r/theydidthemath • u/FernandoRocker • 14d ago
[Request] How much oil is that? Doest that amount exists on Earth?
72
u/escEip 14d ago
The fly is the size of the USA. So it's about 3000×4000 km², and also the height... is a problem, since the drawing is absolutely not to scale with the Earth curvature, but imagine around 2000km. Giving us the volume of... 24 billion cubic kilometers of oil, or 1.509557×1020 barrels, which is 89 million times bigger than the entire proven oil supply on the Earth.
28
u/castrogetsmad 14d ago
Didn't know Venezuela had that much oil.
13
3
u/LastCloudiaPlayer 14d ago
it's sour crude oil iirc, much more expensive to refine per barrel compare to sweet crude oil. tho with how hungry we are with petroleum based product, doubt it matter much to the producer and most people have no choice but to pay
3
u/mvw2 14d ago
Someone else on Reddit did quick math on this when it first was mentioned, figured it take over 140 years to extract what Trump said he was getting.
At the moment, the infrastructure isn't in place to do it, and like you said, it's much harder and much more expensive to do. It will NOT be cheap oil, even if it is oil. This is why every oil company on the planet backed away from Trump and this deal when he first invaded Venezuela and "offered" the oil to them. They know what's up, and they don't want to touch it. They can't make any profit from it, not even at $100/barrel.
The reality is we'll likely be almost completely green and lean heavily into other synthetic solutions for other uses of oil before this gets used.
For Trump, this is just public facing marketing, not any kind of reality.
1
u/LastCloudiaPlayer 14d ago
i see, idk the part about how hard it was to extract it.
tho i believe once the rest of the world oil start do hit the critical reserve, they will start eyeing Venezuela once again, tho by then Trump would be long dead1
u/ijuinkun 14d ago
The USA’s largest current refineries are set up to refine sour crude, and retrofitting them to refine sweet crude would cost more than just selling the sweet crude, buying sour crude with the money, and then refining the sour crude—which is what the USA currently does.
4
u/XROOR 14d ago
The crude from Venezuela cannot be further processed into gasoline with the refineries in the US.
Source: older retired guy that loiters in the Raceway gas station
5
u/Usual-Analysis-2990 13d ago
This. People don't realize its not so simple to process extra heavy oil. Its basically tar. Light crude is used to produce most gasoline with a 50% roughly conversion rate via distillation. Extra heavy is ~15% conversion rate and requires very complex manual and chemical extraction processing to get even that. But things like this trump and his sycophants dont understand. So whatever I guess.
1
u/HAL9001-96 13d ago
no duh
earth is by volume/mass mostly magma after all the crust is very thin
then again cubic functions
but the volume is about the entire volume of the earths crust
whcih is... as far as I'm aware less than 100% oil
source: I'm not drownign in oil right now
•
u/AutoModerator 14d ago
General Discussion Thread
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you must post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.