Now when your friends call you have to decide if they're oil-worthy

Everybody loves the sponge

I remember some panic and thinking I’ll just hope for the best.

With modern synthetics and my driving patterns, that is 1 jug for one of my cars, and 2 jugs for the other.

Maybe now wouldn’t be the worst time. It isn’t a lot of space wasted if I didn’t need it.

The problem with drawdowns is they can and have compromised the structural integrity of the caverns used in the SPR. Like oil, they're a finite resource and should be used judiciously.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/2585591

Either way it seems the US has somewhere from 1 to 8 months before accounting for reductions due to national considerations. That's concerning no matter how you frame it.

What's the outlook for the other major economies?

Thanks for the link, I didn't know very much about how this is implemented and now it's much clearer. I fully expect to see the same things I've just learned on a Youtube video or cable TV news some time from now when stuff goes badly wrong and it doesn't mesh with the simple "Huge metal tank somewhere" picture of such a reserve I'd imagine the average voter has.

Like Britain's ageing gas mains this feels like a measure which should have become irrelevant just as it would otherwise need renewing, a huge saving - but of course we (as a species) will always procrastinate so that was never going to happen. For the next 5-10 years Britain will continue replacing pipelines to deliver a fossil fuel (natural gas, methane, for heating) we should have long since stopped using but didn't.

The caverns have salt walls. The water erodes the salt caverns.

Not at volume yet. How quickly they return and what volumes will determine how fast oil prices go up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49368661

(oil futures market participant)

Expect many “court finds that Trump …” headlines with zero consequence.

> Trump will 100% ignore the defense reserve.

I'd love to see someone try to refute this as the obvious outcome given every decision Trump has made, especially in his second term where he has far less sane babysitters around him.

This is the "If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any" guy.

This is the guy calling for steep rate cuts in the midst of a serious inflation problem.

This is the guy that sabotages solar and wind power, intent on keeping us on oil and "clean coal" (lmao).

He's 80 years old and a malignant narcissist, he doesn't give a single fuck what happens to anyone after he's dead (and he knows that'll be pretty soon) as long as he gets what he thinks he wants today.

> Congress won't stop him either.

Also something that proves out daily.

Our oil travels across our country via the USA. We also depend heavily on USA refining in certain provinces. This will never happen.

The oil that lubricates the combustion chambers and pistons gets burnt and filled with nasty combustion goop. An impressive amount of cleverness goes to minimizing this, but the oil that sees the combustion chambers still goes bad at many times the rate of any other lubricant.

Even on an ICE vehicle, you have transmission oil and differential oil and lubricants in your air conditioning compressor and brake hydraulics and grease smeared on CV joints and door mechanisms and pretty much everything else that moves. But you still talk about "changing THE oil" and mean the oil-that-sees-combustion specifically (along with, typically, the filter that fights the constant battle of getting the worst combustion products out of it). I personally think that makes it fair to say "EVs don't require oil changes" because even though they don't magically eliminate the other lubrication systems or the need to maintain them, they do eliminate the one that is so much more obnoxious than the rest that we commonly called it "THE oil change" before this was ever a debate.

It does, plenty of things inside the EV require all kinds of oils, just the maintenance cycle isn't gallons and gallons every x months. You are looking at years.

I got service centers trying to rotate my tires every 3k miles because "ev". The oil change as well, oh you need to change oil every 5k because... because why?

They do have some gearbox oil that is usually considered to last a lifetime but some sources advise changing it every 100k miles or so. This is analogous to transmission fluid in an ICEV.

The seal between the piston and the cylinder isn't perfect, so when the engine runs combustion products will mix with the oil, making the oil eventually unusable. That's why ICE engines meed oil changes so often.

There is oil for the gearbox, but there's no scheduled maintenance for it at all, and in practice, people regularly get hundreds of thousands of miles without ever needing to think about it.

There are plenty of things that still need oil and grease in EVs still, but it is in such low quantities that we could synthesize most of that from air and it still not being a cost of any concern.

I would imagine if there is oil in the electric motors that is “lifetime” but test really probably 300k miles, so if you drive the car into the ground, you probably would want to service that at some point, assuming they are serviceable without destruction.

You’ve got parts with oil that have to be done every 10 years or are completely sealed into the part and are expected to last as long as the part does.

Nope. I've had a Model 3 since 2018 and besides swapping out tires and window washer fluid, no maintenance.

There was suggested battery fluid maintenance when I first got the car every 3 years or so, but they removed that recommendation.

It's one of the reasons I just can't go back to a regular gas car.

Yeah, but the intervals are much longer.

Surely at some point, but it hasn’t yet happened in my short 3 years owning one

The biggest one that needs changing would be the differential.

There is not. Just brake and washer fluid and coolant.

Nothing that matters on "people who drive new cars" timelines.

Like yeah there's probably some box with gear oil might get a little nasty after 100-200k but gears are pretty hardy and don't demand all that much.

There’s still gearbox oil, diff oil, and brake fluid. These last far longer and are far smaller volumes than engine oil, though.

Transmission/differential oil tends to last a very long time (150-400k, unit doesn’t matter). Automatics require relatively frequent oil changes in comparison, but they’re using the oil to transmit power. Lots of greased parts, but again, the grease will last about as long as the part (mostly because the grease falling apart makes the part fail), which usually lasts the life of the car.

Bearings and shocks have grease, sure. But those things last decades after installation. They're probably two orders of magnitude lower in volume consumption than engine oil, which gets contaminated and disposed of at the rate of like a gallon or two per vehicle per month.

