You asked a good question when you asked if all this was expensive.
You should consider all stakeholders in that question, the planet as well as us, because it's the planet paying the ultimate price, in terms of temperature rise, and that is the price which is unacceptable, because the cost of temperature damage to Earth becomes our cost. What do you think was the cost of damage by climate change in the US last year? This should be taken into account, including projections of future damage expected, using those temperature cost calculations like the one I published, not long ago.
If you do that then you will find no way is it affordable, to carry on extracting.
There is more than one way to work out this unaffordability, because we are talking about a closed system, no new oil is being created at a rate that means anything to us, systemically we can approach the question of cost to the planet from many directions, it doesn't matter which, they all end with the same conclusion - we can't afford it.
Here is the simplest way to see it, imho:
It took billions of years of solar energy to create that oil.
If you look at the total heating power of the sun on Earth it is truly stupendous, 1KW of heating per square metre, when it lands on a surface which heats, instead of doing anything creative with it.
Creative means plant mass, which obviously creates all the energy of life, including oil eventually, after billions of years, but it can also mean solar panel surface area, which again can do something creative with the energy, converting it to things other than heat. More on that later.
Sticking to oil for now, the result of absorbing that stupendous amount of energy, for billions of years, has to be a reduction of temperature.
If it had not been created, the temperature would be much higher.
When we take oil or gas out of the ground, and burn it, what we are doing is undoing what nature did, over billions of years, we are throwing a lot of that energy which was absorbed in the creation of the material, back out to the planet.
The only part that doesn't go to heat is the pollution materials, but those make the heat rise even worse, acting as multipliers in the air, causing greenhouse effects.
If we didn't use the oil, or gas, or whatever we extracted the energy from, we would have none of the temperature rise.
You identified many of the processes involved in refinement of the oil, but which of those did you consider have temperature impact to the planet?
By financial cost to us, or financial investors, you might say the cost was the cost of labor, the cost of the energy to power the equipments, you might even throw in the cost of manufacturing the equipments.
But how much heat energy was generated?
It took billions of years of solar energy at 1KWhr per square metre of solar energy on ancient forests to create even that 1L of fuel you mention.
How much did we get back out?
How much is in the pollution materials generated when we used the oil?
Put those two together, and subtract them from billions of years of solar energy at 1KWhr per square metre of forest, and you should see it doesn't make much difference, its still an awful lot of heat energy, liberated back to the planet, an incalculable amount, actually, all we can say is it's a heck of a lot.
This is why we can't afford to use oil, we never could.
Do a similar analysis on the production of hydrogen from solar by electrolysis and you'll find its the opposite, because in this case, burning hydrogen either directly or by fuel cell, results in reduction of temperature in the first place, before we consume it.
So whatever remains in storage stays as temperature impulse removed from the planet.
We are not talking about billions of years to create hydrogen either, it is created in terms of minutes, seconds, hours, days, etc, not billions of years.
We can undo the damage done by oil extraction in terms of temperature impulse, even quicker than the rate we did the damage.
If we equipped all humanity with domestic and community solar with hydrogen backup, we would be equipped in maybe one or two years, and we would have replaced all the energy thrown to heat in the 150 or so years we've used fossil fuels, in maybe 40 years of hydrogen production, supplying the hydrogen needed by all transportation including all aerospace, throughout that time.
There would be a natural tendency to accumulate this, for the same reason we tend to accumulate energy stores for our own metabolism needs, in the form of money, because money is energy, always, physically, and we can never know our exact enetgy requirements in advance, we never know the future, hence why we save.
Notice all living things are motivated to do this, this is the free energy principle of all of life. It's what motivates us, and even Ai at the deepest level.
The hydrogen accumulated would directly correspond to temperature decrease, we would see this confirmed within the first year of widespread hydrogen production from solar.
A catch to all of this is finance.
Profit is actually an energy con done on the planet.
The planet is the one continuously robbed of energy resources, and it responds, as explained, by temperature rise.
Every profitable transaction has to correspond to an amount of energy extracted from the planet and therefore an amount of temperature rise.
This is not compatible with a create from solar scenario, we can't have a create by solar scenario which is based on profit, it just isn't possible.
Money issued as debt is money that comes with a condition that profit has to be made, in return for receiving it. In other words it isn't given for nothing.
But the energy of solar is, it was given for nothing, the sun asked nothing in return for it, we cannot even force the sun to take anything in return for it.
We can't make the sun work at profit, no matter what we try to do, it just won't do it, it gives what it gives, every KWhr, for free.
And this is the biggest hurdle for humanities acceptance and correct valuation of solar, this is the one thing that makes everybody consistently undervalue it, because it breaks the old rule that no thing should come for nothing, there is no such thing as a free lunch, yada yada.
Well there it is, the proof that everything we know was created for free, donated to us for free, this is the actual reality, and it's a lie told to us that it isn't for free, a lie told by those imposing scarcity on us.
It might have been useful in history to run society like that, who cares. What we should care about is that here is the proof that any scarcity imposed on us now is unnecessary, because by enriching all, we really do enrich all, this is what needs to be done to start living creatively as a species.
I've shown in many stories why solar indexed stimulus has to be issued to enable the real power of solar, now that we have all the technology to use it to replace all fossil fuels, not just for our use, but for the use of nature.
Nature used it as a kind of temperature heatsink.
We removed that heatsink by consuming it.
Now we can replace the heatsink with hydrogen.
But we have to have the money to do it, money is how the benefits of it get to all, and all need that benefit to put their / our own efforts towards it.
It has to be for free, because the energy is for free.
Whilst it isn't done, money has to devalue, because actually solar is still the only energy source increasing in availability, despite it being still unmonetised.
So money only representing extracted energy has to devalue.
Sorry if that sounds off topic, but hopefully you see it isn't, it's all part of the same system, we can't really just talk about parts of it, the cost to the planet is cost to us all, this is how we need to think, to move on from ever destroying, ever heating, to ever creating, ever cooling.
Nature insists, we should recognise, the penalty for carrying on the energy con is armageddon.
The proof we can do without oil was seen during covid.
How can something we really need ever go negative priced?
The answer to that question is much deeper than the usual explanation, that it was just a supply chain hiccup.
It wasn't, or we would have seen more hiccups than just one, just when massive free money was issued, the only time in history.