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#218501 - 03/06/11 04:00 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Blast]
m9key Offline
Member

Registered: 05/28/03
Posts: 143
Loc: florida
i concur i also work for big oil i cant determine if its a wait and see but the 4.00 dollar gas has been bumped up to spring and 5.00 to summer hopefully not.... we will see

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#218505 - 03/06/11 04:58 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Paul810]
Susan Offline
Geezer

Registered: 01/21/04
Posts: 5163
Loc: W. WA
"Combine that with the typically greater price on diesel vs. regular gas, and it starts to make less and less sense to buy a U.S. spec diesel."

Diesel costs less to produce and was always cheaper than gasoline, until BigOil realized it had the truckers by the throat. Outright theft, and nothing else but.

When the gas hits $5.50 or more per gallon, I wonder how often the performance cars will get out of the garage?

Sue

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#218507 - 03/06/11 05:54 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Blast]
Jeanette_Isabelle Online   content
Carpal Tunnel

Registered: 11/13/06
Posts: 2946
Loc: Nacogdoches, Texas
Not only am I NOT associated with Ford, I have a bone to pick with them. That said, it looks as if Ford did something right. Their new EcoBoost engine seems promising. Of course the jury is still deliberating.

Jeanette Isabelle
_________________________
I'm not sure whose twisted idea it was to put hundreds of adolescents in underfunded schools run by people whose dreams were crushed years ago, but I admire the sadism. -- Wednesday Adams, Wednesday

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#218509 - 03/06/11 06:03 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Susan]
Blast Offline
INTERCEPTOR
Carpal Tunnel

Registered: 07/15/02
Posts: 3760
Loc: TX
Quote:
Diesel costs less to produce and was always cheaper than gasoline, until BigOil realized it had the truckers by the throat. Outright theft, and nothing else but.


Diesel DID cost less to refine up until the requirement for low-sulfur diesel appeared. That required a lot of re-plumbing of the refineries and more labor and energy input overall to produce. Your theft hypothesis is wrong.

-Blast
_________________________
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#218510 - 03/06/11 07:01 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Susan]
Paul810 Offline
Veteran

Registered: 03/02/03
Posts: 1428
Loc: NJ, USA
Originally Posted By: Susan
"Combine that with the typically greater price on diesel vs. regular gas, and it starts to make less and less sense to buy a U.S. spec diesel."

Diesel costs less to produce and was always cheaper than gasoline, until BigOil realized it had the truckers by the throat. Outright theft, and nothing else but.

When the gas hits $5.50 or more per gallon, I wonder how often the performance cars will get out of the garage?

Sue


It's not quite as simple as that.

First, Diesel and gasoline are both produced from the same refining process. Essentially, you only get so much of each from a single barrel of oil. Currently, there are two main types of refining processes used (fluid catalytic cracking and hydrocracking), which each result in a different proportion. The one used by most U.S. based refineries (fluid catalytic cracking) allows for a greater ratio of gasoline to diesel. Most European refineries use a process(hydrocracking) which creates more diesel and less gasoline.

Now, Diesel fuels used in over-the-road vehicles go through a further process for the reduction of sulfur. Recently we switched from using LSD (Low sulfur Diesel....not the narcotic) to using ULSD (Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel). This change made it possible to better our vehicle emissions significantly. Unfortunately, this increased the price of diesel fuel on average. To further increase prices, diesel fuel used in over-the-road vehicles is also taxed; typically more-so than gasoline. (average national fuel tax is 48.1 cents for gasoline vs. 53.1 cents for diesel)

Now you might ask yourself....why was diesel fuel traditionally always cheaper than gasoline? Reason was, it was basically an unwanted fuel. Our refining process was dedicated to gasoline production and most of our vehicles were designed around gasoline (which also meant gasoline was traditionally taxed more). Otherwise, we would just sell whatever diesel we weren't using to Europe or whoever else wants it.

Nowadays, diesel fuel is in much greater demand, especially since Europe and many other parts of the world are willing to buy just about every drop we produce. Therefore, our diesel prices are heavily reliant on the value of our currency vs. European currencies. In a world market, we're essentially in competition with Europe to buy the diesel we produce. Add to that an increase in overall cost from the additional sulfur reduction processes and an average 5 cent greater cost from taxes....it's easy to see why we're now paying so much more for diesel.

This is why there is such a big push towards plug in electric vehicles...we can produce our own electricity without being involved in such heavy worldwide competition for fuel. Unfortunately, what we need for this to happen on a wide scale isn't really here yet. Battery technology is lacking and our electric infrastructure is heavily outdated. Slowly this is improving, but we just aren't there yet.

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#218513 - 03/06/11 07:50 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Paul810]
Am_Fear_Liath_Mor Offline
Carpal Tunnel

Registered: 08/03/07
Posts: 3078
Quote:
This is why there is such a big push towards plug in electric vehicles...we can produce our own electricity without being involved in such heavy worldwide competition for fuel.


Ah, the insanity of the electric car future, didn't work out first time around, won't work out the second time around.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Dundee/...-royce-car.html

If they can't keep the lights on in Houston during a one or two day cold spell then the electric car future is patently obviously a non starter. wink

A simple calculation should confirm the hypothesis.

