Ukraine struck Russia’s largest oil refinery, located in the city of Omsk, on Monday, marking what its forces say was its furthest-ever drone attack in the war.
The Omsk facility, which processes about 21 million tons of oil a year, is in Western Siberia and about 1,700 miles from Ukrainian territory — roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Houston.
We need some research into how effective drone strikes against refineries are to stop climate change. Are they a net gain in carbon emissions, considering the cost of manufacture and the prevented emissions?
Gotta make it worse.
There’s the emissions from while it’s on fire plus some of the chemicals in it are worse after being burned like that then in regular emissions. Or become other environmental issues on their own once released/burned.
Then the emissions from building a new one.
It’s so much better to just shut it down because no one needs it than blow them up
Then the emissions from building a new one.
In Russia’s case, depending on how things go, that many not apply all that much.
If things go far enough it might lead to Ukraine striking construction sites of oil refineries. Still not great, but much less worse than an actual running refinery.
You need to cut demand. If the price goes up, refineries are just build elsewhere.
In many cases it’s cheaper to replace it with green alternatives. The refineries have competition from windmills, solar plants, etc. It’s not a given that new refineries will fill the gap in the market that destroyed refineries leave.
I do expect the destruction of refineries to be more positive for the climate than if they had continued producing. Especially if you factor in the demand for reliable supply and strategic availability of energy.
There can be demand destruction from high prices
This. See how the hormuz crisis has caused many to pivot to renewables.
Raise the price enough, and the sold amount will drop. Also, people/industry will begin to look for alternatives.
Yes, there’s even a name for this: demand destruction.
Perhaps, but you can’t tell me Russia can build them faster than Ukraine can destroy them. And in the meantime it means millions of fewer barrels worth of greenhouse gas emissions.
drones are cheap.
Maybe in the past but there’s more alternatives now.
Lmao, no.
And the greatest and second largest army of the world, didn’t even notice a few foreign drones traveling 1700 miles across their land! I wonder who’s gonna fall out of a window for this.
Ukraine has been systematically destroying all air defense and radars. What remains is now around Moscow and Putin’s home. Even if detected, stopping the drones without defense is hard.
Put in Put out
Im a little out of the loop, why are they suddenly able to do this now? What changed in their capabilities?
Ukraine has developed very impressive drone technology in a very short time. It is expected that multiple nations will actually try to make deals to acquire Ukrainian drones at the current NATO summit because they are so good now. So Ukraine is no longer dependent on others to sell them drones. They‘re selling them now.
For example, these drones can use terrain as guidance, so GPS isn’t required for navigation. This also allows them to fly at a very low altitude, avoiding Russian air defense. They’re also very resistant to jamming and have advanced autonomous capabilities, so they can “finish the job” on their own if the link to their operator is severed. Also, they’re very cheap, so it’s possible to overwhelm Russian defenses by swarming them.
In summary, they‘ve developed incredible killing machines that are able to act autonomously, which is very good for them right now but probably not very good for humanity in the long run.
probably not very good for humanity in the long run.
Eh. C’est la vie. We had a good run.
There was a Black Mirror episode featuring the Boston Dynamics “Dog” robot thing with a machine gun on it, and hunting people down, they are terrifying. It’s like being hunted by a zombie tbag doesn’t eat or sleep or get tired and won’t stop.
Flying drones are a whole new level of scary beyond that.
Smart countries are scrambling to buy Ukraine cheap effective next-generation drone warfare weapons. This is developing into a very lucrative market for them.
Its called adapting to new situation
From what I read a few days ago one of the conditions for US aid under biden was that Ukraine make no strikes on russian soil. When trump pulled all the aid to Ukraine it was a huge blow, but also took the leash off.
After that all they had in their way was developing the actual drones and techniques to make the strikes, as well as planning them.
As far as I know, the condition was that US (nor NATO) weapons can’t be used on attacks to Russian soil. That’s one part why Ukraine has basically done a world record speedrun on native drone production. No one has (nor can) deny them from using their own weapons how they see fit.
Removing stupid limitations on how they can hit back has helped, but that was mostly for short(ish) range missiles.
