Oil Prices to Remain Low - For 10 Years?

While low oil prices are viewed by the majority of the public as good, the low prices are not without consequences (as is always the case with ANY economic news). Capital investments in the oil industry are down, so drillers, pipe manufacturers, steel suppliers of said pipe and so forth are seeing a similar downturn. At the other end of the...pipeline...(groan), plastic prices are down. This is generally great for manufacturers, but it is not so great for the recycling industry. With the difference in price between virgin and recycled resin disappearing, the incentives to use recycled resins are disappearing and so is the demand for recycled resins.

So a recent report that oil prices could stay low for another decade is something to take seriously. The source of the prognostication, Ian Taylor if the Vitol Group, is a respected opinionator:

"Vitol trade[s] in excess of five million barrels of crude and refined products a day, sufficient for the needs of France, Germany and Spain combined, and its views on the market [are] closely monitored."

The slowing of the Chinese economy and the shale fracking boom are to blame according to Taylor.

Surprisingly, nothing was said about Saudi output, which Saudi production, which as the linked chart shows, still remains steady. Opinions are numerous and varied as to why this remains so steady (The new Paris accord shouts one site! Fracking and Iran shouts another!) I don't have the time to assembly a list, but proposed reasons could outnumber the reasons offered for the Fall of the Roman Empire. Regardless, a quick decrease in their production could rapidly elevate prices.

As with any good (?) prediction, there are plenty of weasel words to allow for saving face. "Could", "should", "might" and "possibly" are all right up there, with dozens more waiting in the wings. So will oil prices stay low for another decade? I don't know. As Yogi Berra said (or was it Neils Bohr?), "It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future."

Feel free to add yours in the comments section below.

Previous Years

February 23, 2012 - An Edible Drink Bottle - No Thanks, I've Lost My Appetite)

February 23, 2010 - Spec Sheets

Choosing Biodegradable Polymers for a Research Topic?

The topic came up this morning about what would be a good area to research for a Ph.D. nowadays. It was suggested biodegradable polymers, but I really dislike that area immensely. Biosourced polymers would be much better.

Biodegradable polymers have their uses, particularly within medical applications, but as a general commodity plastic, something to take on the Big 6, they will be inherently problematic. Inherently. As in you cannot avoid the problems. To most people, biodegradability is a way to address pollution problems, but biodegradability is not an effective solution because a polymer will never biodegrade the instant it is released into the environment. Look at paper, a readily biodegradable material, but even paper doesn't biodegrade instantly. Paper products are a very visible type of pollution. Do crews cleaning up along highways, in parks and other public places pick up paper or do they leave it because it will biodegrade? Of course they pick it up. When you see paper products spread across a field, are you happy and not concerned because there really isn't a waste problem since it will all biodegrade and take care of itself?

The minute any waste is released into the environment, it becomes pollution. Biodegradation is a long-term solution to immediate pollution, which means it isn't a solution at all. And while research on biodegradable polymers is not without merit, it is inherently limited in its potential to help civilization. No one has proposed or has even imagined creating a material that is smart enough to know when it should and shouldn't biodegrade, let alone one that would be able to biodegrade almost instantly once that decision is made. These are inherent limitations to biodegradability.

Biosourced polymers are quite different. Instead of being made from petroleum, they are made from bio-based feedstocks. For examples, Braskem has developed a process to make polyethylene from sugar cane. The sugar is fermented to yield ethanol, the ethanol is dehydrated to produce ethylene and then the ethylene is polymerized. You now have a bio-based polymer that is (nearly) identical to the petroleum-based polymer (the only difference being the presence of the C-14 isotope). And so the search is on for creating bio-based sources for the monomers currently used in making polymers. And the search is also on for identifying new, biosourced monomers that have been too difficult/expensive to produce from petroleum and that can be used to create novel polymers. Examples are various types of furans and isosorbide. Some of the resulting polymers could be biodegradable if you really are obsessed with that tact, but being biosourced does not mean that they are automatically biodegradable. (Bio-source polyethylene is just as non-biodegradable as petroleum-sourced polyethylene.)

Speaking strictly from a practical viewpoint, biodegradable polymers would not be my favorite subject to study in school because of the time-scale of the experiments. Once you have made your new polymer(s), testing for biodegradability takes weeks and months to perform. That's weeks and months before you get any feedback to let you know to stay-the-course or try something else. Industrial researchers can work with those time scales, but as a student? No way. Unless you want to take a decade to get that Ph.D.

Previous Years

October 13, 2014 - Dinosaur Mode

October 13, 2010 - Calling Mr. Murphy...

October 13, 2010 - Pushing the Laws of Science and Man

October 13, 2010 - Never Mind

October 13, 2009 - Diodes, Diodes Everywhere

October 13, 2008 - Another Unusual Water Soluble LCST System

Fracking and the Stresses it Adds to Railroads

The current fracking boom in the US has had a positive impact on the plastics industry, reducing the cost of many resins and leading to the construction of new facilities for their manufacture. But it has also placed an immense strain on the railroads. Because the fracking is generating some much petroleum products in areas that are without pipelines, the extracted liquids are shipped by rail, and so demand for rail cars is at an all-time high. And this means that any little hiccup only makes the stress on the logistics that much worse. Train derailments, especially those that lead to conflagrations are sure to be on the national news.

But fracking is also also stressing the railroads in other, far more subtle ways that associated with pre-extraction activities, ways that never make the national news.

