Oil Stain on America

by Yukon Jack

 
America’s dependence on foreign oil has created an corridor of death and destruction centered on Middle East oil fields. The entity called the United States Corporation is slaved to defense contractors, oil multinationals and wishes of the Israeli state. America’s military dependence on oil has created a domestic policy of large automobiles and sprawling subdivisions, people now live large distances from food sources and employment. America’s disastrous foreign policy has made it the number one enemy of the world and has destroyed the lives of millions, pushed the national debt into the stratosphere, and destroyed liberty at home. The quest for crude has become a black stain on the heart of the Republic, casting a dark shadow over the land, America’s new fascist dictatorship has everything to do with petrol. Fortunately, America’s dependence on foreign oil is completely artificial and with bold leadership she can be coaxed back from the dark side.

Ever since WW2, oil was no longer a competitive business between multinational corporations, it had become competition between nation states. Oil was the crucial factor in the Pacific Theatre, the US Navy cut the Japanese off from oil supplies. The war at sea was the war for oil. Oil for the war machine drove the major campaigns of the Third Reich, Hitler invaded the Caucasus and Stalingrad for oil. World War 2 proved that access to oil could make or break an empire, from that point forward control of oil became the imperative of empire building and maintenance.
The military quickly became a military of machines dependent on oil – wheeled and tracked vehicles, aircraft, and ships all use oil, lots of oil. The Pentagon is the biggest single oil user on the planet, the American military machine is the world’s largest, military spending dwarfs all other nations combined. American’s foreign policy is driven in a large part for securing this resource. But why does the civilian economy have this obsession with oil?
Gasoline vs. Alcohol and Other Fuels

If there was ever an elixir that approximates free energy it is crude oil. It can be refined into useful liquids like gasoline that have 114,000 BTU per gallon or diesel at 128,000 BTU/gal. That is a lot of punch per unit volume, much greater than that of alcohol, a gallon of ethyl alcohol is only 80,000 BTU’s/gallon. Oil approximates ‘free energy’, it is cheap to pump oil, even at today’s cost it is only a $1 per barrel to get it out of the ground. The electrical cost of pumping oil is next to nothing for the BTU’s gained.
Ethanol is relatively expensive to produce because with oil you just pump it out of the ground. In America, ethanol is made with corn, but corn is made with oil, the entire process heavily subsidized. ADM’s big ethanol push is a joke, it takes more than a gallon of gasoline to produce a gallon of ethanol!  The world produces 85 million barrels a day of oil dwarfing ethanol at less than a million barrels per day. Ethanol is very costly supplying about 1% of US demand, it is another government financed boondoogle that benefits those with political connections, ethanol doesn’t save gasoline, it increases it use which is probably one of the real reasons it is produced. The dogging problem with oil production is constant oversupply, if examine closely you will find that policies are being made to use more oil.
Liquid fuels made from oil, with their high heat capacity, can be easily stored and pumped and used to power internal combustion engines, this is much better than any solid or gaseous fuel. The first attempts with the piston engine fuel were with coal dust. It is difficult to supply an engine with a solid, a gas is better, but gases require special, heavier tanks. Liquids offer ease of storage and transfer, non pressurized tanks, any container will do, the only limitation is changing the liquid to gas for combustion.

The real advantage of a room temperature liquid like gasoline is the ability to be stored cheaply in safe underground steel tanks, and it can be transferred to smaller containers easily. Batteries are heavy and require a long charge time, liquid or compressed hydrogen is an attractive alternative to gasoline, but storage is a problem. Propane and other gases need above ground pressurized tanks.  So the reality is that gasoline is the practical winner, it has the highest heat capacity, it is easy to store, transfer, and transport and it is abundant. Before gasoline invaded the car market, cars were electric or ran on alcohol, but as the car market grew access to fuel became a problem.
Henry Ford’s cars ran on alcohol home brew. Making ethanol is relatively easy, add sugar to water and ferment, then distill the alcohol which is a waste product of the yeast. If you add some corn mash you can get a real good whiskey, filter it through some charcoal made from sugar maple and now you get a smooth purified delectable drink. Drinking alcohol can also be poured directly into the tank, it can be easily produced on a small scale from any sugar or carbohydrate. In the early days of motoring it was common to use drinking alcohol as fuel, it was widely produced but in small quantities and the low compression engines had no problem burning it. A couple of jugs of moonshine might get you home from visiting the country farm. Alcohol is the prime choice for fuel if gasoline didn’t exist. But what if we lived in a world with no liquid or gaseous fuels?  If we lived in a world with only electricity then battery powered cars would be the best choice.
Edison’s battery was amazingly simple and rugged, they last forever, and they are non toxic. Edison’s battery was nickel-iron-hydride, the plates were nickel and iron, the electrolyte was lye. They could be cleaned with hose water and refilled by hand and the electrolyte made at home. Lye is made from wood ash and soaking it in water.