They’ve been specifically targeting Russian Air defenses for awhile now forcing them to spread what little they do have even more. Since NATO have been pussies about providing them long range precision munitions they’ve had to spend time to develop their own cruise missiles like the Neptune and Flamingo the latter of which has entered regular production and has a range of 3000km.
Ukraine is now the premier world class developer of advanced drone warfare equipment and counter electronic jamming systems.
Wanna know too
The article says that they’re jet launched.
That makes sense, they’re flying sorties over Siberia to launch drones in the last mile.
TIL Siberia is way bigger than I expected. I knew it was big, but it looks like it’s more than half of Russian landmass. It can’t all be the climate I’m picturing, right? Like it borders Kazakhstan, so I figure at least part of it has to have hot summers
Though is that comparison corrected for the projection? Texas is farther south than Siberia and with the usual projection used, you can only compare the sizes of things at the same latitude. It’s the same thing that makes Greenland look as big as Africa when it’s closer to the size of South Africa.
Though is that comparison corrected for the projection?
Yes. Check it out here: https://truesize.net/en/
lol, you got me, that’s what twigged it for me- I figured Siberia would start further east of Ukraine than Texas is of California
Siberia is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to Siberia.
Still fits at least twice into Texas! /s
That is for the infinite universe, not for finite Siberia. However, the largeness of Siberia is much better at demonstrating the concept of infinite than an actually infinite land mass.
Well, damn. You need to find a closer chemist.
Siberia is actually 3/4ths of Russia’s landmass. The northern parts are taiga, which are giant uninterrupted forests. The shores of the Arctic Ocean are mostly tundra. In the southern parts the taiga gives way to steppes.
In the northern parts the climate has warm but quite short summers and long cold winters. In the southern part, where most of the population lives, they have the same climate as southern Canada/New England just less humid. The Western parts are also covered by warm winds that originate from the Middle East and hence have higher temperatures than their more Eastern areas. For reference in Novosibirsk, which is the largest city the average yearly summer temperatures reach 25 degrees Celsius but temperatures can also spike to as high as 38 degrees.
So yeah Siberia is not all some barren tundra as most people imagine.
“Do you know how many time zones they have?” “Uh, yessir. Uh, four … uh, no sir. I never really studied that up.” “Eleven.” “Eleven. It’s not even funny.” “Eleven.” “Eleven. That’s, that’s ridiculous.” “Eleven.”
I imagine a huge game of whack-a-mole between Russia and Ukraine. Russia moving air defenses trying to anticipate Ukrainian strikes, and increasingly failing.
You can move air defenses but you can’t move the refineries, bridges and other infrastructure
Pretty sure they didn’t fly ‘all’ the way there ;)
In this case, no, they were on jets. But some drones can. The MQ-9 “Reaper” drone has a 1200 mile range. That’s not just a short run.
they were on jets
Is that confirmed? Their FP-5 drone has a 1900 mile range, so it wouldn’t exactly need the assistance of being fired from a jet for extended range capability. I don’t really know what the benefit would be considering the north and eastern border is being controlled by Russia atm. I guess it may just be safer to fire it from a jet than doing a shoot and scoot.
From the article:
Denys Shtilierman, the chief designer of Ukrainian munitions firm Fire Point, wrote on X on Monday that a new variant of his company’s FP-1 drone was involved in the strike.
The FP-1 is one of Ukraine’s most prominent long-range one-way attack drones. The fixed-wing platform typically carries a payload of up to 60 kg, with an initial range of 1,000 miles, later extended to 1,600 miles.
Shtilierman, however, said on Monday that the jet-launched drone’s latest version can fly 2,110 miles, easily eclipsing the distance between Ukraine and Omsk.
The last paragraph was what I was getting at, given that the FP-1 range is just a tad short.
Ahh, that makes more sense. I figured they were using the fp-5 just for the range. Makes sense firing the fp-1 from the air would add a bit of range though, guess you wouldn’t have to fight to gain altitude.
Not all drones are fpv quadcopters.
I am fully aware of that. :)
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Probably the smilies. The headline does say “drones flew all the way to Siberia,” so it would be reasonable for the reader to assume the drones made the trip themselves without more information.