The key step in fracking, the step that makes fracking all worthwhile, is the placement of proppants in the underground formation. Fracking wells are trying to extract petroleum from "tight" formations, ones where the rocks have low porosity. The porosity can be increase by fracturing the rock (hence the term "fracking") with by pumping high pressure water into the formation, but once the water is removed, the porosity drops again. Enter the proppants. Proppants are small particles, typically fine sand that is placed into the formation and keep the rocks "propped" open after they are fractured so that the porosity remains high.

But just as there are no pipelines in areas where fracking is prevalent, there is seldom the correct sand in the fracking area and it needs to be brought in. For the Bakken formation in North Dakota for instance, te sand is brought in from Wisconsin. And it should come then as no surprise that the preferred mode for bringing the sand is railroads. Which is creating further demand for rail cars. Derailment of a train carrying sand is not something that will hit the national news, so all these sand shipments to support the fracking industry are seldom discussed.

But that shipping that sand can create an even bigger problem for the railroads. The preferred sand is pretty fine and can leak from the rail cars onto the rail bed bellow and when wet, the sand can play havoc on the stability of the rail bed.

"The big chunks of rock � crushed limestone or dolomite that engineers call ballast � that keep railroad tracks in place look like a solid footing even as freight cars rumble overhead...In Wisconsin, a booming industry mining sand used by oil and gas drillers in hydraulic fracturing has presented a new challenge: fine grains of sand can leak from rail cars, accumulate in rail bed ballast and, during a rainstorm, turn into mushy, track-loosening mud."

It's not just by accident that rail beds are always laid on a bed of crushed rock - it is very much be design. And adding fine sand to the mix is NOT part of the design.

The page linked to above discusses some work of University of Wisconsin professors to attempt to stabilize the bed by injecting a reactive polyurethane into the spaces between the crushed rock (Look! Another tie-in to polymers!). I wish them a lot of luck. While creating a system is pretty straightforward, getting it approved for use in something as big and important as a railroad will be a long and difficult battle. Not railroad engineer will ever get in trouble for doing things the way that they have always been done before, but if a section of track repaired with a new technique fails and leads to a derailment, fire, possibly evacuations, injuries and maybe even deaths, that engineer, even if they are still in their 20's, would do well to consider an early retirement since it would place on them regardless.

Previous Years

May 18, 2012 - The Impact of the Nylon-12 Shortage Grows

May 18, 2011 - I think we've beat biobasing to death, haven't we?

May 18, 2011 - Goodbye, Harmon Killebrew

Falling Oil Prices and ExxonMobil

I've been preaching for a while about how ExxonMobil is incorrectly blamed for any and all possible problems around the world that can be connected to our modern petroleum-consuming economies. While ExxonMobil may indeed be at fault for many of these accused problems either directly or indirectly, I again want to emphasize that they are a small fish in a large ocean.

Look at the recent price drop in petroleum around the world. ExxonMobil has nothing to do with this, and in fact, the low prices are hurting them. Revenues are dropping, investments are dropping and their stock price is dropping. Is anyone saying ExxonMobil is responsible for the low prices? Or si the blame being put on Saudi Arabia, whose National Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, has the largest reserves in the world, and who isn't cutting production?

People being people, ExxonMobil will again be vilified when prices do increase and their profits follow. No one will blame Saudi Aramco, and our profound, collective ignorance of the true dynamics of the petroleum industry will continue.

Previous Years

January 15, 2013 - Assault with a Deadly Hair Removal Gel

Comparing Burger Chains and Oil Companies

According to QSRmagazine.com, the top burger chains in the US are

1. McDonalds
2. Burger King
3. Wendy's
4. Sonic
5. Jack in the Box
6. Dairy Queen
7. Hardee's
8. Carls Jr.
9. Whataburger
10. Steak and Shake
11. Five Guys
12. Culver's
13. Checkers/Rally's
14. White Castle
15. In-and-Out
16. Krystal

I haven't eaten at all these chains as some of them are limited to certain portions of the country. But Krystal? I've never even heard of them.

According to Petrostrategies.org, the largest oil and gas companies in the world by reserves are

1. Saudi Aramco
2. National Iranian Oil Company
3. Qatar General Petroleum Corporation
4. Iraq National Oil Company
5. Petroleos de Venezuela
6. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company
7. Kuwait National Petroleum Company
8. Nigerian National Petroleum Company
9. National Oil Company of Libya
10. Sonatrach (Algeria)
11. Gazprom
12. Rosneft
13. Petrochina
14. Petronas
15. Lukoil
16. Egyptian General Petroleum
17. ExxonMobil

So the next time you are tempted to think of ExxonMobil as this HUGE company that has incredible influence and is leading us down an irreversible the path of petroleum dependency, climate change and pollution, and away from renewable energy and a green, sustainable future, think again. They are the equivalent to a burger chain that is smaller than Krystal. If the Krystal chain disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't notice at all. If ExxonMobil disappeared tomorrow, would it really change anything? Nope.

Previous Years

October 29, 2013 - A New Chemistry Lab Building, But Without New Chemistry Jobs

October 29, 2012 - More Open Access articles in Polymers and Rheology

October 29, 2010 - Garbage Patch Vacuum Cleaners

October 29, 2010 - Good Advice

October 29, 2010 - UV Scale-up

An Ironic Effort from Greenpeace

Here's today's newest example of irony:Greenpeace succeeded in pressuring Lego into cancelling a toy give away with Shell. (Fill up with at least 30 liters and get a free Lego toy). Greenpeace was going after Shell because of Shell's efforts to extract oil from Arctic regions, but the irony is that Lego toys are all made from petroleum-based plastic (ABS). So does this change anything? Anything?

Previous Years

October 9, 2013 - Preventing Oxygen Inhibition during Polymerizations

October 9, 2012 - Some Open Access Articles from Wiley