75% of the oil refined and used in the US is burned. The remaining 25% goes into the manufacture of plastics, road asphalt, and lubrication. (Data from the US Energy Information Administration.)
There are over 300 oil refineries in the US that convert crude oil into these products, though not every refinery makes all of them. Refineries vary in size but all together they process about 19.5 million barrels per day.
Nearly all natural gas in the US is burned, except for some (10%?) used as feedstock in industrial applications, again for making plastics, etc.
According to the IPCC all of it has to go by 2050, and half of it has to go in the next 10 years, if we are to avoid the worst of the effects of climate change. But that 50% is worldwide. Because the developed countries already produce proportionally more of this stuff, they have to cut back proportionally more.
Like 80% by 2030, as Greta Thunberg is quoted in this article from The Guardian in February:
The EU wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030, compared with 1990 levels.
“Some people say that is good, that is ambitious; but this new target is still not enough to keep global warming below 1.5C,” Thunberg said, referring to what scientists regard as the preferable upper limit if the planet is to avoid extreme droughts, floods and the bleaching of corals.
“This target is not sufficient to protect the future for children growing up today. If the EU is to make its fair contribution to stay within the carbon budget for the 2C limit then it needs a minimum of 80% reduction by 2030, and that includes aviation and shipping.”
She followed up just this week on Twitter:
Perhaps the most dangerous misconception about the climate crisis is that we have to “lower” our emissions. Because that is far from enough. Our emissions have to stop if we are to stay below 1,5/2°C warming. That rules out most of today’s politics. Including airport expansions.
The “lowering of emissions” is of course necessary but it is only the beginning of a fast process that must lead to a stop within a couple of decades. (Note that rich countries need to get down to zero emissions sooner than that according to the Paris Agreement.)
And then we need to get the emissions to minus by inventing new technologies, if we are to stay below 1,5 or 2°C of warming. Which we must… The fact that we are speaking of “lowering” instead of stopping emissions is perhaps the greatest force behind business as usual.
(btw, Greta is careful in her research, so my first inclination is to trust any numbers she reports.)
Shutdown
So getting back to those 300 oil refineries… Lets say for the purposes of a quick calculation that they are all the same size and they all produce the same products. We need to eliminate the bad 75% of 80% of their output in 10 years. Even assuming you can adjust a refinery to produce only the not-for-burning products and zero of the for-burning products, that is the equivalent of shutting down 75% of 8% of 300 refineries every year. That is 18 refineries per year, or one every three weeks. And that does not include the Natural Gas suppliers.
How could we go about that? One can envision the lawsuits… I don’t think a Carbon tax would get the desired result fast enough — a refinery every three weeks.
Cutting off their funding would help: “Banks Funneled $1.9 Trillion Into Fossil Fuels Since Paris Agreement”
Freezing in the dark
How will we heat our homes! How will I get to work? How do I visit my sister 3,000 miles away? The way forward in a Carbon-free world is a massive shift to electrification combined with conservation (ie, getting by with less). Electricity is the only clean energy form that can be generated, transported, stored, and used without putting CO2 into the atmosphere. The technology exists. But our transmission system for moving larger amounts of electricity around needs to be beefed up.
Making stuff
I do not mentional the burning of coal here because I covered that in a previous diary, and we are well on the way to getting rid of it anyway. But coal has other uses. For example, coal is used as a constituent of steel, as adding Carbon makes the Iron stronger, but this is not the same as burning the coal. The steel industry uses 5% of all energy consumed in the industrial sector, primarily in the form of natural gas, though it is becoming more efficient every year.
Can you melt steel with electricity instead? It turns out you can, though it takes a lot, 600-650 Killowatt-Hours, or a few days electricity usage for a single house, to melt just one ton. Aluminum takes about the same order of magnitude. Electricity at industrial-scale levels like that means that nuclear is not going away, but there are ways to build a nuclear power plant that are a lot safer than the Cold War inspired way we do it now. It needs development to commercial scale. Topic for another diary.