Like, the price differential is so high that the high end artisinal lubricant market is dominated by chemically synthesized products that aren't strictly petroleum at all (though many of the reagents used to manufacture them probably come out of the petrochemical world).

Correct. ~140k miles on my 2018 Model S, tires, wipers and wiper fluid, and one battery pack heater replaced (deprecated, no longer used in newer builds) are all that have been done. Motors are lubricated at manufacture and sealed for life.

https://ev-lectron.com/blogs/blog/tesla-electric-vehicle-pow...

Not really. Most stuff is sealed for life. So it's more replacing whole parts when they fail than changing the oil in something. But many bearings will last hundreds of thousands of miles and never need changing for the entire life of the car. Quite amazing really.

He says "old iron", that could mean anything, but in my personal opinion it's probably for the best to bump up a weight once a car gets over 150k on the odometer. You get a little thicker film to compensate for wear, a bit higher viscosity to cut down on any leakage, and the same low temp performance.

I would not play around with it on anything with VVT, but it's a pretty common "hack" for pre-2010'ish motors and probably even a good idea.

Florida. 89 Dodge p/u, 92 Buick, 96 Toyota and my son daily drives a 63 Dart. We have a 61 Sunliner I drive when the weather cools down.

I remember using a large Jerry can of oil to top off a MATV. Google says 19-28 quart capacity- oof!

I can't edit this now, but,

10 US Quarts (9.46L) are not the same as 10 Quarts (11.36L). Good job there!

My 3 cylinder 1.0 litre Citroen takes exactly half that. Interesting.

Umm, no? A liter is slightly larger than a quart, so 10 quarts is about 9.5L.

For reference, did you mess this up yourself or did it require AI?

Liters are not SI units.

Metric isn't magic.

It's not ergnomic nor designed around the human body or everyday experiences.

It started arbitrary. Then was defined as in terms of the wavelength of radiation from krypton-86. (the meter was 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of that particular transition to match the original arbitrary metal bar)

Then they based it on the distance light travels in an arbitrary amount of time (1/299,792,458 of a second).

These were all decidedly non-human scale measurements with no actual scientific basis. Yes they used scientific references, but theyre all arbitrary references.

Not everything has to be political. I live in Japan and raised SUV's with max-grip tires are all the rage here. Just total, 100% useless vanity that wastes fuel for nothing.

Flexing useless crap as a status symbol is as old as time

Lots of people haul things. The US is huge compared to what most people expect. Big trucks can be a necessity depending on what you do for a living/your way of life.

Specifically, oil cooled Porsches take that much, because they have to fill the oil cooler at the front and the lines that lead to the engine at the back.

I've owned and driven V8 engine powered vehicles since the 1970's and have never owned one that used more than 7 qts of oil for an oil change. Most use 5 qts plus a filter. That is why oil is sold in 5 qt jugs. That's all that most vehicles need. Of course my vehicles are all model year 2015 or earlier.

I checked specs with different manufacturers and find that the V8 engines that need 10 qts of motor oil are the heavier duty trucks typically with a diesel engine. Checking specs shows that most gasoline V8s require 6 qts, some require 7-8 quarts, and the larger diesel trucks require 10 qts, sometimes up to 11 qts depending on the engine.

10 qts of motor oil takes up a lot of space and that is at a premium in most engine compartments. The oil pan would need to be deep and trucks are the only vehicles that have that much room between the engine block and the crossmembers/differentials.

2030 could be the decade where nations all over the world realize that independent energy production that produce an overabundance of stable energy is critical to enable growth and prosperity, and thus will put a lot of money, people and political capital towards that goal. Fossil fuels was useful when it had a consistent cheap price and availability, but those properties has been quickly eroded.

You can definitely replace petroleum for many of the things you listed - or find alternative technologies that don’t require it. You can live without plastic bags or plastic clothes for instance.

It’s just that a lot of companies (and people) get very rich from it and they invest A LOT into making sure that petroleum alternatives are not viable.

Of course there are some things were petroleum cant be easily substituted but I would argue the vast majority of use cases doesnt require it.

Energy is probably the most important and there it’s laughable easy to replace.

> nothing can replace petroleum right now.

You don't need to be some kind of super genius to understand this, if you have not been sucked in to the populist left wing propaganda about petroleum. We can't even replace petroleum for energy right now, let alone all its other uses.

It's not just oil we'll have issues with either, lots of minerals could easily see shortages and rapidly increasing costs to extract over this century.

> We are doomed.

More propaganda. We don't need infinite economic growth, infinite population growth, or even continued quality of life growth. Nothing bad even happens when you have degrowth, all other life forms have periods of growth and degrowth. It's all crazy propaganda that people repeat we need to constantly keep boosting up population numbers.

A few generations ago nobody on earth ever saw a motor car for the entire history of humanity. Or electricity. Antibiotics. Synthetic fertilizers. Any kind of plastic.

Things will change, people will adapt, conflict and famine, etc. Much the same as the rest of human history. The people of the future might no lot be able to expect to be clothed, fed, housed, and entertained in exchange for sitting around an air-conditioned office eating a birthday cake before putting in their solid 2.5 hours of work for the day drawing up the next draft of policies around who can use which bathroom before scrolling tiktok for the rest of the work day. But I wouldn't call that "doomed".

COVID was the last time our global CO2 output decreased, hope it sticks this time.