Synthetic Motor Oil - Why not Gasoline?

You are not considering cost -- mass-producing something does not make it infinitely cheap, just cheaper than producing it in small volumes. What do you think that they would make synthetic fuel out of -- butterfly farts?

I wouldn't pay ~2X more just because it was "synthetic".

 

You could use coal but I don't think anyone would be happy with the cost or the big complex built in their neighborhood.

Probably will happen though.

 

The flaw in your logic is that it is not an "alternative" -- it is just a more heavily processed form of the same resource. In over-simplified terms:

Non-synthetic gasoline = take naturally occurring fossil fuel -- refine and sort into smaller parts (with some impurites) -- use the portion of gasoline as fuel.

Synthetic = take naturally-occurring fossil fuel -- refine and sort into smaller parts (with some impurities) -- more refining to remove impurities and make even smaller parts -- reassemble the smaller parts back into gasoline -- use.

Same thing with "hydrogen" -- it's not an alternative fuel because we don't have any free hydrogen available here on Earth.

 

It is called ethanol.

 

Oh right, that's working out well -- we're already starting to have food riots from (subsidized) ethanol production driving up the cost of food.

 

Stop-gap, inefficient alternative that is only viable with government subsidies. Food prices are already going up from competition resulting from ethanol production.

 

I thought the Nazis used synthetic gasoline and diesel?

 

I think they did as a last ditch measure towards the end of the war but the quality was poor... IIRC it was made from coal.

 

They did and the process they invented is still used today to make synthetic gasoline and ...hydrogen.

Race fuels are basically synthetic gasoline.

When oil reached $70/bar is became cheaper to make gasoline from coal. There is a plant being built here in PA, but there should be dozens under construction and the oil issue would disappear....but then what problem would there be to rally the people?

 

I'm not aurguing with either post, but as alternative fuel source it currently is the best proposition. As the cost of gasoline continues to skyrocket, and corn prices also rise dramatically, other sources or processes to manufacture "fermented fuel" will be developed. These will not be motivated by government mandates, but rather entrepreneurial opportunities.

 

Well there is always water I hope something comes of that invention using water as a fuel. God knows we got enough water on this planet.

 

One problem with converting coal is that this process also takes energy and releases CO2 so it's kind of a double negative effect -- you're consuming fuel and releasing CO2 to produce a fuel that will release CO2 (but as I've said before -- once we burn up all the oil then we're going to burn up all the coal )

 

IF (big if) we eventually end up as a hydrogen society, why wouldn't there be huge wind farms that do nothing but electrolyze water and store the hydrogen for use later in fuel cells. At least you could store the potential energy that way, rather than having to use the electricity as it is made.

 

The problem with "huge anything farms" is that they require many more people, need more maintenance, and have a much higher initial cost. Converting a lot of fossil fuel into the money necessary to pay many salaries and benefits isn't any better than just burning the fossil fuel directly in a very compact (i.e, few employees needed) generator.

Since today was "Earth Day", of course, Oprah (a freakin' billionaire) had Al Gore (a 100 millionaire) on her show. It's just amazing the denial that these people are in about where their wealth actually comes from. Just like the rock stars, as long as they don't shovel the fossil fuel into the boiler personally, they seem to think that they aren't (directly) benefitting from our civilizations consumption of fossil fuel -- unbelievable!

 

I think it's amusing to think that these eco-elitists are kinda responsible for more and more people going hungry across the world. I'm glad Al can feel good about burning E85 in his security detail SUVs while thousands of people are starving due to agflation.

 

While wind turbines require a large capital cost, they also have very low operating expenses and maintenance requirements. Aside from repairing storm damage or the occasional component failure, very few technicians could service hundreds of MW of turbines. You would have more trouble with the hydrogen pipeline or tanker trucks carrying the hydrogen than the turbines themselves. In addition, the nice thing about wind is that the land can also be used for other things like farming. A few bats and birds pay the price, but IMO far more die from fossil fuel pollution.

Some European countries already generate a significant portion (10-15%) of their electrical power from wind, and the world capacity for wind power is currently growing at nearly 10% per year.

 

Coal based gasoline is very real, doable, and requires no new technical development but there are a couple political problems. The biggest is that oil shouldn’t cost $177/bar, it should be about $50. It’s not $50 because oil has a very inelastic cost/consumption relationship and the opec countries understand that. They know you will drive to work and heat/cool your house every day regardless of the price of fuel. They learned in the 70s that are options to oil and if they tighten the supply too much they will lose their market share to coal and nukes and never get it back. They also know however that if the supply is just a little too high the price will plunge like it did 3-4 years ago.

It would take 2-4 years to get a coal conversion plant on line and the plant would cost hundreds of millions of $ to build, and by the time it was on-line the opec countries would have adjusted oil supply to make the coal plants uncompetitive…..because they are nearly a monopoly and have that power. So there will be no coal plants without government price guarantees, and no congressman in his right mind is going to give price guarantees to “big oil” so there will be no coal plants.

The second issue is newer, global warming. Coal cracking plants make CO2 and getting the permits needed to build and run it is a difficult proposition. Again government help would be required and this time the call would be the government is caving to big oil on environmental issue while “they” make record profits, so it's not going to happen.

The bottom line is that the reason we, the American people, pay $4/gal for gasoline is because collectively we are idiots. The US has enough coal to supply all of the entire world’s energy needs for over 200-300 years but we chose not to because that would mean big oil would make even more money……

 

And since it's in our backyard, add employment. In theory that is.