I saw this recently at an exhibition about plastics. The distilling process suggested to me that you cannot get plastics (naphtha is the precursor) from oil in a world that does not also use Diesel and gasoline etc as fuels. Because they are all produced at the same time and are by products of each other.
Does anyone know if it is potentially possible to increase the yield of naphtha if there is no (or low) need for fossil fuels?
There's lots of ways of shifting the ratios of produced materials and converting them into each other, so it's mostly a question of cost (and cost distribution across products), not of reduced demand making other products entirely unavailable.
Absolutely yes, Gasoline is the most demanded product so their production chains are built around re-processing components into as much additional gasoline as possible.
Residual products from oil are a convenient feedstock for plastic but it can be made from other sources. Corn is a good example.
If we stopped using gas/diesel/jet fuel and stopped refining oil completely the biggest tertiary products the world would miss out on are vaseline and petroleum based fishing lures
The gist is that if we decide that we need any fixed amount of any of the oil products, that product becomes expensive and the remaining products become inexpensive byproducts of its production.
Without fossil fuels, tens of millions of people will starve to death. Fossil fuels are here to stay precisely because no other energy source exists that is as energy dense, portable, safe, and cost-effective. Everything else is just hype and salesmanship.
What is the basis for this extraordinary assertion?
Without adaptation, climate change could depress growth in global agriculture yields up to 30 percent by 2050. That's 2 billion dead. By 2100 it could be more.
With some really clever policy it could be less, but there is no evidence of clever policy from anyone.
> our lineage of argumentation is non-conclusive as 30% change doesn't equate 2 billion death
World's population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. We grow enough food for 10 billion. Climate models say there will be 30% less food, so only enough to feed 7 billion.
These numbers are common knowledge, none of them are disputed. [1] Put 2 and 2 together.
What will happen to the 3 billion people that have nothing to eat?
The people is the impoverished global south can feed extra 1 billion by getting rid of animals, but then what?
Are the other 2 billion going to learn photosynthesis? Is the developed world going to give up food?
Put forward an actual counter argument, provide numbers, back them up with expert opinions.
The most defining quality of fossil fuels is that they are precisely not here to stay, even if you want to grant that they are otherwise unimpeachable.
Everything not-fossil-fuel is safer by orders of magnitude. A PV panel will output around as much energy per kg as fossil fuel burnt for electricity in a month. PV or wind are about half the price of coal or gas per kWh.
The only place fossil fuels win is power density, but that's not a deal breaker compared to the downsides.
Yes, we should be demanding alternatives to all petrochemicals. It seems that we take for granted that plastics are just a fact of life now but this is a big reason -- along with other more popular ones like microplastic pollution, ocean wildlife destruction etc. -- that we should move away from them where possible.
Because there are shorter and longer hydrocarbons in the oil as well. Most of the longer hydrocarbons can be cracked apart, but the shorter (both liquid and gaseous) and extremely long (e.g. tar, bunker fuel, ...) hydrocarbons will still be present and need to be dealt with.
Plastics are made chaining small molecules into long chains. The property of the plastic deepens on the initial small molecule, how many of them you chain and other stuff.
Also, if the initial molecule has only two "sticky" points and form a linear chain, or has three or more "sticky" points and then form a net of interlocked chains. Or something in between.
Also depending on what is in the initial molecule, the chain may be like a single smooth rope, or have some dangling parts like a Christmas light line.
And you can also mix two or more initial molecules, and there are a few methods to make them "sticky", and ...
In particular, the size and shape of the initial molecule is very important. You want a very specific one to get the properties of each plastic, not a mix random chemical stuff.
Back to oil... Oil has a mix of hydrocarbons of very different sizes and shapes. Some are linear, some have side chains, some have cycles. (This differences are also important if you want to use them as fuel or lubricant.)
To make plastic you must add two "sticky" points to the hydrocarbons, changing some part of them, for example adding oxygen or nitrogen. But before that, you must select the correct length and shape of the hydrocarbon.
To select the length and shape of the hydrocarbon, the fist step is to boil it, and let the vapor condensate at different temperatures. The short hydrocarbons have a low boiling point and the long hydrocarbons have a high boiling point. Then each part is further proceed and used as a different kind of fuel or for different chemical reactions (to make plastic and other stuff).
I wish they did a better job at educating the public about the energy cost & pollution cost of moving all this gas around in this process.
Climate deniers have done a great job of making the public aware of all the externalities of battery electric vehicles while making the public think gasoline magically appears at the gas station with no expensive/dirty/high energy supply chain to get it there.
This is another case where the deniers are so much better at PR & Messaging that they win even when they're wrong/lying. Similar to things like anti-vaxxers.
