FYI the oil used for asphalt is basically a byproduct of diesel production. Diesel use drop (like it did in 2020), the piece of asphalt goes up.
From what I understand, gasoline isn't just a byproduct, it's then pretty heavily refined to very specific blends by large production facilities that depend on volume for pricing. So it would not be surprising that the cost of gasoline would rise as it becomes uneconomic to run the big refineries.
I would definitely have to disagree with some here. As EV use goes up and IC engine use drops, gasoline will become both more expensive and harder to access. As useage lowers refineries will shut down. Transport costs will rise, and the simple economies of scale will be reduced. Gasoline will become a less accessible product with a high demand from a much smaller, more widely dispersed consumer base.
That is a recipe for high pricing.
This thread reminds me of a movie that I cannot remember the name of. Please helo.
I think the guy had a muscle car of some sort, maybe holden or something not USA, and was certainly dystopian. I do not think it was Mad Max but maybe. I just remember that he had to stop at defunct gas stations and pump old fuel from the tanks.
Anyone?
As for the original question, bio-diesel seems way easier.
frenchyd said:Moonshine comes out of the still at 190 proof ? Honestly?
They show moonshiners taking a swallow of it and nodding? Not just in movies but also documentaries.
Am I that much of a woose that when I have anything like 80-90 proof it's like drinking battery acid. I can't imagine drinking 200 proof.
I had a bottle of 190 proof Everclear back in college. Mixed with punch or orange juice or something it was okay, but straight out of the bottle it was harsh. My roommate drank a couple shots of it one night, and he was out of commission until sometime the next day. 
frenchyd said:Moonshine comes out of the still at 190 proof ? Honestly?
They show moonshiners taking a swallow of it and nodding? Not just in movies but also documentaries.
Am I that much of a woose that when I have anything like 80-90 proof it's like drinking battery acid. I can't imagine drinking 200 proof.
"95 horsepower!"
The funny thing is when Leather Jacket Guy tricks the other guy (who started the video shoot hungover and feeling awful) into taking another shot, at the end.
Definitely not something I'd try to drink. It's supposed to be used as a mixer, maybe a cleaning solution? But tolerances are certainly a thing. I have heard that Bela Lugosi was so far gone that he started drinking formaldehyde because alcohol couldn't get him to where he needed to be in any quantity. Yikes.
Think of what needs to happen in war zones to get fuel for the trucks and tanks ,
WW2 north africa had to be interesting , even if there were refiners on the coast you still needed to get the fuel ( and food etc ) out to the troops.
but I guess the same things happen if you have an EV powered Army :)
In reply to californiamilleghia :
WWII was a resource war. Japan needed the oil fields from SEA, Germany needed the oil in Eastern Europe. A lot of the strategy to defeat them revolved around denying them oil.
Germany in particular spent a lot of effort trying to develop synthetic fuels. I have also seen external-combustion Kubelwagens in books. (Wood fired!)
Japan went to kamikaze tactics in part because late in the war they didn't have enough oil to budget for flight training! That and they didn't rotate their experienced pilots out to train the newbies. MASSIVE turnover resulted - I have heard as much as 500% pilot death rate over New Guinea. So they figured, if they are going to be sent to die anyway, might as well have 'em die usefully.
I'll just use gasoline to power my generator to charge my EV = gas powered EV!
It takes a lot to get above 90% ethanol if distilling grain, you pretty much need to go the sugar route to get there. I've heard you can get there with switchgrass or bamboo, but I haven't experimented with either as there's no market for beverages based off of either.
Currently even using sugar, you'd be looking at around $20 a gallon, And that's able to purchase it directly at the distillery. Transport, which is the most expensive part of the process, would kill the concept before it got off the ground. The amount of time that it would take to go inside purchase individual one gallon glass bottles full of vehicle manually one gallon at a time deposit the glass bottles into a receptacle where they can be reused by the distillery. Then start your car and drive off. You're honestly probably looking at about 15-20 minutes for a fill up, within 5 years that will be an EV charge time for 150-300 miles of range. Also, You're going to need larger injectors and your fuel economy is going to drop by about 40%. running anything higher than E90.
