Hey, great news! I just inherited a rather sizable oil field, complete with extraction infrastructure (this is a lie)!
But I am unusually foresightful (another lie) and don’t think gasoline has much of a future anymore, owing to improvements in electric cars and increasingly popular proposals to ban most applications of the internal combustion engine within my lifetime. By some estimates, about half of my black gold is distilled into gasoline and a significant part of the rest becomes diesel and other fuel oils. My crude is looking increasingly less lucrative (this is probably a far darker outlook than reality). Visionary me is wondering what my options are to get ahead of inheriting little more than a polluted hunk of land and finding a better use for my new-found mineral wealth.
So what am I to do? Since I assume it matters what sort of goo I’m extracting, let’s assume my fields are optimal for producing respectable quantities of gasoline & similar products. Is that good for anything else not intended as fuel?
You can use anything that contains carbon as the raw material to make plastics. There might be some sorts of oil that are easier to use than others (I’m not sure how variable petroleum is), but at worst, that just means that you’ll be selling your stuff at a slightly lower price than the premium would fetch.
Broadly speaking, just a few categories: fuels (liquid or gaseous) – probably the first thing people think of; waxes; lubricants; tars and asphalts; and “petrochemicals”, the assorted organic chemicals that are feedstocks for lots of other industrial products, like plastics, agrochems (fertilizers and pesticides), solvents, glues, and about a jillion other things.
Eliminate petroleum-based fuels from the economy and you eliminate about 85% of the current demand for crude oil, but the other 15 percent would still exist.
I think you’re looking at the wrong part of the production line. Oil wells do not produce gasoline or aviation fuel or plastics or fertilizer. Oil wells produce crude oil. They then sell the crude oil to refineries that turn the crude oil into other marketable products.
So when you inherit your oil well, you’re going to just sell your crude oil to refineries. Sell it to whichever one pays you the best price. But they’re all going to be paying pretty much the same price.
My Dad died in 1978, a couple years ago a landman located me to tell me I was heir to a small percentage of mineral rights on 10,000 acres in the middle of the Alpine High,potentially one of the biggest oil and gas discoveries of our time. Here’s the kicker, my % is part of a big Trust my Dad invested in and I do nothing, all decisions are made by the Trust, and, hopefully in 2018, they’ll just mail me a check every month. In real life the Big Oil Companies are going to build big refineries out there in West Texas far from Hurricane Harvey, they’re going to build a company town for 50,000 workers, they’ve already built a pipeline to Mexico and have major pipe and rail lines planned going to all 3 coasts to export natural gas and refined products. Additionally Apache and Exxon are building offshore LPG loading terminals in the Gulf to load the huge Chinamax tankers China widened the Panama Canal for, allowing us to export all the gas we can produce to China. Because we are humans we’re going to burn every drop and lump and squirt of carbon there is on this planet, I don’t think that can be changed. And it’s weird that I’ll profit from it whether it’s for good or for ill, and weird to think I have no say in it. Neither does anybody else.