And on the other side of that coin there is god knows how much residential and industrial diesel usage that could instead be nat-gas but isn't because no pipelines so it just gets wasted by flaring it at the well (which is downright terrible for the environment).
The perfect is the enemy of the "good enough for the next 5yr".
There's actually some companies that are making use of this "waste"! For example, you can take geo-agnostic computation (like crypto mining) with small bandwidth requirements and move it to literally be on-site. Then you power it with generators that are fed the natural gas instead of flaring it.
This can partially displace computation that otherwise would have used up higher-cost energy.
See [0] for the best example of this that I'm aware of. Section titled "How Bitcoin Uses Otherwise-Wasted Energy".
I would argue that this specific use-case is still energy wasted all the same. Maybe it is even net negative given that it increases the difficulty for other energy wasting miners, even before considering other externalities.
New gas connections aren't permitted in some municipalities, and many areas only have 30% to 40% uptake rates for Natural Gas. The best days for Natural Gas are behind it imo.
Regardless, it's borderline criminal that they just waste it due to lack of transportation infrastructure when those BTUs could have done useful work and the demand must instead be made up with potentially dirtier fuels.
IMO, natural gas lines to homes are no longer a necessity. Better overall efficiency can be achieved by burning the gas at a power plant, sending electricity to the home, and using a heat pump to heat the home.
Similarly, induction stove tops are more efficient than cooking with gas and have other benefits such as being easier to clean.
We could do better in a few circumstances, but the idea of piping natural gas from the remote places where a lot of NA oil is produced often doesn't make economic sense and it is literally impossible to get a pipeline built in the US and Canada. This means eastern consumers import tankers of oil from nice places like Saudi and we ship even more by rail at terrible costs and environmental risk.
"Climate deniers" (whatever you put under that definition) don't think so, at least I never seen anyone stating that.
Climate change preachers though, tend to think "green energy" comes from the outlet magically appearing there. If we look at full cycle with making recycling the "green" vehicles, it may not be so green (or even green at all), but who would look that far - it doesn't make us feel so good about ourselves, does it?
And the anti-vaxx thing attached to your message left me a bit baffled how it is connected to context of the article.
Why is it necessary to add this religious stuff? You could have just made your point (which apparently is "somebody do something!!") It's pretty sad that this is the top comment
It's a fairly dumb comment intended purely for sneering and backslapping, but calling this sort of garbage out is against the rules despite the comment itself doing nothing to engender thoughtful discussion on the topic.
The most glaringly contradictory aspect of the comment is the suggestion that everyone-who-disagrees-with-me is an utter moron who thinks that gasoline "magically" arrives at gas stations, but somehow these mouth-breathing imbeciles who engage in such thinking would be swayed by more education from the government.
While this is interesting, what took me a minute to realize is that while the line about US gasoline being produced in the US is (presumably) true, it doesn’t explain why global oil prices tend to affect our gas prices. That line is about the refinery stage of the manufacturing pipeline.
Global oil prices affect our gas prices because global oil prices affect local oil prices (and gas it made from oil). Global oil prices affect local oil prices because oil is a (mostly) fungible [1] commodity and it's (mostly) easy to move around. If oil from Canada became more than a little bit cheaper than oil from Texas, the Texas refineries would buy Canadian oil and have it shipped down. The increased demand for Canadian oil and decreased demand for Texan oil would cause Canadian prices to go up and Texas prices to go down, until the difference between them was very close to the transportation costs. Likewise, if Canadian oil were more than a little more expensive than Texas oil, the Canadian refineries would start buying their oil from Texas, and the prices would equalize that way too. As it turns out, this is the same reason Gold (And silver and platinum and copper and so on) has very close to a single global price, except all of those things are even more fungible and even easier to move around, so there's even less regional variation in their price.
[1]: Fungible means that every barrel of oil is commercially equivalent. I say oil is mostly fungible because there's quite a bit of nuance in various grades of oil, but in broad strokes, you can make the same stuff from any grade of oil, it's just harder with some grades than others, which keeps price stability between the various grades - if one grade gets too expensive, the consumers of crude oil will make due with a different grade. Gold is more fungible - 14k gold is 14k gold. Dollar bills are fungible - you don't care which one the cashier gives you as change. Fine art is not at all fungible.
Eh, I just read about oil on the internet but my understanding is that oil is not at all fungible. Refineries are constructed and operated with specific grades of crude in mind. Though they can can process other grades with a few years of process tweaks, it comes with an efficiency (ie. profit) hit.
