Oil
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Oil

A Beginner's Guide

Vaclav Smil

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eBook - ePub

Oil

A Beginner's Guide

Vaclav Smil

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About This Book

World acclaimed scientist Vaclav Smil reveals everything there is to know about nature's most sought-after resource Oil is the lifeblood of the modern world. Without it, there would be no planes, no plastic, no exotic produce, and a global political landscape few would recognise. Humanity's dependence upon oil looks set to continue for decades to come, but what is it?Fully updated and packed with fascinating facts to fuel dinner party debate, Professor Vaclav Smil's Oil: A Beginner's Guide explains all matters related to the 'black stuff', from its discovery in the earth right through to the controversy that surrounds it today.

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1

Oil’s benefits and burdens

Dominant energies and the devices and machines used to convert them into heat and kinetic energy have left deep, and specific, imprints on society. The age of biomass energy relied on wood, charcoal and crop residues (known as biomass fuels) that were not always actually renewable as demand for heating and metal smelting often led to extensive deforestation and the overuse of crop residues. Small waterwheels and windmills powered by water and wind had a marginal role as human and animal muscles energized most tasks. The coal age introduced fuels that were more energy dense than wood, were available in highly concentrated deposits and in prodigious amounts from a relatively small number of mines, and could economically power steam engines. These were the first inexpensive mechanical prime movers that not only replaced many stationary tasks that had previously been performed by animal and human power, but also turned old dreams of rapid land and ocean travel into inexpensive realities.
The introduction and diffusion of refined oil products (gasoline, kerosene, diesel fuel, fuel oil) marked an even more important qualitative shift in modern energy consumption. New fuels were superior to coal in every respect: they had higher heat content (releasing more energy per unit mass when burned), were easier and safer to produce, cleaner and more convenient to burn and offered an incomparable flexibility of final uses.
Crude oil, or more accurately a variety of refined oil products derived from it, has changed the very tempo of modern life. By allowing the introduction of more efficient prime movers they increased the productivity of modern economies and they accelerated, as well as deepened, the process of economic globalization. Their extraction and sales have fundamentally changed the economic fortunes of many countries, and they have also improved some aspects of environmental quality and added immensely to private and public comfort. The nominal price paid for these benefits – the cost of finding crude oil, extracting it, refining it and bringing the products to the market – has been, so far, relatively affordable for all but the poorest of the world’s economies.
The history of the oil business and of the price for crude oil paid by consumers are matters of rich documentary and statistical record and I will briefly recount major events, shifts and trends. But the prices that countries and companies pay for importing crude oil and the prices consumers pay when buying refined oil products (directly as automotive fuels and lubricants, indirectly as fuels for public and freight transport and for energy embedded in the production of virtually anything sold today) tell us little about the cost of finding and producing oil, and they are obviously very different from the real cost that modern societies have paid for oil in terms of (what economists so coyly call) the externalities of its extraction, transportation, processing and combustion, as well for ensuring the security of its supply.
That is why in the closing section of this chapter I will describe some of the broader costs of oil’s benefits: the environmental consequences of energizing modern economies with liquid fuels ranging from marine oil pollution and photochemical smog to the combustion of refined products as major contributors of anthropogenic greenhouse gases; the economic, political and social impacts of both owning, and so frequently mismanaging, rich oil resources on the one hand and of being forced to buy them at what often amounts to extortionate prices on the other; and the political, military and strategic designs, calculations and decisions aimed at securing a steady flow of crude oil from the major producing regions and the wider repercussions of these activities.
What we have accomplished with oil
The beginnings of the oil era were not all that revolutionary: they started with a single product limited to just one major market as kerosene refined from crude oil became a major illuminant during the late 1860s and the 1870s. But it was not the only source of light, as city gas, made from coal, had been making great inroads in urban areas and soon afterwards both kerosene and gas were displaced by electricity. And neither the lightest nor the heaviest liquid fractions of crude oil were of much use in the early decades of the oil industry: gasoline was an inconvenient by-product of kerosene refining, too volatile and too flammable to be used for household lighting or heating, and there were no suitable small furnaces that could burn heavy oil for space heating. At least oil-derived lubricants offered cheaper and better alternatives to natural oils and waxes.
Only the invention of internal combustion engines (gasoline ones during the 1880s and the diesel engine during the 1890s) made oil’s lighter fractions potentially valuable but they became indispensable only two decades later, and then only in North America, with the emergence of large-scale car ownership and the diffusion of trucking (elsewhere the conversion from railroad to highway transport and the rise of car ownership began only after World War II). Less than two decades after the first motorized vehicles came the use of gasoline-powered reciprocating engines in flight and, within a generation after this fundamental breakthrough, the emergence of commercial aviation after World War I. During the 1950s this new business was revolutionized by the introduction of gas turbines. These superior internal combustion engines made long-distance flight affordable.
