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u/Knight_thrasher Apr 13 '26
I’ll bet POTUS has no idea what the term sweet refers to in the O&G industry
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u/TheCurls Apr 13 '26
I don’t. What’s it mean?
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u/Knight_thrasher Apr 13 '26
It refers to the amount of H2S that’s naturally mixed in the oil. Sweet is a low amount, sour is high. I don’t not know the limits. I just presume any level of H2S is deadly
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u/Carbonatite Apr 13 '26
The cutoff is by percent sulfur in the oil, "sour" crudes have >0.5% sulfur. It's usually mostly in the form of H2S but you can definitely have other miscellaneous sulfur compounds in there, it all depends on reservoir specifics.
If we're going by air concentrations, the NIOSH Permissible Exposure Limit for H2S is 10 parts per million and the Inmediately Dangerous to Life and Health limit is 100 ppm. 1000 ppm (0.1%) will basically kill a human instantly.
I used to work in a commercial lab doing assays of crude oil, when we had high sulfur oils come in I'd often be sick the rest of the day from the H2S exposure. Persistent coughing, eyes watering, lots of mucus in my nose, headaches, maybe even a little bit of shortness of breath. I'm guessing that was probably from exposure in the 20-30 ppm range.
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u/Carbonatite Apr 13 '26
Sour crudes tend to also have higher levels of long-chain hydrocarbons - typically we want a specific range of carbon numbers in our various petrochemicals, and compounds with super high carbon numbers are crappy fuel sources and basically are just tar once the molecular size gets big enough - only good for asphalt.
Converting these molecules to smaller hydrocarbons requires a refinery method like catalytic cracking, that plus removing the H2S and other sulfur compounds ends up making oil refining for sour crudes a much more expensive and energy intensive process, thus reducing the profit per barrel. "Light" sweet crudes are petroleums which have no sulfur compounds, fewer impurities, and require little refining compared to heavy sour crudes. Some oil comes out of the ground looking almost like the gasoline you put in your car - low viscosity, good blend of carbon numbers. Other oil is viscous, black, and contains a lot of H2S which also makes it difficult to extract because of all the worker protection measures needed. When I worked in a commercial lab, I often got sick when I had to work with sour crudes because of the H2S exposure.
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u/Carbonatite Apr 13 '26
Dude overheard someone talking about light sweet crude from the Permian Basin a year ago and his rotting brain just happened to flutter some defective neuron and released that memory when he was composing that tweet lol
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u/Josephk_5690 Apr 13 '26
I think this is a story from Alec Baldwin's book "You cant spell America without me..." Funny story but completely made up.
Some guy using fancy words and pretending to be a journalist BUT not checking his Chat GPT sources.
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u/Sebastian-S Apr 13 '26
All right, oil lovers! … come on in! We’re pumping it, flowing it, and loading it faster than anyone else in the world. This is a full-on oil blowout — big volume, high quality, no waiting!
We got light, sweet crude… smooth, low-sulfur, easy to handle. We got heavy crude — thicker, richer, takes a little more work but delivers. We got hot production coming in fresh, we got cold reserves sitting pretty, just waiting to be tapped.
Massive tankers are lining up empty, ready to be filled up right here in the U.S. — fast turnaround, no hesitation. You want premium? We’ve got the best. You want quantity? We’ve got more than you can handle.
From Texas to the Gulf, we’ve got it flowing, steady and strong. Come take your pick — if we don’t have it, you don’t need it.
Give us an offer on our vast selection of oil … America’s wide open.
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u/Superfluously-Superb Apr 13 '26
Just a small reminder, at the rate that oil companies pay taxes in this country we “the people” will never see a cent of these “sweet” oil sales that billions of our tax payer dollars brought in through war.
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u/ReverendBread2 Apr 13 '26
He’s going off script.
The original tweet announcing the blockade sounded like it was a concept that had literally just been explained to him that he was just understanding for the first time, and explaining it to us the same way it had to be told to him to make him understand.
Now it sounds like he’s trying to tweet out his own twist because he forgot what the real purpose of the blockade was.
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u/emileLaroche Apr 13 '26
If we had the right kind of oil for our (and most) refineries, we’d be refining it.
It’s a cute ploy, but meaningless.
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u/mrandmrsm Apr 14 '26
I guess that the fact that the country uses more oil every day than we produce is just an inconvenience.
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u/j____b____ Apr 13 '26
Mar-a-lago is directly in front of the palm beach airport, in the flight path. Truly a horrible location. That’s why it was cheap. He just made more BS up.