Britbike forum Forums Thread Like Summary - Fuel

Blimey, i just paid $2.21/litre for 98 fuel here.
I used to complain when it went up to $1.50 a short while ago.................
I'll have to curb my riding style...............

Spent 30 years in the oil industry. It's a cyclic business. Prices start to rise and companies start exploring and discovering new reserves. All this new production hits the market and prices fall. Companies cut their exploration budgets and the wells drilled during the last boom go through their natural decline in production. At some point demand starts to outstrip supply and the cycle starts again. The industry has gone through this cycle many times in the last 100 years. History has proven that the political party in power at the time has about zero to do with the cycles.

However, the industry today is not what it was 30 years ago. All of the easy reserves have been gotten. Companies are now forced to drill in deep water and extremely deep and high pressure wells. They have also turned to drilling shale reservoirs. People have known for years that oil existed in shale but the shale was too impermeable to let the oil flow into the well bore. Modern day fracturing technology increase the oil flow. However, these wells have an extremely rapid decline curve. In other words a well flowing hundreds of barrels a day declines to one flowing a few barrels of oil per day in often a matter of weeks. The only way a lot of the shale drillers survived was to use borrowed money and continuously drill wells to keep their production up. Most shale wells had a break even cost at about 50$ a barrel. After the price crash a lot of the hedge fund source of money for shale wells dried up. The deep sea and high pressure wells are also extremely costly and are really only available to companies like Exxon or Shell.

This brings up another point. Often people see the large profits that the major companies like Exxon make and think they are taking advantage of the public. What they don't realize is the huge investments these companies make. Offshore production facilities run into the billions of dollars. If you look at the return on investment that these major companies make it is often under 10%. Compare that to companies like Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ect who make large returns, often over 30%, on relatively small investments based on their market cap. Also, all those billions being invested by oil companies are providing jobs and a fair amount of them in the US.

If you take the cost of living increase that has occurred, gas that cost 30 cents a gallon in 1960 is equivalent to about 3 dollars a gallon in today's dollars.
Given that the cost of producing a barrel of oil has gone from about 5 dollars a barrel in 1960 to 40 dollars today the profit margin is a lot narrower now. In fact, a lot of companies consider gas sales as just a method to get people into their convenience stores. Beer, cigarettes and junk food are the big profit generators.

Forget tar sands. Uneconomic without government support and an environmental nightmare.
Good riddance to the pipeline. Same for ethanol.

FWIW
The tonnage of easily adsorbed lead oxides used in paints that powdered off and became road & houshold dust dewarfs the tonage put into petrol by many orders of magnitude
But sueing paint companies is not as sexy as pilloring fuel companies
If you don't look for things you never find them
The bulk of the environmental free lead has come from paint and it is still being used in a lot of paints because there is no viable substitute for the UV protection it gives to large steel & cast iron structures like bridges & gasometers .
It is very cheap & easy to take a dust sample or air sample and do a strait chemical lead content
And of course because lead is very heavy the weight percentages always look massive.
Doing molecular lead determinatins is very expensive so it does not get done very often but that is the only way to determine where the lead actually came from but if you have a predetermined culprit then you do not want to know that .
Rignt now lead is a major addition to car tyres so road side dust will always show high lead levels and the ego inflaters will naturally attribute it all to those nasty petrol companies because they are all evil and it is fashionable to blame them for everything .

A sizeable amount of the lead found in sea water can be attributed to climate change as the increased amount of sulphur & co2 in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution has drastically incrreased the occurance of carbonic acid and sulhhuric acid both of which attack lead roofing products .
Nitrates in the atmosphere attack the bare lead when the above acids have removed the protective oxides from the surface .

Nothing is as simple as You tube likes to make it out .

Strait lead metal can not be adsorbed by animals
The standard experiment was to get undergratuate to swallowsome lead shot then when recovered wash & dry it
The results were always the same the dry weight in was the same as the dry weight out down to the 5th decimal place
Lead oxides are a different matter they are easily adsorbed by a human body
Tetra ethyl lead prior to combustion is easly adsorbed both in the digestive tract and through the skin, this includes breathing it in but it has the be highly atomised first so you have to be breathing in a petrol mist .
Post combustion it is very hard to be adsorbed untill prolonged exposure to UV rays starts to break it down, basic high school entropy .
Remember just becaue the road is wet that does not mean it has been raining .

Now it has been 40ish years since I was involved in biological monitoring of lead in the foundry workers plus environmental monitoring of lead in the surrounding ares, including the tidal canal next to the foundry and the same for the 6 battery plants we ran .

There is a lot more to lead than just petrol
Medically it is really only a problem in developing children and no arguement , it can be a very big problen to developing brains .
Adults usually suffer nothing worse than annemia as the lead bonds to the hemoglobin preventing it from taking up oxygen .
And that reverses with reduced exposure as the kidneys have no problem removing it from most people.
The two screening tests were hemoglobins & lead in urine
So if it is in your urine ( or stools ) then the body is purging it from your system
The stuff you really need to worry about is the stuff that accumulates like mercury and even nice safe zinc .

All metal oxides, sulfides & chlorides are posonious it is just a matter of the degree of the toxicity

All this talk about conspiracies and Biden and Putin and Covid and Ukraine causing the rise in fuel prices and inflation simply isn't so. It's because I retired and am now on a fixed income!!

Ed from NJ

yes. the price of fuel in america is proximately based on refinery and distribution capacity, and ultimately based on long term futures committments to domestic use and exports.

oil exports were extremely low from 1950 to 2005, but have increased 400 percent since then.

imports peaked in 2005, decreasing since.

as hugh says, the lines cross in 2020, and the US now exports more oil than it imports.

you can thank wall street and the oil industry for high fuel prices, not any particular administration.