Our gulf coast refining capacity is built with heavy sour crude coming from Central and South America in mind, but most of our indigenously extracted oil is light sweet. It's more profitable to just trade for the crude our infrastructure is built for than to refine the wrong crude, but this does expose us to the global market prices.
This is mostly right, but it’s more a range of potential grades a refinery is set up for, but you can get to those grades by blending, in which case it could be cheaper to buy a heavy and light cargo to get to a medium grade than buy a medium grade cargo…
The feedback across years is still a short enough time periods for markets to adjust.
Oilfields generally last a long time as there is little incentive to drill a lot of holes and add hundreds of millions in equipment to empty one in 5 years or less. Instead companies extract oil across decades so when a new oil filed gets tapped regional prices shift, refineries adapt, until regional prices quickly match global ones long before the well is dry.
Fracking is something of an exception, but it’s still dependent on having refineries to process the stuff.
Except Canadian oil is in fact generally cheaper than Texas oil. There's a price differential there because it's difficult to ship oil out of Canada. Similarly there aren't enough export ports for US oil so US oil prices are lower than global oil prices.
That doesn't exactly explain it. Plenty of states in the oil business derive either significant tax revenue from it or subsidize it for local consumption. As far as I can tell, the US does neither (actually, it pays subsidies for the exploitation).
Prices of commodities are global if they can be shipped. Gold has only one price. There’s no difference in a Bitcoin price if it’s mined in the US versus abroad.
Not quite, there is a world price, but shipping and storage means that your local price can be different.
In agriculture we call it bias, and elevators post this price on the sign trying to get farmers to sell. It is understood when you bring in a load of corn they pay you the Chicago price minus the bias and the Chicago price is well known (rural radio stations report it every half hour), while the bias can be very different between two companies in the same small town. (In reality most corn is on a contract with prices set months before, but there is always a small percent not on contract)
Likewise, oil at the well is worth less than at the refinery, and the difference is about the shipping costs (though I suspect shipping is all contracted out and so you won't find the real difference anywhere)
I'm sure gold is the same, but I have less insight into that market.
When you actually sell/buy gold, it’s the same. Rather than being one bias price (due to one commodity form - like a bushel of corn ears), it also has the element of product/form and associated spread/premium/discount (depending on the type of transaction, location, local market forces, etc).
All buy prices generally will be lower than sell prices (hence spread), no matter what. Everyone needs to get enough of a percentage to make a transaction happen, after all. It’s not a charity.
Also for instance with Gold, raw gold dust or random blobs of unattributed melt will always sell at a discount compared to an authenticated coin or bar of the same purity (maybe as much as 10% or more), due to difficulty in figuring out it’s actual purity and ability to sell it on.
If someone is operating a mine/refinery, they can negotiate something better if they have a good long term track record, of course.
A easily validated coin or bar, for instance, might even be sellable same day to a retail customer, where dust or a random no name bar might require tracking down a wholesale buyer (and get a lower price) and require more time and work to validate - and have more risk for the middleman due to fraud or price slippage.
Some coins or bars will also not be in high demand at the moment, and require a larger spread to be worth it for a given buyer.
Certain high demand or standardized products will also be able to demand a premium (American eagles, or Canadian maple leafs, or whatever is in vogue now.). Sometimes as high as $75 or $100 above normal spot.
Standardized (and tracked/serialized) COMEX bars are used to set the market price, but are huge, and not something that folks can typically get value from by holding in their hand, as they need to always have a documented chain of custody or go through an expensive recertification.
So smaller amounts will also have a corresponding larger spread.
Same for all commodities. They are standardized, but that sets the baseline. Almost every actual individual product has some normal offset from it for whatever specific difference applies. That difference includes things like quality, transport/delivery costs from its current location, usability/marketability of that specific form, etc.
For example, nat gas prices in the US are usually cheaper than the price in Europe. For the last year, due to recent events, the price differential has been a lot bigger too.
on top of that, there are contracts. So Japan might pay a different price to Europe, but that might be because they bought a contract 12 months ago for today's price
That differential is mostly due to shipping and limited supply though. Creating and processing LNG is expensive, and there's limited worldwide infrastructure to make it.
Natural gas is not very portable in gas form. LNG so it can be shipped is kind of expensive on both sides, so having pipeline access is really important.
It will be wholly dependent on global oil prices even if refining stage had nothing to do with it. Just because oil producers have a choice of selling their oil at home or abroad, and refinery owners have choice of buying their inputs from local or overseas producers, and petrol station chains have a (rather limited and almost not used in practice) choice of buying the gas they sell, from local or overseas refiners too. Markets are global. You can only "disconnect" the prices by banning foreign trade in oil and oil products. But that wouldn't work out because you need both heavy and light crude to produce most refined product, and there's almost no heavy crude produced in US, and you need to sell excess light crude (which is by the way more expensive and rare in the world overall), somewhere.
