Rationing Motor Oil
During a Climate Crisis
GOOD
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.
These are the same people buying trucks with 5 mpg and then having the audacity to bitch about gas prices.
Wouldn’t cooking oil be cheaper? A biodiesel conversion is supposed to be cheap, isn’t it?
Your Republican party is destroying the federal government. All that will be left when they are done are the guns and jackboots.
Your Republican party is destroying the federal government.
What has the federal government been up to recently?
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”
… as was foretold.
Once you’ve got the basics squared, do make sure you have a local copy of a suitably appropriate soundtrack.
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.
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.
Wouldn’t that just most likely lead to higher prices for energy? A more cost effective investment for a lot of people might be hot water bottles so you can turn the heating down.
A more cost effective investment for a lot of people might be hot water bottles so you can turn the heating down.
You’re thinking heat, but many places are also unlivable without air conditioning which is not so easily solved. Many backup power solutions are also petrochem and that could lead to weird consequences at some point, though I don’t know if it would do so in a way that would be passed on directly to consumers.
Wouldn’t that just most likely lead to higher prices for energy?
As long as there’s supply enough to fill the demand, yes. A lot of people around the world are already stretched super thin and in precarious positions. Not everyone supports balcony solar and the like, either.
You can also just do balcony solar and tell them to get fucked. Legal issues only come from connecting it to the mains, if you connect it to a battery its just a camping solar/battery setup instead and totally fine. You could also charge the battery from the mains when there is no sun.
Considered it, but energy is cheap and stable enough it doesn’t really seem worth the effort. USB power banks are alright, I suspect they sell higher volumes so mass production makes the cost/Wh more competitive.
Now if I had an off grid cabin, suddenly all sorts of fun solar/battery options exist.
Ah, yep. I meant balcony solar that plugs in to an outlet that some countries can do; I was less thinking about just the type that charge batteries.
Yeah, battery doesn’t require legislation to use though. Plug into the mains does, but it is even cheaper as you don’t need a battery.
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.
even raw material extraction is gonna skyrocket, because all those machines also run on diesel.
Be more forward thinking. A few generations of uranium and lithium mining with pickaxes and oxen drawn wagons will get the world economy up and running again.
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.
They’re running low to the point where there are concerns about whether or not the salt caves they’re stored in can ever be used to store oil again:
What kind of food price increase is actually likely though? Food costs fuck all compared to a mortgage. UK prices, I can buy 15-20kg of oats/rice/flour/potatoes for an hour of minimum wage.
Even if food goes up 4x its current price, I will just cut out some of the luxury products like meat. Not like its a massive problem. Potatoes with some rosemary salt, delicious. I grow the rosemary myself, used to do it as guerilla gardening along some foot paths but now I have a small garden.
and if my food costs went up 4x, Theres no amount of cutting I could do that could keep the power and water on, or keep a roof over our head, because not only have I cut all my luxuries out years ago, I’ve cut out a good deal of necessities. Hell, some meals are just meals for eating nutrition, not meals to lvie or thrive with. I’ve cut literally everything and anything I can cut, thats not my own wrists.
I don’t think we’re living in similar tax brackets.
I used to live off £8k just fine. Now on £29k but my increase in spending is just on luxuries I could easily survive without, or goes to savings.
Like I don’t need expensive bags on my bike, I could use 2x Aldi carrier bags and strap a couple of bamboo canes to the panier rack to support them. I used to have a setup close to that and it works pretty well. Isn’t waterproof of course.
I haven’t kept up with the state of things in Britain (I left some years ago), but were I am now (Portugal) it was just recently on the news that credit card debt is the highest it has ever been.
This kind of thing is a signal that people’s finances are tight (read: they have no savings, spending everything they earn), as many people use credit card debt (which, remember, tends to have 20%+ APR interest) for dealing with unexpected large expenses (for example, their fridge stopped working) that they can’t pay for directly from their savings.
From what I remember from the UK, even before Brexit things were getting worse for most people with average real incomes for the lower 90% of the population in economic terms falling at about 1% per year.
From what I’ve been reading it’s the same or even worse in the US.
So, how likely is that the various effects of higher oil prices (not just on food prices but on the prices of pretty much every physical product due to transportation costs as well on the prices of fuel for people who still have ICE cars) will, when a large percentage if not even the majority of people are in a financially tight situation with no significant savings, cascade into all manner of problems, from mortgage defaults to companies going bankrupt (with people losing their jobs) because their revenues went down due to lower sales and their costs went up due to higher fuel prices?
