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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (69422)	5/22/2008 8:21:05 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

It would depend on the situation. Crudes vary from bituminous goop to natural gasoline and into the gases topping out at methane. <>>The proportions of various distillates can be varied<< How much leeway is there? What are the tradeoffs? If your current ratio of gasoline/(diesel +heating oil) is 47%/23%, can you go to 35%/35% or even further? > Google must be full of information on crude oil types, refining processes, catalytic cracking, hydrogenation etc. I haven't looked. The less processing that's required, the cheaper it is. When gasoline was in high demand relative to other distillates, it was worth doing a lot of processing to get to the lighter fractions. Now that diesel is all the rage, the value of various crude oils and processing methods will have changed to emphasize diesel. If electric vehicles become all the rage, refineries will focus on power station fuel. Without the profit from transport fuels, oil exploration and production would become less profitable and nuclear reactors would take over, or mini wind turbines in back yards, or photo voltaics etc. Mqurice