Refined fuels powering massive diesel engines also changed both freight and passenger waterborne transport: all ships that were previously fueled by coal, from river barges to trans-oceanic liners, and from fishing vessels to large container ships (whose introduction made marine shipping a key tool of globalization) have benefited from the cleaner, cheaper, faster, more powerful and more reliable manner of propulsion. Small gasoline-powered outboard engines created a new leisure activity in motorized boating. Freight and passenger trains benefited from diesel engines, as did numerous heavy-duty trucks and construction and off-road vehicles.
Obviously, refined oil products have had their most far-reaching impact in transportation and I will note the key technical milestones of these advances and describe the current fuel requirements of these activities. The automobile was a European invention and its mechanical beginnings go back to 1876 when Nikolaus Otto (see figure 1) built the first four-stroke cycle engine running on coal gas. The first light, high-speed, gasoline-powered, single-cylinder vertical engine using Otto’s four-stroke cycle was designed by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach in 1885, and in the same year Karl Benz built the world’s first motorized carriage powered by his slower horizontal gasoline engine. After a major redesign by Emile Levassor in 1891 the standard car configuration was virtually complete by the mid-1890s: the combination of four-stroke gasoline-fueled engine, electrical ignition and a carburetor launched the largest manufacturing industry in history whose expansion still continues.
An entirely different mode of fuel ignition was patented by Rudolf Diesel in 1892 (see figure 1). Fuel injected into the cylinder of diesel engines is ignited spontaneously by high temperatures generated by compressing the fuel twice as much as it is compressed in Otto’s engines. Diesel engines work at a higher pressure and lower speed, and large stationary machines have best efficiencies just above 50% and automotive engines can approach 40%. Gasoline engines used to be 20–30% less efficient but their best new designs have almost closed the gap. Diesel fuel has other advantages: it contains about 11% more energy than gasoline in the same volume, it is slightly cheaper than gasoline and it is not dangerously flammable. Low flammability makes diesel engines particularly suitable in any setting where a fire could be an instant disaster (such as on board ships) as well as in the tropics where high temperatures will cause little evaporation from vehicle and ship tanks. And the combination of high engine efficiency, higher volumetric energy density and low fuel volatility means that diesel-powered vehicles can go farther without refueling than equally sized gasoline engines. Additional mechanical advantages include the diesel engine’s high torque, its resistance to stalling when the speed drops, and its inherent ruggedness.
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Figure 1 Creators of the automobile age (clockwise): Nikolaus Otto, Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and Rudolf Diesel
But early diesel engines were simply too heavy to be used in automobiles, and gasoline-fueled machines were not an instant success either: for more than a decade after Levassor’s redesign (and also after Charles Duryea built the first American gasoline-fueled car in 1892) cars remained expensive, unreliable machines bought by small numbers of privileged experimenters. This changed only with Henry Ford’s introduction of the affordable and reliable Model T in 1908 and with the expansion and perfection of mass production techniques after World War I. Greater affordability combined with higher disposable incomes alongside technical advances in car design and better automotive fuels led to an inexorable rise in car use, first in the US, and then after 1950 in Europe and Japan, and now throughout much of continental Asia.
The combination of America’s affluence and perfected mass production gave the country a more than 90% share of the world’s automotive fleet during the late 1930s, but the post-WWII economic recovery in Europe and Japan began to lower this share. In 1960, the US still had 60% of the world’s passenger cars, but by 1983 Europe matched the US total and the continent is now the world’s largest market for new vehicles while China became the fastest growing new car market during the 1990s. In 2015 worldwide passenger car registrations surpassed 900 million (see figure 2) and there were also about 350 million trucks, buses and cars in commercial fleets making a total of 1.25 billion road vehicles. Because the typical performance of their engines remains rather inefficient their claim on refined fuels remains high.
Any brief recital of the key economic, social and behavioral impacts of global car use must include, on the positive side of the ledger, unprecedented freedom of travel, expansion of individual horizons, flexibility and convenience, and the enormous contribution to the prosperity of modern economies where car building is commonly the single largest industry (in terms of added value) and where activities associated with the ownership and driving of cars create a large share of gross domestic product. The two lead items on the negative side are a large death and injury toll (worldwide, about 1.2 million deaths every year, and some twenty million injuries to drivers, passengers and pedestrians) and various environmental impacts. Traffic jams, now nearly chronic in most large urban areas, loss of land (often prime farmland) to highways and parking lots and the destruction of traditional urban patterns are other common negatives.
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Figure 2 Worldwide car ownership, 1900–2015
GASOLINE CONSUMPTION BY CARS