Further, specifically for Britain, never forget that the response of the Government to the 2007 Crash was to support bankers and more broadly asset owners and make most people pay for it via Austerity (something which in turn fed the discontent that gave Leave a victory in the Referendum and thus Brexit).
Absolutelly, people will basically do like you and squeeze little savings here and there, yet when lots of people do that companies’ revenues fall and some will be bankrupt, plus some things (like mortgages and rents) aren’t really flexible (wellm not easilly: sometimes you can downsize but even that has costs) and with the current housing market a lot of people are spending most of their after tax incomes on housing.
Herbgrower, you seem to view the world through a singular lens…
“Covid smovid… I could just make a vinaigrette with some chervil and tarragon, throw that on the little swab they stick in your brain before they test and I’d feel jusr fine, shoot? And I grow that tarragon myself actually…”
“Food is going to be unaffordable”, I proceed to demonstrate just how cheap food is. So far price rises have just been a little bit the previous times things like this have happened. I don’t think there is any credible reason to expect food to go up by as much as some seem to make it sound like.
Just food price increases will mainly hit poorer people in poorer countries more.
Then again the median wealth in the US is less than Portugal - it’s a “rich” country only because a handful of people are stupidly rich, not because most people are - so most Americans are poorer than Brits (which has a median income above Portugal).
You do make a good point though.
As I see it, there are two factors here:
- How much will food prices go up: on one side there are a few ways oil price push prices up, mainly increases in fertilizer costs (as most fertilizer is made from oil), farming machinery operation and transportation, whilst on the other side there is some flexibility on the Demand-side (people actually eat more than they need and can eat less) so its not like this is an inflexible market were a small inbalance between Production and Demand can massivelly move prices.
- How tight are most people’s finances already. Specifically, how likely it is that there’s a “drop that spilled the glass” effect from higher food prices that mean it cascades into all manner of other things (such as mortgage defaults) because that pushed people over the edge.
Personally I’m more concerned over the latter mainly because wage growth in most of the West hasn’t kept up with inflation, inequality has exploded and most people have been so bad in terms of balance between incomings and outgoings that not only do they have little or no savings but aggregated credit card debt has never been this high.
Seems to me that the way this will explode is likely to be more akin to dominos falling due to various effects from oil prices increase cascading into an ever greater effect because we’re in an Economy where financially most people are already very tight, than due to any one overwhelming effect.
If only we lived in a rational market. There was plenty of toilet paper to go around as well.
I’ve heard this so many times before and it’s never as bad as people said.
We’re all getting used to the slowly warming waters (literally and figuratively) soon the water will boil and we’ll be dead. Ribbit.
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If we were “energy independent” would we be using up our rainy day fund?
Yes, if there was a reason to dip into the fund like an enormously expensive war. Once the war is done the reserve can be refilled.
How does that logic work exactly? My point is we are not energy independent. Are you arguing we are?
We COULD be, but US companies are making back off of exporting oil. We are exporting record amounts of oil to other countries. Mr Global on YouTube does an excellent job of explaining the intricacies of oil and gas industry.
2 charts showing crude import vs export. There was a brief time where USA exported more crude than it imported around April/may. The consistent trend is USA needs 3 million barrels per day of crude imported. (We import 6 million and export 3 million)
The video you linked doesn’t even say we export more than we import. What is your point exactly?
Oh shit… The price on Amazon is about $10.00 higher than last time I bought it… Like a month ago.
A jug of Varsol thinner is now $50 in Canada.
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.
You’ve heard of RAM-pocalypse, now its time for Aramco-pocalyse.
Aramco? I thought they only made weird plastics and special glues.
Either you are joking, or… no, no they’re like biggest oil producing company on Earth.
They even named a whole country after the company!
Sorry but I had only heard of them from looking at aramid type resins and materials like kevlar, polyamide, polyimide and such.
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!
I mean, yeah, there’s oil in there because there usually is still a transmission that has two gears (forward and reverse), so obviously there have to be gears and those obviously need lubrication. However, as there is nothing burned it usually really is just for lubrication and doesn’t really accumulate dirt or deteriorates in other ways. In fact I just checked and both my cars have no transmission oil changes in their maintenance schedule because it just doesn’t need to be replaced. Like, ever.
