It Would Be Foolish To ‘End Fossil Fuel’
https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/30/it-would-be-foolish-to-end-fossil-fuel/
Let’s say tomorrow, or in 10 years or even 15, that by some feat of magic that wind and solar could fully power the global economy. We could then stop extracting oil and the natural gas that’s a byproduct of drilling. Right?
No, it wouldn’t work that way – because it can’t.
Even in a world that ran entirely on renewable energy, it would still be necessary to drill for crude. Why? Because of, as Dustin Hoffman’s character Benjamin Braddock was told 1967’s “The Graduate,” plastics.
“There’s a great future in plastics,” Mr. McGuire, a family friend, told Ben at his college graduation party.
More than a half century later, none of us can imagine our lives without plastic and other products made from the oil refining process.
We’ve heard the argument that we should be moving toward an economy in which we drop the fuels for transportation and power plants and drill only enough to make plastics and other products of modernity. It’s made by those who believe they’re always the smartest person in the room but don’t know what they don’t know.
To use crude oil to make only consumer products and asphalt (about 21% of a 42-gallon barrel of oil is dedicated to these components, the balance is made into transportation fuels) is simply not economical.
“It would not be profitable for anyone unless you raised consumer prices” on the more than 6,000 goods that are made from a barrel of oil, says energy consultant Todd Royal. “You would likely go into a recession or even a depression.”
We’re not talking small increases but “astronomically” inflated prices, he says, on these products, which include pharmaceuticals and life-saving medical devices, as well as the fertilizers and pesticides that are necessary if farmers are to grow enough food to keep us fed.
Royal tells us that refining oil to make only consumer products would “throw the entire [refinery] model on its head.” The entire market would have to be repriced.
Presidential candidate Joe Biden guaranteed during a 2019 campaign stop that “we’re going to end fossil fuel.” Well, he not only hasn’t ended fossil fuel, the production of gasoline, the most common product of crude and of course the most hated of all hydrocarbon fuels, has increased since hitting a valley in the pandemic panic of 2020. In 2023, Biden’s third year in office, nearly 9 million barrels of gasoline were being produced domestically each day. That’s not far from the all-time high of 9.33 million barrels set in 2018 in a more energy-independent era.
No one, not even the most radical green, expected Biden to end fossil fuel within a four-year term. The fact is, he couldn’t do it in eight. But that doesn’t mean that the eco-left won’t stop agitating for the eradication of oil and gas. It’s been on a civilization-killing mission for decades and isn’t going to easily give up its campaign to tear down what better people have built over the generations.
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