There's also a significant chance that a vehicle that is going to be run at the challenge this year will have homemade fuel in it.
Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:I tried distilling for a couple years for my own personal "engine." (and by that I mean drinking). The whole process of starting with 20 gallons of something and ending up with 2 gallons is frustrating, not to mention the time and attention it takes. Plus, to burn it in a car you need to get rid of the inherent water that likes to stay trapped in the alcohol molecule.
I think I will be buying electric long before I make vodka for my classics.
For the most part across history, there have usually been sufficient alternatives. Back in the 70s when they stopped doing Tetraethyl lead, it felt like the apocalypse for people like my parents who could only afford old junk. At the time we had a 64 Olds and a 68 El Camino. I remember TV commercials about it with some guy driving around in a green Nova with superimposed gas station signs showing no leaded gasoline available. Now it's such a non-issue. For a while people went crazy over ethanol in gasoline like it was the apocalypse, but it's widely accepted, and nearly all the perceived shortcomings have been proven non-issues. My grandpa had a 29 Model A when he was a teenager, and that was back when Ethylene Glycol was the hot new thing for anti-freeze. People were afraid of it because it had "ethylene" in the title and the myth of the times was that it was explosive. Grandpa said he drained his in the driveway and he filled it with water in the summer and kerosene in the winter. To him, Kerosene was safer than anything with the word "ethylene" in it. That new anti-freeze snake oil wouldn't cut it for him.
I think we'll probably run into strange supply/demand issues with things like gasoline, E85, and motor oil, but I think people will still be driving their restored Studebakers in 2085.
Just for the record, ethylene glycol is flammable and it can act in an explosive way if it is pressurized or heated to a high enough point as well.
I have witnessed the damage that a 1000 gallon tank of ethylene glycol can do when somebody welds on the tank. Pieces of the tank were found hundreds of feet away.
That kinda makes ethylene glycol sound like a pretty good candidate for internal combustion.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:Germany in particular spent a lot of effort trying to develop synthetic fuels.
And now they're trying again: Porsche researching synthetic fuels
In reply to Keith Tanner :
I have found that it does not work that well via intra-gasket injection
Ethylene glycol, the pure chemical, is wildly corrosive. I have heard horror stories of middle managers who thought they were being smart by cutting out the middleman and buying ethylene glycol feedstock instead of antifreeze.
uninhibited ethylene glycol will degrade into five organic acids - glycolic, glyoxylic, formic, carbonic, and oxalic - in the presence of heat, oxygen, and common cooling system metals such as copper and aluminum
In reply to preach (fs) :
Was it the one with Lee majors?Pumping out the leftovers of the bottoms of the tanks.
US refineries won't shut down. They will just export the oil/gas to countries that aren't part of treaties requiring reduced carbon emissions.
Keith Tanner said:....From what I understand, gasoline isn't just a byproduct, it's then pretty heavily refined to very specific blends by large production facilities that depend on volume for pricing. So it would not be surprising that the cost of gasoline would rise as it becomes uneconomic to run the big refineries.
Crude oil is distilled to create a number of products, some of which will be VERY important for many many years (e.g. various forms of plastic, chemicals, lubricants...). Someone here mentioned that the process can be tweaked to get more of some, but I am not sure to what extent, so refineries will very much be a thing for a long time and some amount of gasoline will be produced even if there is less demand.
The question of further processing is there, but as noted, the world is certainly not going EV any time soon. Electric passenger planes are also many many years away.
Considering how realistically cheap gasoline is (compare to milk for example) for the amount of processing and transportation required it hard to imagine the price would not go up when some of the infrastructure goes away.