Thermal efficiency of the best gasoline-fueled engines in passenger cars is now over 30% and in 2014 Toyota developed an engine (using the Atkinson cycle) with maximum efficiency of 38%, but engines in everyday use achieve no more than 25%. Frictional losses cut the overall efficiency by about 20%, and partial load factors (inevitable during the urban driving that makes up most car travel time) reduce this by another 25%; accessory loss and (increasingly common) automatic transmission may nearly halve the remaining total so that the effective efficiency can be as low as 7–8%. Besides, for most of their history cars have not been designed to minimize gasoline consumption, and this has been particularly the case in the world’s most important car market: America’s preference for large cars, decades of low gasoline prices and heavy Detroit designs led to the declining performance of the post-WWII US car fleet.
In 1974 specific gasoline consumption (expressed in Europe in liters per 100km) actually increased by about 15% in comparison with the machines from the 1930s; the US uses a reverse measure of performance, miles per gallon (mpg), and hence this rate declined between the mid-1930s and 1974. Only OPEC’s oil price increases brought a rapid turnaround as new federal rules (known as CAFE, Corporate Automotive Fuel Efficiency) specified gradually improving performance: the average was doubled in just twelve years, from 13.5mpg in 1974 to 27.5mpg (8.6 l/100km) by 1985. Expanding imports of more efficient European and Japanese cars further improved the overall performance. Unfortunately, the collapse of high oil prices in 1985 and then the economic vigor of the 1990s ended this desirable trend and CAFE remained stuck at 27.5mpg for the next 25 years, a huge loss of opportunity to make cars more efficient. Moreover, as pick-ups, vans and SUVs (sport utility vehicles: a monumental misnomer), all used primarily as passenger cars yet all exempt from CAFE standards, gained nearly half of the US car market, they dragged average fleet efficiency backwards.
The specific performance of these excessively large and powerful vehicles used to be mostly below 20mpg (above 11.8 l/100km), and some 2017 SUV models are even consuming more than 16 l/100km: Chevrolet’s Suburban and Tahoe, and GMC’s Yukon are in this monster category. Moreover, the stagnating efficiency was accompanied by a steady increase in average distance traveled per year: that rate barely moved between 1950 and 1975 (up by just 3% to 15,400km/vehicle) but by 2005 it had risen by more than a quarter to reach nearly 20,000km. As a result, average performance of all US light vehicles was still only 20mpg in the year 2000 and 21.5mpg ten years later. Then the average performance began, finally, to improve: by 2015 the mean had reached the record level of 24.8mpg and a number of bestselling cars could do better than 30mpg: the Honda Civic delivered 33mpg in combined city/highway cycle and 37mpg in highway driving, requiring just 6.35 l/100km.
Hybrid vehicles are, of course, much more efficient: the Ford Focus and Chevrolet Volt are just above 100mpg, requiring just 2.2 l/100km. And the combination of three trends – rising CAFE standards (by 2025 EPA stickers should be 43mpg for small vehicles and 37mpg for light trucks), further market inroads by popular hybrids, and a growing acceptance of electric vehicles – makes it very likely that even with slightly increasing car and truck fleets the US automotive gasoline demand may have already come close to its all-time peak (in 2016 it was just 0.1% above the previous record level set in 2007).
In 2016 motor and aviation gasoline accounted for a third of global refinery throughput. The US share of global gasoline consumption was about 41% of the total, or more than 1,200kg/capita: the country now consumes more gasoline than the combined total for the EU, Japan, China and India. The EU, with a population more than 50% larger than the US and with car ownership nearly as high as in the US, consumed only about 13% of the world’s gasoline (about 160kg/capita). The key factors explaining this difference are the EU’s higher number of diesel engines, smaller and more efficient gasoline-fueled vehicles, and much shorter average annual distances traveled by car (about half of the US mean). Japan consumed about 4% of the world’s gasoline supply in 2015; China, with a population ten times larger than that of Japan, 10% (still only about 70kg/capita); and India claimed just 2%. These comparisons indicate the enormous potential demand for motor gasoline as car ownership increases in Asia’s two most populous economies. They also make it clear that only major shifts in vehicle fleets (more efficiency, more hybrids and more electrics) will prevent this expansion from causing further serious deterioration of air quality.
The diesel engine has changed the world no less than its lighter but less efficient gasoline-powered counterpart. High weight/power ratio had delayed the use of diesels in passenger cars until after World War II but by the 1930s they were well on their way to dominating all applications where their higher mass made little difference, that is, in shipping, on railways, in freight road transport and in agriculture.
Just before World War II, one out of every four cargo ships was powered by diesel engines. Conversion to diesel accelerated after 1950 and today about nine out of ten freight ships are propelled by them, including the world’s largest crude oil tankers and container vessels whose incessant traffic is the principal link between the producers and markets of the global manufacturing economy. The largest ships now have capacities closely approaching 200,000 deadweight tons (dwt, the weight of cargo plus ship’s stores and bunkers and the fuel taken on board to power engines) and are able to carry more than 20,000 stacked containers at speeds exceeding 30km/h. Finnish Wärtsilä and Germany’s Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg (MAN) are the leading designers of large marine diesels and Japan’s Diesel United and South Korea’s Hyundai are their leading producers.
Combustion of diesel oil has multiplied the energy efficiency of railway transport as the replacement of coal-fired steam locomotives by diesel engines boosted the typical conversion efficiency from less than 10% to at least 35%. Trunk rail lines everywhere are now either electri...

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