The Importance of Oil in Society

I grew up in the fringes of the oil business in Tulsa. Tulsa called itself the oil capital of the world in the 1950s and it was a real far of it. It was very central to a lot of little companies on oil equipment they are asking, most people in business very large share of the oil business in one way or another. Well so anybody is familiar with the oil business knows that up until the early 20th century, you could only get gasoline from a tiny share of petroleum but first with thermal cracking and then in the 1930s catalytic cracking, you could use much larger shares, 70% to 80% maybe of oil to produce gasoline, and it was that expansion of the feedstock that made possible the transportation revolutions of the early 20th century, as a result gasoline was 25 cents a gallon when I was growing up in Tulsa. The trade doesn't produce oil, and the United States produces some oil certainly, and we are going to need oil for a long time. But if we can get to a lot less oil than we have now, we can do something very important. I will give one example; Anne Korin of the IAGS, the think tank in Washington that promotes working on energy for national security purposes says that, up until the late 19th to early 20th century salt was a strategic commodity. There was no other way to preserve meat. Preserving meat was hugely important for the human diet, huge share of the human food chain. So people had salt mines and countries that had salt mines were really important.

Believe it or not, countries fought wars over salt. That changed with refrigeration. Now we still use salt, probably we still use it some to preserve meat but mainly we use it for flavoring and one thing or another unless you are intermittently familiar with Morton's, you probably don't have any idea where it comes from. You don't care. It's bought and sold on a market. It's a commodity like a lot of other commodities but nobody is going to order you around because he has got salt and you don't. Well, we need to do that to oil. We need to destroy not oil but we need to destroy it as a strategic commodity. So we don't need it for transportation. There are real competitors, and competitors electricity, alternative fuels together in one summed combination can get the job done, at that point oil becomes like lots of other commodities, and by the way, it becomes much more property in a free market is which you have now is not a free market. Opaque runs at the curtail and they are able to run it with Saudi Arabia leading it. But cars is the strategic commodity, and there is no other way for most people and most structures in the world to propel their vehicles around except with petroleum derived fuel. If we can end that, so there are some competitors that are close to oil's cost like Cellulosic ethanol and other like electricity. They are much cheaper. People are still going to want the oil, depends on how cheap it is. Whether they use oil or natural gas in the chemical plants etcetera. Fine, we don't want to destroy oil. We want to do to it what refrigeration did to salt.


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