[PortlandMEnerd]

You're missing many other ways how we (America) subside driving I.E. how much of our armed forces (especially the Navy) have been built out and utilized post WWII to ensure a steady stream of oil.

On a side note, that would be an interesting PhD dissertation - figuring out the actual cost of America's car-centric lifestyle broken down locally, state and nationally.

[hollerith]

Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil for itself.

The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now. Everyone in the industry says it is only a matter of time before the US will be able to produce all the oil the US needs. Whether that happens next year or 5 years from now depends on pricing and production decisions made by the OPEC producers.

I wouldn't be surprised if in 8 or 10 years the US will be in a position to guarantee a steady supply of oil to one of its strategic partners: the UK or Japan, say.

But this has thread has gotten off track because like grandparent already pointed out, Amtrak run on oil, too. I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables

[gumby]

> Some good news for you then: the US no longer needs a navy to ensure a steady stream of oil. The combination of the US and Canada has been producing all the oil the combination needs for a year or 2 now.

There's more to it than that.

first, oil is a commodity product traded around the world, so, say, if Indonesian (offshore) oilfields go offline, china will simply buy from the saudis, which will drive up the price of Saudi oil and encourage US producers to export instead. Now rising price encourages local production, but most of it can't be switched on and off in a instant.

And in fact they already both import and export; for example tar sands "oil" from Canada is removed with a shovel, not a pipe. Refining it is very expensive (and energy demanding) so only gets mined when the price of oil is high enough to justify it. Currently the US exports about as much oil as it imports.

Lots of great stats on this topic from the Energy Information Administration (though some of the important statistics stopped being collected last year, alas). Here is the petroleum import & export page: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

[hollerith]

What you write is relevant to the price of oil, which is a tangent from what we were talking about, namely, ensuring a supply of oil in chaotic circumstances, e.g., closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is itself a tangent from the original topic of Amtrak versus highways (since as GGGP already pointed out, Amtrak runs on oil, too).

But OK, let's talk about price. There's probably a 100 years worth of 'tight' oil just in Texas that can be produced for the price oil currently sells for. In other words, the cost of fracking that oil has decreased a lot. (And that oil is easier to refine than the stuff that comes from Saudi Arabia.)

[Reason077]

> "I suppose your reply to that is that it is easier to convert Amtrak to renewables than to convert the highway system to renewables"

It's probably the other way around. The highways (ie: cars and trucks) will gradually convert to electric in the coming decades as the vehicle fleet is replaced and old equipment is retired.

On the other hand, electrifying long-distance rail requires a lot of very expensive infrastructure investment. Battery electric technology may mean that cost comes down, however (perhaps you only need wires on intermittent sections of track).

[adrianN]

Trains are one of the few applications where hydrogen fuel cells make more sense that batteries, or so I've heard.

[CalRobert]

Not to mention that drivers are the leading cause of death for kids in the US, and we've completely blinded ourselves to this public health emergency.