 

 

Jay Leno with an original Edison battery that is still serviceable in his 1909 Baker Electric.

Oil is better than alcohol when compared to the volume produced, it is easier than makin’ a still in the backwoods, you drill a hole in the ground and pump out the black ooze and put it in a barrel. You can sell it and get anything you want like gold, it is black gold, it is better than gold because everyone wants it. Oil is the closest thing to free energy, maybe that’s why we are fighting for it, oil gives us unlimited mobility.

Before the automobile how did someone get around? Most did on foot, some had wagons or horses. Trains and boats were used for long distances. The train is limited to the track so people took horses with them on trains, boats are limited to waterways far from the homestead. The horse drawn wagon proved practical transportation, the whole family could be driven to town, later that wagon became the station wagon and the pickup truck. Compare a wagon-car-truck to a bicycle-horse-walking, you simply can’t carry much (75 pounds) and you are out in the elements. With a car you are in a heated cocoon with your stuff, you can live in your car and millions do and the car is off the ground unlike a tent.
Infernal Combustion Engines

Simpler times before the advent of the gasoline engine.

Early oil refineries producing kerosene used to dump gasoline into the nearby creek until someone figured it could be used to run a piston engine. Around 1900 gasoline entered the automotive fuel market, but there wasn’t enough of it – refineries couldn’t keep pace with demand, as cooking crude in a distillation tower only yielded 20% gasoline.  As refineries learned to crack crude with heat, so that a barrel of oil would yield 40% gasoline, then gasoline became the preferred fuel. In a very competitive marketplace gasoline was the winner, it had the high heat value, low cost, easily produced in large volumes, it was a liquid at room temperature, it won especially when the Venturi carburetor was invented. Gasoline is a liquid, it is pumped to the engine where it must be phase changed to a gas. No one knew how to do that efficiently until the Venturi carburator.
In a typical down draft carburetor, filtered air flows downward in a restricted diameter region called the Venturi, liquid fuel enters this down draft at this point, the lowest pressure region. The liquid fuel is vaporized then mixed with air on the way to the piston. Only a gas can burn, liquids and solids can NOT burn until they are gasified.  On the intake stroke of a four cycle engine, with the valves closed, the downward moving piston draws fuel and air toward itself, the mixture is then compressed and ignited. Work’s like a champ, the Venturi carburator was the device that made gasoline the king of fuels.

This device is simple and works amazingly well and was used for over a century until fuel injection and computer controlled combustion replaced it. But there is a problem, if there was ever a wasteful device it is the internal combustion engine because it is not thermally efficient. Piston engines waste 3/4 of the fuel. Most of the heat value of the fuel goes to the radiator or out the tail pipe.  But regardless of this high thermal loss, a piston engine is good at making lots of torque with a cheap inexpensive fuel. Even with many improvements the piston engine will always waste much heat.  The 2 to 3 ton vehicles of the 1950’s and 60’s, the glory days of American cars, could exist only because gasoline is ‘free’ energy – for a mere 25 cents you could buy a gallon of petrol that would take you 15 miles down the road.  Beats walking and you have status, the auto more than any other thing became an expression of ego.