Also, if your goal is reducing gas prices, disconnecting markets by banning foreign trade isn't an answer anyway, even if we ignore light/heavy crude problem. With significantly reduced prices, oil production will fall and eventually, imports will be needed again to provide necessary amounts for the market.
America already has by far cheapest gas of the developed countries. Reducing it even further won't make anyone much benefit.
The simplest answer is: if the price in, say, the EU is higher than in the US, there's an incentive for someone pumping oil in Texas to sell it in Europe rather than to a refinery in the US. If the price in the US rises to the same as EU (net of shipping) you might as well just sell it here.
Note that they said that our gasoline is produced in the US. It does not say that the oil used to make that gasoline was domestic too.
Even if the oil was also domestic, global oil prices would still have an effect on domestic oil (and thus gas) prices because that oil could get shipped overseas or stay local.
People often conflate an opportunity loss with a real loss. Almost all conversations about market prices include moments when this mistake enters the room. You didn't make it, but I can almost guarantee somebody would start acting like taking $2 as a price, when you could take $5 means you "lost $3" when what you suffer is an opportunity loss.
Long term pricing contracts, futures are about price stability and prediction. Predicating that there is a "better price" out there demands you not consider the long term consequences of seeking it and charging it.
Sometimes, It's better for everyone (yourself included) NOT to seek the highest spot rate price for something.
"I got $5 but I bankrupted my customer and now I can't get $1" is not in the end, a good move.
Refineries actually use a blend of different grade of oil for various products.
And many countries only produce a specific type of oil, which is why we import several types of raw oil even in the US and that affects our local prices.
The US imports <1% of its gasoline: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_a_epm0f_mbbl_a_cur.... (compare ~39M barrels of gasoline imported versus 3,477M barrels produced domestically). The US is in fact a net exporter of refined petroleum products, which means we (on net) buy crude oil to refine it in the country for other countries to use.
And our big refineries are often not in remote areas either.
If you look at the top 5 refineries[1] they're relatively near population centers in the hundreds of thousands to millions of people (ex. Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Houston), and 4 of them are a football field away from residential neighborhoods.
Refineries have cleaned up. 30 years ago the area 10 miles around stunk. They figured the EPA fines were a cost of business. However they have changed, and have cleaned up so that they never pay fines.
The above is about a specific refinery I know of. There are more than 100 in the US with different management.
The US uses Louisiana and Eastern Texas as the places that bare the burden of environmental contamination from oil refinement since they have fewer restrictions on pollution.
The #1 most horrifying thing I ever saw as a child was a tour through Monsanto's factory in Louisiana. It's where the company manufactures Roundup. .75 pounds of the stuff can kill an acre of vegetation. This place had thousands of huge barrels of the chemical. The right hurricane or tornado could send that crap flying everywhere for miles before it could get cleaned up, and the refinery is huddled up against the Mississippi river to boot.
It impresses me that even with all this mixing from various sources at various stages, the quality of the final output is consistently maintained.
How is a 'tragedy of the commons' situation prevented, where a supplier might be inventivised to skimp 'just a little' on quality, figuring it will average out downstream? Kind of how clipping and sweating would gradually debase physical coins. Is there actually a fair bit of variance that is adjusted for in your vehicle?
At some, or multiple points, each source is being monitored before it mixes with other sources. It would be a huge scandal if someone was mixing in adulterated gas.
A couple of weeks ago a number of motorists in New Zealand filling up at a particular gas station has water pumped in with the gasoline, causing engine problems. I did wonder at the time what could possibly have caused that!
> A couple of weeks ago a number of motorists in New Zealand filling up at a particular gas station has water pumped in with the gasoline, causing engine problems. I did wonder at the time what could possibly have caused that!
If I were to guess, someone didn't take care in getting the water pumped out after cleaning a tank.
This already happened across-the-board for all companies.
That's how we migrated from 95 and 100 octane ratings, and ratcheted down to 87 and 93. People gradually adjusted to the lower quality until the cars could go no further, and here we are.
Actually, just the opposite happened one day about 20 years ago.
There was an oil company that did something nobody had thought of in years, they actually made the gasoline better for a while. With promotional advertising they were legitimately claiming you would feel the difference after a tankful or two. The secret was they were simply supplying more than the minimum 87 & 93 octane ratings.
They really pulled a fast one there.
For a while.
Turns out that actually making the product better can even be accomplished in a deceptive way after all.