The gears are usually not forward and reverse, just reduction gearing. Lifetime fluid is a misnomer. Differentials also are just moving gears with no pressure or combustion byproducts, but those get changed regularly. It depends whether you want your car to last past the “lifetime” as defined by the manufacturer or not. Personally, my cars get fluid changes, because my definition of lifetime is longer than the extended warranty period.
Great, guess that means I should look into transmission oil changes at least for my golf… thanks for bringing that up, would have ignored it completely otherwise.
Not a difficult change, not a lot of oil (<1 liter), do it every 50k km if you want to be super safe, but honestly even 80k km is probably fine. Idk if the video goes through it, but on absolutely any car you change the diff oil on - crack the fill plug open first - only once you know it’s not seized shut should you open the drain plug.
I make it a point to change on all my vehicles if I intend to keep them for any amount of time because I buy them heavily depreciated with tons of kilometers and the previous owners have almost always neglected it. Is it likely that I’d have a diff blow up on me if I didn’t? Probably not, but nice to be safe and to know the next owner of the car won’t have the diff blow up after a few months of ownership either.
We drove that car about 150k km. Yeah, I’m going to do that rather sooner than later.
Our second car doesn’t need that right now because we just had the parking brake replaced (different story, although I’m still salty about that one because the car obviously uses the parking brake to stop when on adaptive cruise control and thus wrecked it after about 120k km) and therefore just had all engine lubricants replaced. Still, I had really just assumed that this is a maintenance free part for both of them. Crap.
Oh well, good thing I wanted to be a smartass about this one, I guess. The more you know. Again, thanks for bringing it up.
you still need to make plastic parts, and lubricants for other things besides cars.
All of the plastic in your electric car is made from petroleum.
Yeah, but I don’t need to replace that regularly.
No, but it does mean that replacement EVs are going to get more expensive too.
Luckily you usually don’t have to replace your car regularly either.
That’s not my point. Just because you could afford to upgrade 5 years ago doesn’t mean everybody could and shit is just going to get more expensive.
Ah okay, sorry… misunderstood your comment.
Yes, it’s of course pretty bad that everything gets more expensive.
Yep, Their post just screams “I got mine so it doesnt matter anymore”.
Not only are the greases, oils, lubricants, etc in the car from petro, the plastic are too, and so is the means of transporting those EV cars from the factory to the dealerships via trains and big rigs that run on diesel. Oh, and lets not forget all the extraction equipment for the batteries/bodies/wiring/etc that all runs on diesel as well.
and all those prices going up are going to make EVs skyrocket in price
Sure you’ll be able to drive on all renewable electricity to the grocery store where you can’t afford the food, then you can run your fridge at home for free but it’s empty.
That’ll show the oil companies.
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.
Welp guess it time to get out me old whaling harpoon
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.
Typical industry standards group devaluing words like “synthetic” and “real”. Can’t risk consumers comprehending things!
I’d say most “full synthetic oils” are still group III or a mix containing mostly group III. You can tell by looking at German websites, they’ll say synthese-technologie or something, they’re not allowed to advertise group III as vollsynthetisch there, has to be at least some % group IV though I’m not sure if it’s just 50% or even more than that.
I was looking for oils for my car with group IV base oil and I don’t think there was one. Or maybe ONE manufacturer managed to do it. Turns out the exact oil spec simply isn’t very conducive to using group IV even if it is technically “better”. Seems group IV is often used for expensive high quality racing oils that aren’t trying to hit a bunch of manufacturer specs made in the 00s and 10s. Soon as you try to hit something like VW 507.00, you’ll be using something that’s mostly group III.
Why is this low before petrol which is used so much more?
In April, Iran hit the shell owned refinery in Qatar that primary makes lubricating oils. That refinery and the rest behind the strait of Hormuz account for around half of the US’s supply of lubricating oils.
Repairs to that refinery are estimated to take a year to complete once its safe to do so. Domestic refineries to replace that capacity aren’t expected to come online until 2027. Even if the war ended in May, these lubricating oil shortages were coming regardless.
This is something that those in the industry knew was coming for a while.
What about the global supply, most of us don’t care about the US supply, they voted for this mess.
Petroleum products are pretty fungible. Shortages in the normal supply to the U.S. raise the prices there. This increases profits to be made by diverting supply that would normally go elsewhere to the U.S. instead, raising prices elsewhere. It’s a worldwide market. Some exceptions due to geo-political factors do apply, but in general a shortage anywhere is a shortage everywhere.
My inexpert understanding is that more oil is suitable for petrol production than heavier petroleum products like diesel or motor oils, etc.
