blert

This discovery will take five to 10 years for the oil find to benefit Kenyans and the world.

So from now till that time what you thinking how US improve her economy with China alligator?

Easy, Just as Bush did in his 2nd term, create new WAR……..a New Regime Change

Thanks for all that info. I’m trying to process it all…as i’m not in the business. Are you saying that our current refining capacity is adequate to handle the projected volume of our shale oil endeavors?

Would we not benefit from or even need a world scale facility here as we’re not dealing with crude oil with shales?

If we are bound and determined to be energy self-sufficient does it matter that Africa has entered the game, if our goal is not primarily to be an exporter?

Refineries are NOT our fundamental bottleneck.

Lost to the MSM, and hence the general public, oil refineries are perpetually expanding in through-put capacity all the time. This is why there has been no real pressure to build a ‘greenfield’ plant in decades.

This increase in capacity is due to better catalysts, better processes and additional pre-processing ‘trains’ which are tucked into the same ‘foot-print’ as the original refinery.

[ Most of the land committed to a refinery is used to create a fire break and explosion buffer. This is typically miles across. You can see the voids from Google Earth. The empty land surrounding refineries is owned by the processor itself.]

The other global trend is for OPEC nations to pre-process their own heavy sour crudes within world scale facilities. This is driven by the economics of scale. Absolutely no-one can compete with the advantages of large scale processing trains — particularly with heavy, sour crude.

Thus, KSA is building a 400,000 bbl/ day facility at Yanbu — on the Red Sea — which will transmute the nasty crude into heavy oils and light products. The heavy stuff can be sold to small markets like Ireland — which can’t ever justify a world scale refinery even if the whole island consumed its production.

The KSA project was started as an American-Arabian deal. Then, because of fracking economics, the Americans dropped out. Red China stepped up. This new refinery is expected to fire up in less than one year.

Eventually, KSA is going to have to pre-process almost all of its heavy, sour grades. It’s an economic imperative.

==========

In other shocking news: Kenya has discovered the other end of the Permian oil deposit of KSA an Gulf fame — off its coast.

In less than a decade, Kenya figures to be a heavy weight oil exporter.

Yes, it’s light, sweet crude. Even the very first test well is a gusher.

The implication is that the deposit lies off of Somalia, too.

Imagine that.

How we get around this inevitability aside from declining birthrates is a relatively recent problem that we are still learning how to solve…if it is solvable at all.

Which in a round about way leads us to alternative means to acquire capital to survive, which ultimately leads us to government “entitlement programs” and tort reform, for starters….. and of course the time honored tradition of crime.

Think about what would happen with gasoline back to $ 1.50 a gallon? But that’s minimal compared to the impact on chemicals, plastics, pharmaceuticals,etc.

We’re stuck with HIM for 4 more years so let’s stop pissin and moaning fix what we can….and hope our Supreme Court
Justices stay healthy…..

I think the Ur-problem is, once again, the collective stupidity of the populace, from which all too often the most stupid are drawn to form the juries.

neo-neocon Says:
December 30th, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Ira: I assume when you speak of anti-lawyer screeds, you’re talking about commenters. I don’t think I’ve ever been one for anti-lawyer screeds.

Occam’s Beard Says:
December 30th, 2012 at 10:35 pm
I don’t think I’ve ever been one for anti-lawyer screeds.

Work on it.

Yes, I was referring to commenters, and obviously not to all commenters as I wrote (emphasis added), “But for the occasional anti-lawyer screeds . . . .”

expat Says:
December 31st, 2012 at 12:00 am
I am not against all lawyers, but we certainly could rein in some of the class action types. There is something definitely wrong when a sleazebag like John Edwards is seriously considered as a national politician.

I believe the real problem with some of those cases had been the judges’ letting evidence get to juries that actually did not point to the conclusions for which the evidence was offered.