Before America went car crazy, times were simple and quaint, the pace of traffic was with Nature. No deer was ever run over and killed by a buckboard wagon. In today’s world we joke about road kill, the freeways are highways of death for every kind of animal. It is estimated that there are about a million auto accidents with deer each year that kill a couple of hundred Americans, cause more than 10,000 personal injuries, and result in over a billion dollars in vehicle damage. The carnage is caused by the power of the gasoline engine which can propel a pile of metal at great speed. Deer, raccoons, beavers, armadillos – you name it killed in large numbers including lots of people. God help the slow moving animal, here comes ‘hell on wheels’, four tires rolling down the road not caring what they run over. What chance does a turtle or any other slow moving critter have crossing the road? What is needed to stop this insanity are wildlife corridors and fences that keep the wildlife off the roads and slower speeds and lighter vehicles.

There are over 250,000,000 registered cars, millions more not registered, America is drowning in cars, there are so many you can’t crush them fast enough. Every second of everyday a new car rolls off the assembly line. The problem with cars, besides the obvious pollution and noise, is that they move to fast and when they crash the energy involved is so great is crushes metal and destroys the tissue and bones of living things. Cars are out of sync with Nature and natural rhythms, but we need to move fast because time is money. Money as debt is the real problem, it has created this artificial need to move fast.
Bicycles are a very good alternative to autos, they are light and have low mass, accidents are rarely fatal unless a car is involved.  The wonderful irony is that at sprawling oil refinery complexes workers use bicycles because they are far safer around equipment and piping.  With a bike you quickly get in shape and change your eating habits, exercise drives the need for real nutrition.  Check out your local organic coop, you’ll see lot’s of bicyclists in for better quality food.
The American Cheap Oil Society Model – Doomed to Fail?
If you fly over America and look down you will see a horrific sight, patterns of row homes, put together like a jigsaw puzzle. Everyone got their own home and got screwed at the same time. The American model is a high energy model, it is also a high tax model, a highly individualistic tax slave model. The county loves your home, you are their cash cow. Schools and roads are paid for from taxes on these ‘homes’. Suburbia is central planned hell when gasoline becomes unavailable or if the state turns fascist, suburbia is rapidly becoming the prime hunting ground for DHS predators looking for a kill.

There is a big problem with this model – what happens when the economy slows down, jobs disappear, gas goes up in price in relation to income? The burbs were based on cheap oil. Without lots of cheap oil war becomes permanent policy and those homes are sitting ducks in a row for ‘terrorists’. What was promoted by developers and county tax planners as the American dream is in reality a nightmare of unsustainability.
A nation with sprawling house complexes went to war for oil and now is turning in on itself. The government backed into a corner with failed Neocon policies says America’s got terrorists. DHS storm troopers are now attacking suburbia in pre-planned false flags. The planners new central plan is to combat terrorism, they have collectively agreed upon the insane public policy of of using terror to manage their failed cheap oil model. The American people, who were victims of corporate and state greed, are now the targets of state terror, and they live in stick built homes that offer no protection from jack booted thugs. The situation is insane.
No cared to think about the possibility of a change in the availability of the cheap fuel needed to maintain this model. Back in the good days, when we still had freedom, we could saddle the horses to a wagon and go to town and buy supplies – maybe once a week. We made lists because going to town was a major undertaking. What cheap energy has created is a perversion of energy usage, we now run down to the supermarket for a stick of fake hydrogenated butter in our two ton V-8 powered urban assault vehicle behemoth SUV.
The End of Suburbia and Into the Zombie Apocalypse Dementia

If there is a modern meme that describes our desperation it is the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ meme. Sociologist will spend decades debating what is means, perhaps zombies are a metaphor for the end of the suburbia, the end of work tax slave car culture. Zombie are us, we are a culture of death who spread death, we are the end times zombies, strung out free energy junkies, dancing the death of corpses on the grave of liberty. We drive overpowered cars to the fast food joints and choke down greasy food that gives us heart disease, watch corporate propaganda news and programming television, bomb the crap out of anyone with petrol, and cheer the disease as the cure.
You can not bomb your way to prosperity, no matter how much death and destruction you rain down on the Middle East you will never fix the prosperity problem of a cheap oil car culture gone haywire. No one ever needed gasoline, no one ever needed to kill for oil. Gasoline engines are not even needed, humans are ingenious and can invent any kind of transportation, we could of built our culture on electric cars. Imagine is we spent the last hundred years perfecting the electric vehicle and battery technology? Americans are out of their damn minds with petrol powered cars and it is no surprise to see the entire culture going over the cliff into oblivion.