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Thursday, February 23, 2012

The cold hard truth about the oil rip off...we are being snookered!

It cost about 26 cents to produce one gallon of regular gasoline, taxes are about 11 and a quarter cents for every one cent of cost. so 26 x 11 = 2.86 + 0.26(cost) = $3.12, there you have it  we pay 10 times more in taxes than the product itself..
Now that we cleared up that issue...Let's address how many gallons of gasoline is produced from one barrel of crude oil....
 There are 42 gallons of oil in an oil barrel, so I first thought that there would then be 42 gallons of gasoline in a barrel as well. But as I looked into it it quickly became more complicated that that.

Oil is complex mixture of hydrocarbons (mostly alkanes) of various lengths of which only some are of the length that make up gasoline. It is also turned into diesel fuel, jet fuel, solvents, fertilizers, pesticides, and plastics. Since gasoline doesn't make up the whole barrel, it then seemed like a good idea to figure out what percentage of the barrel was turned into gasoline.


 About 10% of the product of the distillation of crude oil is a fraction known as straight-run gasoline. That would mean that a barrel of oil would produce 4.2 gallons of gasoline. It also depends on the type of oil, as Venezuelan crude yields little gasoline (about 5%), whereas Texas or Arabian crude yields about 30% gasoline.

Given the differences I took a look at what the average barrel of oil produces. American Petroleum Institute reports that 1 barrel of oil produced 19.4 gallons of gasoline per barrel based on average yields for U.S. refineries in 2000.  

If straight-run gasoline only makes up 2-13 gallons per barrel, how did the average get to 19.4 or 18.5? That lead me to read these really interesting articles on oil refining and cracking. Using catalysts, heat, steam and or hydrogen complex organic molecules (e.g. kerogens or heavy hydrocarbons) are broken down into simpler molecules (e.g. light hydrocarbons) by the breaking of carbon-carbon bonds in the precursors.

From Chevron:
Today, some refineries can turn more than half of every 42-gallon barrel of crude oil into gasoline. That's a remarkable technological improvement from 70 years ago, when only 11 gallons of gasoline could be produced.
So it looks like using cracking you can turn 1/2 of a barrel of oil into gasoline or 21 gallons.
Or maybe even higher as Cars.com reports:
More than half of the gasoline used in the United States today is produced by cracking, most by a fluid catalytic cracking process that uses alumina-silica gel powders as catalysts.

By combining all of these processes, 100 liters (26 gallons) of crude oil can yield slightly more than 100 liters of gasoline.
100 liters of crude = 100 liters of gasoline, that would get us back to the 42 gallon mark.

So in summary the oil companies are ripping us off...as well as government taxes on the gas as shown above... the actual cost of producing one gallon of gas ! There you have it boys and girls...we have over two hundred years of fossil fuel available within the US alone...so why the big rush for so called green energy...there is plenty of time to develop this new energy!



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