Take the number of cars during the Houston Rush Hour and multiply by the average power consumption of an average vehicle used during the rush hour then add the total GWhr to the installed Electric Grid capacity that flow into Houston.

Multiple that by the number of cities around the world and then work out how many 1250 MW Nuclear power stations would be required to take care of the 90 Mbpd per day that is currently extracted. To put things into perspective you probably wouldn't have enough copper available to transmit all that electrical power to all those electrical vehicles.

1 bpd = 1.7 MWhrs

90 Million bpd = 152,000 GWhrs

over 24hrs = 6,375 GWdays

6,375/1.250 = 5,100 Nuclear Power Station operating at full load every 24hrs 365 days of the year to take up the energy load requirements for todays peak oil.

As the US consumes around 20-25% of that peak oil load this would require around 1000 Torness sized Nuclear power stations to be built. To take care of the duty cycle and peaks, 2000 nuclear power stations would be more realistic.

And we even haven't started on the battery technology grin



This is a more realistic future than the electric Rolls despite what even Dr Michio Kaku has to say on the subject. Gotta love his optimism on the subject though... laugh


Edited by Am_Fear_Liath_Mor (03/06/11 08:13 PM)

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#218516 - 03/06/11 09:39 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Russ]
Nomad Offline
Addict

Registered: 05/04/02
Posts: 493
Loc: Just wandering around.
Originally Posted By: Russ
Nomad -- What year Dodge Ram are you driving? I hear the older models got better mileage.


2003 with over 230,000 hard miles on it.
_________________________
...........From Nomad.........Been "on the road" since '97

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#218520 - 03/06/11 10:50 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor]
Paul810 Offline
Veteran

Registered: 03/02/03
Posts: 1428
Loc: NJ, USA
It's impossible to convert barrels of oil into raw energy content and then use that number to draw a determination on how much electricity would be used for electric automobile transportation. There are differences in the efficiency of each technology.

For example, Nissan's leaf uses 32kwh to travel an average of 100 miles. A gallon of gas is the rough equivalent to 36kwh....and we know that a gallon of gas in a typical car will only get about 25 miles in combined driving. With that being the case, a leaf gets about 4 times the fuel economy of a typical 25mpg combined car. This is why it gets a 99mpg combined fuel economy rating.

Now, in the United States we use around 142 billion gallons of gasoline a year (2004 statistic). At 36kwh a gallon equivalent this is the equivalent to 5112 billion kwh. Now, since a leaf is around 4x more efficient than the average car, we have to divide that number by 4. Therefore, it would take 1278 billion kwh of electricity a year to completely replace our average 25mpg combined gas cars with 99mpg equivalent leafs.

A typical nuclear power plant averages 12.4 billion kwh a year. That means, if we were just using nuclear power plants, we would need to build just over 100 to completely replace the gasoline that we use (which, we don't even need to do if all we're trying to do is heavily reduce our oil consumption). That doesn't take into consideration any alternate electricity sources (the good), nor does it take into consideration power transmission losses in our grid (the bad).

All in all, it's completely possible to use electric cars to significantly reduce the amount of oil we use. The biggest hurdle is updating our power grid, which is severely out dated and bleeding power at a ridiculous rate. The second big hurdle is battery performance. We need batteries that can charge faster and allow for a greater range before the average person would even consider buying a plug-in electric car. Both of these are slowly being improved (as is the efficiency of regular gasoline vehicles), but it's going to take a while to get there (especially since our government is presently lacking the money to really fund a lot of these projects).

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#218522 - 03/06/11 11:32 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Paul810]
Am_Fear_Liath_Mor Offline
Carpal Tunnel

Registered: 08/03/07
Posts: 3078
The Nissan leaf (@99mpg equivalent) is a small car equivalent roughly in size to the Fiat Panda Eco (@56.5 mpg). The Nissan Leaf energy spec will be at the battery @ 32kwhr and doesn't take into consideration the transmission and the battery loses with respect to the generation of the source electricity (Lithium Ion has 80% efficiency so you can easily knock 20-30 mpg of that 99mpg headline figure when taking these losses into account) so the differences aren't to great when everything is taken into consideration especially when you take into account the real world combined driving figure as a combination of motorway, urban and city driving. So the reality on the number of nuclear power stations would in reality be nearer 400. The other problem is of course would be the peak loading issues for the electrical grid as everyone tops of their car batteries just before the rush hours. To take the peak loading problem into account you could easily double or triple that 400 number. The discrepancy between the first figure (2000 nukes) I ball parked is due to the fact that only 25-30% of oil consumption is actually used for vehicle transportation energy consuption requirements for the US.

The other major problem of course is replacing millions of those cheap toxic $9000 Li-ion battery packs every 3-5 years or so in the rather small and very compact Nissan Leaf.

The other major issue is the actual problem of the distribution of the required electricity, i.e. around 20 Nuclear Power stations to cater for the peak electricity loading for a city the size of Houston for its rush hour.