They're gone now, assimilated by a larger company that would never think of such a thing.
Lower octane rating isn't really "lower quality." We invented better engines that run just as well on lower octane fuel and then stopped wasting resources producing high octane fuel. Putting higher octane fuel in your car does absolutely nothing unless you have a specialty engine.
Lots of these overall better engines are just highly improved fuel-injected V-8's. Quite run-of-the-mill today.
Never a specialty to me, when I was learning to drive the most common choices were between small-block V-8's and big-block V-8's.
I think we can all be confident that serious resources did not go unwasted, especially after the returns made it to the shareholders of the oil companies.
A modern V8 is absolutely fine with lower octane fuel. Massive improvements in fuel atomization, compression chamber shape, ignition timing, valve timing, air routing, cooling, basically literally everything about a combustion engine means that we can run a 5 litre V8 with an 11:1 compression ratio on 87 and make ungodly amounts of power.
The reduction in required octane is directly related to the fact that old V8s that had garbage compression ratios and horrible fueling got muzzled by emissions regulations so they couldn't compensate for their mediocre engineering by just dumping extra fuel into the process. All those things listed above that are meant to improve resistance to knock ALSO bring way more efficiency, and the interesting thing about gas engines is that higher efficiency often means the specific output is boosted as well.
Higher octane ONLY means a higher resistance to knocking. If your car isn't fighting knocking already, that won't improve anything. We could reduce the octane we require and get somewhat cheaper gas, but it would most likely also reduce the power output of the engine (fine nowadays) and the fuel economy (very not fine for most people).
Driving a truck up a hill is not a normal use case. Driving a luxury car is not normal. Driving a sports car is not normal. These are all specialty vehicles.
Normal cars do not need high octane fuel. Normal cars do not benefit from high octane fuel.
Car and Driver did a study of the effects of high octane fuel on a CRV, F-150, Charger, and BMW M5. Only the F-150 saw a >0.1s improvement to 0-60 time for high octane. High octane showed modest MPG improvements in some cases, but this were not enough to justify the higher costs. The CRV, the only remotely normal car in that study, actually had lower 0-60 performance on high octane fuel. https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a28565486/honda-cr-v-v...
I'm not saying not to fill your truck up with high octane fuel. There is a reason to do that. But most people are obviously not driving that around to the grocery store or whatever - it's a specialty vehicle for your farm or work. There's no reason for anyone to fill up their normal, personal car with high octane fuel unless the manual says it's needed.
Says the Car and Driver study I linked to which shows that normal cars (e.g. the CRV) don't experience improved acceleration or torque from high octane fuel.
>There was an oil company that did something nobody had thought of in years, they actually made the gasoline better for a while. With promotional advertising they were legitimately claiming you would feel the difference after a tankful or two.
Source for this being true? All the media articles I've seen basically say something to the effect of "if your car doesn't call for premium gas, there's no point in getting premium gas".
This was "System 3" gasoline according to their promotion.
I was on the testing committee with their chemists.
>"if your car doesn't call for premium gas, there's no point in getting premium gas".
You are correct to a certain extent, but this is one of those cases where you really need to see for yourself since your actual mileage may actually vary a lot more than you think.
87 octane is figuratively speaking kind of the "bottom of the barrel".
You may find with many cars anyway "if you don't want premium performance, there's no point in getting premium gas".
My GTI has a 2L 4 cylinder engine. In was EPA mileage rated on 87 octane gas, and the fuel door has a stamping to inform the user it wants 87 octane. HOWEVER, VAGs official claim is that the engine makes it's rated power while using 91 octane. Previous versions of this engine were EPA rated with 91 octane.
My pet conspiracy theory is that VAG were "cheating" on more than just diesel emissions, and that on 91 it leans the fueling way out for more efficient power and economy ratings a full 20% higher than claimed, but on 87 the system pulls way back and just dumps fuel into the chamber to control knocking and keep NOx emissions down, which results in the absurdly low claimed fuel economy.
>My pet conspiracy theory is that VAG were "cheating" on more than just diesel emissions, and that on 91 it leans the fueling way out for more efficient power and economy ratings a full 20% higher than claimed, but on 87 the system pulls way back and just dumps fuel into the chamber to control knocking and keep NOx emissions down, which results in the absurdly low claimed fuel economy.
Why would they do that? It sounds like from what you're saying that the engine was designed to run off 91 octane gas (it was more efficient and provided more power), but for whatever reason they felt obligated to market/test using 87 octane gas? Is it purely economics (ie. premium costs 26% more than conventional[1], but you only gain 20% more fuel economy)? Is there some government regulation that penalizes cars that "officially" use premium gas?
