oil to heat. I'm prepared for a good couple of weeks thus year. A couple of years ago we lost power for an entire 2 weeks.
Heating oil will be the least of everyone's concern when they can't afford to drive to work or buy groceries, assuming they still have a job.
Different oils are used for different things. Heating oil is getting expensive, yes, but this article is about motor oil for lubrication, which have been in crisis the entire war.
Any high performance synthetic motor oil (which this post is about) has seen shortages and price increases, because Qatar is a major exporter, through the Strait of Hormuz, of the base oils used as feedstocks for those synthetic motor oils.
You've heard of RAM-pocalypse, now its time for Aramco-pocalyse.
A jug of Varsol thinner is now $50 in Canada.
Something like 25% of synthetic base oil production is currently offline.
Its doing some interesting things with manufacturer certifications as changing base oil supplier often voids the certification.
We switched to fully electric cars 5 years ago. Guess this is one more reason that that was a good decision.
Yeah, but most of the shipping industry still needs motor oil. I'm more worried about what this is going to go to the price of other goods
I believe all EVs have some kind of gearcase oil; mine certainly does. It doesn’t need changing for a long time, but it is going to be effected - still, way ahead of the regular interval oil changes!
Motor oil for internal combustion engines doesn't last very long because it needs to work in a very large temperature and pressure ranges, from a cold start in winter temperatures to the high operating temperatures of an engine with a bunch of little explosions.
The oil is also directly exposed to the combustion chamber so it needs to be able to be filtered for whatever contaminants come from combustion, and it needs to not combust itself in that environment.
The oil also does double duty of being a fluid that takes heat away from the engine, and can exchange heat with the radiator fluid in order to cool the engine of excess heat.
All that together means that we ask so much more of lubricants for ICE engines than for the other moving parts in a car. An EV will have lubricants that aren't exposed to the same operating conditions, and can last longer without needing to be replaced. Basically they're more like traditional transmission fluid than like traditional motor oil.
Full synthetic oil isn't made from any "real" oil. It's a hugely complicated chemical process and people won nobel prizes for it. I don't understand how this could affect real full synthetic oil.
Full synthetic oil isn’t made from any “real” oil.
I'm sorry to say that synthetic oil production most definitely does use hydrocarbons sourced from crude oil. It is possible use other feedstocks like natural gas, coal, biomass, but oil is still the most economical. Pennzoil was using natural gas, but have stopped recently because the refinery was damaged due to the war.
Some synthetic oils are made from Group III base stock and some from Group IV, while other synthetic oils may be a blend of the two. Mobil sued Castrol and Castrol prevailed in showing that their Group III base stock oil was changed enough that it qualified as full synthetic. Since then American Petroleum Institute (API) has removed all references to synthetic in their documentation regarding standards. "Full synthetic" is a marketing term and is not a measurable quality.
It’s just “real oil” that’s sufficiently modified to not resemble the base oil enough.
Lubricant base oil is sourced primarily from the Middle East, including synthetic oils, greases, gear oils, and other products like transmission fluids. Including that for electric vehicles. Additionally, synthetic oils can be manufactured from natural gas, which is also sourced from the Middle East for most of the world.
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