Its not the kind of a world I would want to live in. I'll take the horses any day. wink







Edited by Am_Fear_Liath_Mor (03/06/11 11:33 PM)

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#218523 - 03/06/11 11:32 PM Re: Fill your gas tanks, folks. [Re: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor]
Art_in_FL Offline
Pooh-Bah

Registered: 09/01/07
Posts: 2432
Originally Posted By: Am_Fear_Liath_Mor

Ah, the insanity of the electric car future, didn't work out first time around, won't work out the second time around.

http://www.thecourier.co.uk/News/Dundee/...-royce-car.html

If they can't keep the lights on in Houston during a one or two day cold spell then the electric car future is patently obviously a non starter. wink

A simple calculation should confirm the hypothesis.

Take the number of cars during the Houston Rush Hour and multiply by the average power consumption of an average vehicle used during the rush hour then add the total GWhr to the installed Electric Grid capacity that flow into Houston.

Multiple that by the number of cities around the world and then work out how many 1250 MW Nuclear power stations would be required to take care of the 90 Mbpd per day that is currently extracted. To put things into perspective you probably wouldn't have enough copper available to transmit all that electrical power to all those electrical vehicles.

1 bpd = 1.7 MWhrs

90 Million bpd = 152,000 GWhrs

over 24hrs = 6,375 GWdays

6,375/1.250 = 5,100 Nuclear Power Station operating at full load every 24hrs 365 days of the year to take up the energy load requirements for todays peak oil.

As the US consumes around 20-25% of that peak oil load this would require around 1000 Torness sized Nuclear power stations to be built. To take care of the duty cycle and peaks, 2000 nuclear power stations would be more realistic.


Sorry Am_Fear_Liath_Mor but your analysis is quite poor. You clearly need more reliable sources of information.

You get the energy content of a barrel of oil about right at 1 bpd = 1.7 MWhrs. What you missed is that you use it assuming that the vehicles are 100% efficient. Simple fact is that a gasoline engine has a theoretical maximum efficiency of roughly 20%. And it is all downhill from there. Bearings aren't perfect. Out of millions of cars how many are perfectly maintained. Then apply that to an engine in a vehicle which spends time idling, using gasoline and returning nothing (efficiency of 0% for energy expended), poor driving habits, etcetera, and there is no bottom end of how inefficient a car can be. A fair working estimate might be that in actual use gasoline powered vehicles actually only use 5% of the energy stored in gasoline actually moving people and products. Already your estimate is twenty times higher than it should be.

Second, electrical systems are not actually overloaded when you consider a typical 24 hour period. Fact is most power plants dump power through resister banks just to keep capacity available. Power plants are set up to run at near full power and throttling them back is problematic. Typically power is shared and entire generation units are put on or off line. There is typically a large rise in electricity used in the morning which tapers off rapidly mid morning and then a large spike in the afternoon which tapers off as night comes on and people start to go to bed.

The key here is that the entire system is designed for maximum load. A maximum load which is easily accommodated. Your need to find a time it was not, Houston during a single rare event, highlights that the vast majority of the time the power is on and working quite well. The reason the situation in Houston was shocking was because electrical generation has become so reliable that its short term failure is a novelty.

The grid is designed for the maximum load and the power plants are designed to run most efficiently at near maximum load. Typically 80%. Most modern electrical plants are getting real world efficiency of better than 30% from the coal or gas used. Nuclear power plants are actually less efficient.

What your missing here is that the charging load for vehicles can be shifted to normal low-load times. This was done in the 40s for electric water heaters. In effect we get a certain amount of power for free because there is less need to start up and shut down units. The end result is an overall increase in the efficiency of electrical power generation because there would be less need to throttle back the generation plants or dump power.

In effect there will be little need to build new electrical power plants because what we have doesn't run at designed output much of the time.

The final point is that major power lines do not use copper. They use conductors composed of a combination of aluminum and steel. But here again, there is not going to be any great need to string more power lines because the lines we have are not running anywhere near capacity most of the time. There are a few isolated choke points where lines are near capacity most of the time but these choke points are a result of commercial advantage and land use issues, not a lack of resources.

Bottom line here is that electric vehicles are entirely practical with the only real issues being the battery capacity and available charging stations. The later point being a non-issue if the vehicles are set up to simply plug into a standard 15/20A receptacle. The trade-off is between more specialized charging stations that will recharge a battery bank quickly, an hour or two, or a standard plug that will do the same thing more slowly, four to eight hours. The Israeli model of simply exchanging a standard modular battery bank works around many of these issues.

In many ways the shift over a few decades to majority of vehicles being electric will be less traumatic than what happened in the 70s when the blow dryer suddenly, in a matter of a couple of months, became a fixture and daily use item in US homes. In effect fifty million people got up one morning and plugged in a 1000 watt space heater for ten minutes. Farah Fawcett and Peter Frampton, with their blowdried hairstyles, had a profound effect on the US power system.

Electric cars, which will take over the market over the next couple of decades, aren't going to be a huge problem for the power systems we have now. Even less so if we get rid of the structure and engineering that is a throwback to technology of the 40s. Which is made possible by oil we aren't paying full freight for and coal which is dirt-cheap.

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