To clarify, my conspiracy is that on 91 octane that the engine is designed for it is able to run leaner and hotter in the combustion chamber, which makes more NOx emissions than are allowed, so they just added a map to the ECU that limp modes the engine a bit on 87 so there's reliably no knocking and lower emissions, and they don't care that mileage takes a hit because nobody who buys a GTI will put 87 in it, because we are "enthusiasts". IE I'm saying I think the car can't pass emissions regulation on 91.
It's 110% a conspiracy theory. I could test it by going to a shop that does emissions testing once on 87, and once on 91, or by carefully logging certain parameters through ODB2 on both types of gas. I just.... haven't
Something to think about, now that so many decades have passed since the octane test methods were fully standardized in the USA;
Auto and oil companies have had the same number of decades to come up with more "interesting" ways to game any numbers involved.
The EPA didn't even get concerned with gasoline until relatively few decades ago, and their input has been more from the standpoint of a "pure" bureaucracy.
You can go buy ethanal free gasoline in lots of areas (often called recreation fuel here). The gas component has to have a high average octane without the added ethanol.
> That's how we migrated from 95 and 100 octane ratings, and ratcheted down to 87 and 93. People gradually adjusted to the lower quality until the cars could go no further, and here we are.
Crazy. Here in Europe, gas stations have generic 95 and 98 (plus some still carry E5 95 for older cars that don't handle 10% ethanol without issues), premium shit for people with supercars (e.g. Shell V Power, 100 octane) and diesel. Can't remember the last time I saw anything less than 95.
Worth noting that the US[1] and Europe don't measure "octane" the same way, so they're not directly comparable. The US way of measuring typically results in a number 4-6 'octanes' lower than an equivalent European fuel.
So 87 Octane fuel in the US would probably be rated 91-92 in Europe and 93 Octane fuel could be as high as 98-99 Octane under the European system.
What they don't say is that different oil companies started operating the engines in different ways to begin with, and it took many years before standardization was possible at ASTM. And ASTM was much more North-America focused than ASTM International is today.
By that time there were two main methods of conducting the test in the USA, known as the "Research" method and the "Motor" method. These are different ways of operating the same test engine. These antiknock numbers could be quite a bit different from each other, and different oil companies and automotive companies had developed their preferences.
In Europe they had basically started out using the Research method alone and stuck with it for commerce. This value is normally consistently higher than the Motor method.
Full standardization in the USA was a bureaucratic compromise so it ended up (R+M)/2, so if anyone was to do any whining it would be equal whining for all.
Vendors didn't complain, you need two of the reference engines anyway so you can run both methods at the same time:
TIL, thanks. The downside of being non-American on an American-dominated platform is you'll continuously get trapped in Americans running their own standards no one else uses or even knows about... sigh
Modern cars have variable valve timin, yeah, but it's more that there's a small number of big players, and strict standards based on an easily measurable metrics and a product that already relirs on a lot of processing/gradii/mixing to produce.
If this is also true in the EU, which I expect it is, does that mean there's absolutely no difference between supermarket diesel at £1.60/l and BP diesel at £1.80/l apart from a little bit of stuff, extra detergent or whatever, that BP squirt into it as it's pumped? I wonder if there's some kind of submarine marketing company that spends loads of time on car enthusiasts forums trying to plant the idea that there is a difference.
(In America) there's a huge difference between "Top Tier" (the brand name) detergent gasoline, and a non-detergent gasoline. As in, basically never run non-detergent gasoline in a modern car, because all your injectors were designed with the detergents in mind.
However, 93 isn't better than 87 unless your car specifically asks for it or is turbocharged and has an ECU that can clearly distinguish them and use different programming.
Even my Turbocharged GTI has a map for 87 octane gasoline, and that's what it's fuel economy is rated with. It does however have a different program for higher octane gasoline, as the engine output was rated using 91 octane.
It's just the detergents, but as I understand it the car enthusiasts know that.
Those detergents do work. You don't need to use them all the time, though. You can just use them occasionally and it will breakdown the buildup from the times when you used regular gas.
I am not convinced that gasoline detergents are anything more than marketing nonsense. You know what is already really corrosive? Regular gasoline.
I am curious to what the buildup you are referring to is, fuel injectors maybe? This might make sense on older multi-point fuel injection cars where their max power is like 60 psi, but on modern direct injection engines the fuel rail pressure is so unbelievably high that the sheer pressure would slice through any form of buildup. (My VAG engine for example, idles at ~700 psi and easily reaches twice that when moderate acceleration is demanded)
If you're in a place with ethanol in the gas as an octane booster you're done right there.