In reply to nocones :
More like the military will purchase all the fuel they can produce. EV fighter jets and aircraft carriers are nowhere on the horizon. (This is no way meant as a flounder, there is a sub segment of vehicles that are still decades away from potentially being EV though, cargo ships and passenger aircraft also come to mind.
lrrs said:In reply to preach (fs) :
Was it the one with Lee majors?Pumping out the leftovers of the bottoms of the tanks.
The Last Chase. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082642/
Countingcrowbars said:In reply to Stampie :
I have no problem converting to electric. However I don't know what to do with all those beautiful classic cars that I have. Maybe everything in my stable needs to run on alcohol? Or propane and a turbo
That's easy. Start converting the classics to electric.
The maths say it won't happen in our lifetime.
2% of new vehicle sales are EV. About 95 million cars are produced per year. That's 1.9 million new EVs per year.
There are 1.42 billion vehicles on the road today worldwide. At the current rate of production, it would take 742 years to produce enough EVs to replace the ICE vehicles currently on the road.
If EV production increased by 10X, and NO ONE ever built an ICE car again, it would still take 74 years to replace all the vehicles currently on the road.
Enjoy the drive. Regardless of what fuel you enjoy.
We wrote something related a little while back: Fuels for a Post-Apocalyptic World.
John Welsh said:The Feds wouldn't be happy that you are not paying road/fuel tax on that self made fuel. See the irony when compared to electric?
One largely unanswered question is how will fuel tax be replaced via EV?
They have a plan for this. Real time mileage tracking of vehicles. Get billed a tax per mile of road use. They started planning this when it was realized that a downside of high MPG vehicles is less fuel sold and this was cutting into the revenue from vehicle fuel tax.
As said ethanol is the easy button but gets a little tricky to diy. Methanol can be had as well, and perhaps easier to an extent.
If massive decarbonization becomes real ammonia and methanol are likely to be widely available for long haul shipping where other fuels are not even close to practical. Likely one of these will be the way forward if fossil fuels really go away.
jharry3 said:John Welsh said:The Feds wouldn't be happy that you are not paying road/fuel tax on that self made fuel. See the irony when compared to electric?
One largely unanswered question is how will fuel tax be replaced via EV?
They have a plan for this. Real time mileage tracking of vehicles. Get billed a tax per mile of road use. They started planning this when it was realized that a downside of high MPG vehicles is less fuel sold and this was cutting into the revenue from vehicle fuel tax.
I'm pretty dubious that'll ever happen. Even ignoring the privacy questions that it entails, it's just not practical to install a tracker in everyone's car and expect them not to get mysteriously sabotaged.
It's more likely that we'll see a tax on EV charging, it's trivial to put that in a commercial charger network and for home chargers I expect you'd effectively get a second meter that's just on the charger.
Either that or they'll give up on the fantasy that the people who use the roads are the ones who pay for them and just fund them out of the general tax.
codrus (Forum Supporter) said:jharry3 said:John Welsh said:The Feds wouldn't be happy that you are not paying road/fuel tax on that self made fuel. See the irony when compared to electric?
One largely unanswered question is how will fuel tax be replaced via EV?
They have a plan for this. Real time mileage tracking of vehicles. Get billed a tax per mile of road use. They started planning this when it was realized that a downside of high MPG vehicles is less fuel sold and this was cutting into the revenue from vehicle fuel tax.
I'm pretty dubious that'll ever happen. Even ignoring the privacy questions that it entails, it's just not practical to install a tracker in everyone's car and expect them not to get mysteriously sabotaged.
It's more likely that we'll see a tax on EV charging, it's trivial to put that in a commercial charger network and for home chargers I expect you'd effectively get a second meter that's just on the charger.
Either that or they'll give up on the fantasy that the people who use the roads are the ones who pay for them and just fund them out of the general tax.
It may not be a feasible thing but it is a thing: The Vehicle Miles Traveled Tax Would be a Tax from Hell - Ordinary Times (ordinary-times.com)
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