$3.75 per gallon for "regular" in my home town yesterday, thanks to our current quasi-president cancelling the oil pipeline.

I would imagine the US was similar to OZ
orignal shops were strip shops along the main road
At some point in time the main road could no longer afford to have parking out front of the shops
Then we get silly council planning
Even now most local councils think residences are just dormatory buildings where no commerse is allowed to happen
They must be quite at night & every one leaves in the morning peak to go to work in the neighbouring commercial / industrial zone
Probably because were morphed from the UK there still seems to be the idea that we either walk to local employment or catch public transport to the nearest major city.
There are many suburbs in Sydney where every street is a dead end so making 20 home deliveries takes 10 hours & causes you to drive 30 Km round & round in circles.
Because Australians are the most stupid people on the planet we still build dead end residential developements with anything up to 2000 houses ( dog boxes on postage stamp lots ) that are keyhole so only 1 road in or out and every one of them has to have a "commercial precint " to provide employment for the local residents .
I often shop at some of these & take pleasure asking staff which suburb they live in.
Never yet found one that actually lives in the same subburb ( Glenmoore Pk or JamisonTown ) as the shops they work in.

I litterally piss myself hen I hear clowns masquerading as urban planners & environmental consultants spewing out rubbish how working from home will reduce traffic & pollution.
So in place of the people goping to work where the printer is & get serviced, now there are 5000 printers ( massive amout of pollution ) distributed all over the suburbs and some one has to vist them all to service them ( unless they are thrown away , even more pollution ) plus deliver consumables like paper , toner etc. The thousands of couries taking proof, contract & documents that must be original to a dozen diferent places for signing

I started my career in engineering in UK and worked there for35 years.
I worked for several large groups before deciding that I had had enough of working for idiots.
So I did a management buy in of a company in trouble (that way it was cheap) then sorted it out and built it into a thriving group of companies.
But you dont need to have a degree to be a good engineer.
Some of the best engineers I worked with had done an apprenticeship and were just natural engineers.
Conversely I interviewed Ph.Ds from Oxford who to quote a UK engineering phrase " I wouldn't pay the buggers in washers"..
Then I sold the group of companies, moved to US and spent a few years buying and selling companies.
Then I retired and indulge myself in these old bikes.
Happy Daze!

I don't know, D.

These days, the difference between a "conspiracy theory" and "OK, so it happened, get over it" is about a year.

Lannis

And remember the price has nothing to do with the war
The world demand is still way less than production even if you take Russia out of the picture
The price hike is because speculators rushed in and bought up all thef futures in the hope the price will skyrocket and they will make a killing
SO don't bother complaining to the white house
Send a cranky letter to your pension fund they are the ones doing the price pushing.
And of course the petrol companies will never let a chance of a price hike go past without making the best of it .

The United States became a net exporter of petroleum (i.e., exports exceed imports) in 2020.
https://www.investopedia.com/investing/worlds-top-oil-producers/#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20most%20recent,the%20world's%20top%20oil%20producer.

I'm afraid the price of fuel in the U.S. is not based on supply side issues.

$4.35 for diesel.

2011 I know I was paying over $5.00 per gallon.
1998 when I bought The White Whale it was $0.85.
Sure could use that Canadian Mud that makes fine diesel.

That tar sands garbage costs twice as much to refine. How is that going to help lower costs?
Let Canada build its own refineries and see how they make out.

I'm afraid that it's only going to get worse with the Russians acting stupid.

trevor ^^^this is absolutelty true. i also recall when a shopping mall was something you drove out of town to go look at. when i was a child all the local businesses wete within a childs bicycle ride from my house.

in america the killer insome places was restrictive zoning. residential neighborhoods were separated from any retail or industry so that commuting by vehicle was essential, and there has never been a cultural push for public trans in the states since the 1950s.

the small neighborhood businesses withered because centralized competition was available along the commute route with a parking lot .

Try toluene, it'll probably be cheaper to blend that with standard fuel than
buying race gas these days. Don't go bananas with it, up to 30% is fine.
Higher and you may start to get cold start problems.

https://nitrous.com.au/octane-booster-shootout/

Toluene has a RON octane rating of 121 and a MON rating of 107, leading to a (R+M)/2 rating of 114. (R+M)/2 are how ordinary fuels are rated in the US. Toluene has a sensitivity rating of 14 (RON: 121-107 MON). This compares favorably with alcohols, which have sensitivities in the 20 to 30 range. The more sensitive a fuel is the more its performance degrades under load. Toluene's low sensitivity means that it is an excellent fuel for a heavily loaded engine.

In the 70s and 80s I had a race bike with an 11:1 compression ratio. I had a telephone discussion about fuel mixes with a chemist from a fuel company (Total) and his advice was to make up a mix of 50% Super petrol and 50% Methyl Benzine (toluene), and that the octane rating of this would be about 110.

I used this mix for years, and the bike went really well. No adverse effects, and cold starting was a dream. The only time it didn't start when required was the time Tony McAlpine rode it around the pits at Amaroo Park and oiled the plug.

Flyers, corner of Watt and Marconi.

When I was using methyl benzine I was young and single, and I had money to burn. Also there was the girl who worked at the fuel depot ...... As you say, there's more to it than just octane.

Stunted intelligence kinda explains the current political climate, doesn't it.

Interesting youtube vid on the history of lead in fuel, how one man did more planetary damage than any other living organism.