Ethanol is fantastic at removing deposits. So much so when it was phased in 20 years tons of engines that had been running on non-ethanol blends had tons of trouble with deposits breaking loose and causing issues, especially anything with a carburetor that had built up deposits. The Ethanol broke down the deposits and then they'd get lodged in jets.
Modern engines seem way better at not building up deposits like you said, but things like Direct Injection also didn't become common (at least in the US) till Ethanol was also present.
The issue is not corrosion but buildup, which detergents help to disperse. High pressure itself doesn't cause high sheer forces during fluid flow, rather high velocity does. Any regions of the system with low velocity w.r.t. the surface could still experience buildups. Whether that happens in practice is certainly debated.
As a practical matter, it doesn't make a difference because almost everyone occasionally uses detergent gasoline (e.g., when that is the most convenient gas station).
> High pressure itself doesn't cause high sheer forces during fluid flow, rather high velocity does
I am definitely not someone with experience in fluid mechanics, but I feel this goes against a layman's understanding of it? Could you provide some quick material on this claim so I could understand it? I already tried searching it but due to my limited knowledge of the subject I couldn't word my search to get the results I wanted.
I thought all gasoline had some detergents in it, not just the name brand stuff? I understood it as the name brand places add extra detergents or fancier additives, according to their marketing at least.
By and large, they're pretty much the same. However:
- Detergent mix might be different
- the quality control of your super market might not equal the brand name pump (ie test the tanks for water, dirt, contaminants, etc).
However, I'd be more concerned routinely getting Ex gas from the same middle-of-nowhere gas station that gets little traffic than suburban supermarket gas. Once in a while while you have 1000 mi to go on a trip, that gas wont affect anything. But, sitting in your half filled tank everyday that ethanol will suck up moisture and even polymerize into gunk.
At least in Switzerland for example a lot of the Miniprix, BP[1] and Shell gas stations have all the same gas as it comes via the same supplier which is Oel-Pool AG and its subsidiaries. Oel Pool is also selling their surplus gas via their own low cost gas station networks which has the symbol of an elephant trunk.
Does anyone have any data on the total CO2 emission, from pumping crude to consuming one litre of petrol? Surely the emissions of burning the petrol - the "business end" of petrol use - must be only a small fraction of the whole story, even in the case of e.g. Norwegian crude oil that's refined in Norway and shipped to Norwegian gas stations?
You have to include more than just oil refining too:
- there's the CO2 emitted during manufacture of the vehicle and maintaining the vehicle
- the CO2 emitted to construct and maintain the roads the vehicle is used on (apparently this is about the same as the CO2 produced in making a car, per metre of road [1])
- since society is so massively oriented around vehicle use, you would probably need to apportion some significant amount of the CO2 emitted by the bureaucratic machine that allows for widespread vehicle use -- lawmakers, financiers, road engineers and regulators, police forces that enforce traffic codes -- this all costs a lot of energy and therefore carbon so it could be a non-negligible contribution
- to much lesser order, the CO2 you yourself emit in order to operate the vehicle and maybe the CO2 emitted in building your garage where you store the vehicle
The oil tankers that shuttle the oil around the world have very few or non-existent emissions controls on top of everything else. Global shipping is a race to the bottom where all the ships are flagged in the country with the least regulation and the owners hide from responsibility through a chain of shell companies.
I often wonder what it will be like in the distant future if/when gasoline becomes a luxury that collectors purchase to operate “antique” ICE automobiles. Will we have little craft refineries brewing single origin artisanal gasoline? What will it cost?
Ethanol stills and combustion engines modified to run on 100% ethanol. Cost to own and operate is a few thousand dollars (still + engine modifications + feedstock).
Wouldn't that undercut the point of owning a classic car? If old engines were run on a specific fuel and operate differently when burning ethanol, then you can't get the same experience while running on ethanol.
I'm sure there would be differing opinions on this (and some people might just want the chassis and not even care about the engine), but I'd expect some people to see modifying the engine as heresy. Those people would probably want some sort of synthetic petrol fuel.
Ethanol has 30% less energy in the same volume, so you're certainly going to travel 30% fewer miles on a full tank, and you're likely going to have 30% less horsepower too.
And you usually lose less torque than power, so it won't matter much unless your engine is close to underpowered for the car or you're driving on a race track.
>Is there actually a fair bit of variance that is adjusted for in your vehicle?
The modern computerized fuel-injected ICE automatically adjusts for an incredibly wide variety of octane ratings and component percentages such as alcohol content.
Vintage carburetted engines could require careful mechanical adjustment if they were to be optimized for something other than the prevailing vintage gasoline when issued.
>operate differently when burning ethanol
Not in a very noticeable way when running. The problem is pure ethanol does not have enough vapor pressure to cold-start many engines, depending on how cold. Plus in case of fire during the daytime, the faint blue alcohol flame is virtually undetectable. These problems are overcome with the 15 percent gasoline content normally found in E85. Or with methanol, M85.
>you're certainly going to travel 30% fewer miles on a full tank
That's the big difference. Methanol has even less energy per gallon even though a gallon weighs about the same as a gallon of ethanol. About 5 percent heavier than a gallon of gasoline too.
>and you're likely going to have 30% less horsepower too.
This is not correct. The alcohol will burn with a much better antiknock rating than regular gasoline and if you step on it you can usually extract more horsepower from the same kind of engine, even if you do bring it up to a bit higher RPM, it's smooth as butter and roaring for more.
We will likely still need refineries for all the other products. Refineries can be designed to favor output of in demand products like fuel oil (today.) If in the future we still need (say) asphalt and lubricants from crude oil, tapping out some amount of gasoline would still be possible.
Likely, yes, just as one can buy racing gasoline in various formulations in a 5 gallon pail by special order today, for about $20 per gallon.
Boutique run fuel production for special groups is already done today. Every year, the Reno Air Racing Association orders a batch of 160 octane aviation gas that has not been otherwise available since around the end of the Korean war, for one week of qualifying and racing. It costs “If you have to ask you can’t afford it” per gallon, I assume.
Actually this was a thing with some finicky vehicles like ones with multi-carburetted engines. Decades ago it was still quite common for the retailer to be consistently supplying the output of a single refinery. You filled up with the top premium gasoline from a well-promoted brand, then spent a lot of time under the bonnet adjusting the carburettors and the corresponding ignition characteristics for that exact fuel. Then refilled the tank at the same retailer whenever possible.
Gasoline is actually a mix of different blending stocks that have their own reed vapor pressure and octane - refineries blend them together to get a mix that has the right octane and reed vapor pressure to sell.
Oil is pretty fungible so it is easy to bypass sanctions with oil as you describe. Saw an article about it recently. There is a difference between petroleum (oil) and gasoline (refined product)
Same also applies to energy. Also there, all energy (nuclear, renewable, oil/natural gas, ...) is "mixed" and consumers take what is at the end of the pipe (think about a energy supply contract from pure renewables).
If oils are mixed in the pipe, how does this affect octane levels? Is there a separate pipe for each octane? How is the octane set in a fuel? Is it an additive.
No - higher octane fuels come from the refinery as higher octane - usually because the mix of blending stocks are different and you have to add in some elements to the mix that could have been used to take more lower cost product into "regular" spec.
What happens in pipelines is a lot of the same stuff goes into the pipeline aka "one big slug" at the same time. In between slugs stuff gets mixed and that becomes transmix which gets bought and sold (at a discount) and usually reprocessed and reused. Pipeline scheduling is done to reduce transmix - if high grade gasoline is next to low grade gasoline the transmix could potentially be sold as low grade gasoline.
Power plants can burn crude oil directly without refining at a higher efficiency than a gasoline engine with much more sophisticated emission controls.
Power is then transmitted by the grid at about 5% loss vs transporting with tanker trucks which is around 2% loss.
The refining step itself has losses on the order of 15%.
You can burn domestic natural gas at 60% efficiency in the power plant as well, mix that with that with renewables and it's easy to see how you're ahead. Look up well to wheel efficiency for more.
Batteries can be recycled creating a circular economy there once enough are in circulation.
You can burn unrefined oil at a power pant at 40%+ efficiency saving the losses in the refining step and with all the complicated emission controls not in the vehicle.
In 70% or so of the world, just park the car under a carpark sized solar panel with a 20kWh buffer battery and have a little induction pad under it for one full charge per week.
Pipeline physics astound me: the same single pipe can be used for a series of different products with only a small boundary volume between them needing to be diverted [0]. As a naive software guy I would have feared that across 170km and numerous valves and pumps cross-contamination would become problematic, but apparently not so (plus the definition of the fuel types had greater tolerances than laboratory-grade chemicals)
When you see a flare stack like this [1] running 24x7, wasting enough energy for a small town, you realise quite how cheap energy is to an energy company. It simply isn't worth doing anything about those losses when instead they can work on building another bigger refinery.
Not so much an issue with crude oil, but with renewables it's an issue. The economics of driving tanker trucks to animal rendering facilities and to restaurants would not work but for the governments RINs programs.
Fun fact: gasoline or petrol is the only dangerous chemical that ordinary people can buy and keep without a special license. It really is quite harmful!
