Mood:
hungryNow Playing: Gas Kills
Topic: TECHNOLOGY
The Fuel from Hell
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Written by:
AL MCKEGG
October 5, 2005
October 5, 2005
We always knew it came from deep in the ground, but until it had us by the wallet we didn’t know it was from hell.
By its very nature, gasoline is nasty stuff, probably the nastiest commercial fuel in the world. Swallow it, inhale it, or leave it on your skin too long and it will poison you. Burn it and it spews an array of poisons into the air. Over the years it’s fouled thousands of wells and retarded thousands, if not millions of people through lead exposure.
The system for transporting crude oil and refining it into gasoline is elaborate and vulnerable. After being pumped out of hell under, let’s say, Saudi Arabia, crude oil is piped to an ocean terminal and loaded into an oil tanker to begin an 8000-mile ocean trip to, let’s say, Beaumont, Texas. The trip is susceptible to terrorists, shipwrecks, storms, and engine failure leading to drifting onto the rocks. If the oil makes it to Beaumont (not spread over beaches, not coating oyster and clam beds and suffocating crabs and fish) it’s refined into gasoline and travels by boat or tank truck or pipeline 2000 miles to Howard County gas stations.
A disruption anywhere along this complex route—pipelines, tankers, refineries—hits us in the wallet. Some of the businesses in the gasoline distribution system responded to hurricane Katrina’s damage by instantly jacking the price of regular towards $4 a gallon. I think they call it “forward pricing.” In the case of a gas station it’s setting their pump price based not on what the gas cost them but on what they think their next tank truck load will cost.
One suspects these modern pricing systems are just cover for the old “charge as much as the market will pay” routine. During the Katrina price spike, one Baltimore station raised their price to $4.50, because (they said) they were afraid they’d run out of gas.
We can expect these same wallet-busting increases (indeed, we have seen them) in response to regional war, major terrorist attacks, tanker catastrophes, and calamities we haven’t yet imagined (remember, there used to be a time our imaginations didn’t include fuel-laden planes toppling skyscrapers.)
Danger and expense aren’t the only downsides to moving fuel along this long, tenuous route. It’s grotesquely inefficient: there’s less energy in a gallon of gasoline than the energy it took to make and transport it. A net loss! One study co-sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Energy and Agriculture found the energy used to find, pump, transport and refine a gallon of gasoline adds up to 20% more than the energy in that gallon. To say that another way, it takes 5 BTUs of energy to make gasoline that yields 4 BTUs.
Engines that use gasoline are inefficient, too, turning only about 30% of the gasoline’s energy content into work. Diesel engines are far better, about 45% efficient (more about this next time.)
And it’s explosive. Once crude oil is refined into gasoline, it’s no longer just flammable, mixed with air it is a very powerful explosive. Accidents involving gas-powered vehicles, stored gasoline, and filling stations can cause raging fires and sometimes lethal explosions. The same potential is available to terrorists.
If you’re like me, every vehicle you own and most of your yard equipment is powered with this fuel from hell. A grim picture. But what alternatives do we have? At this point, on the commercial scale, not many. But we’re seeing the beginnings, and very soon will see the blossoming of an entirely new class of fuels. If gasoline is the fuel from far beneath the earth, you could call these the fuel from the top of the earth. They’re all promising, but one—biodiesel—is remarkable.
It’s less toxic than table salt and biodegrades at the same rate as sugar. It’s very clean-burning and burns in standard diesel engines (without the black cloud of soot.) It’s less flammable than traditional diesel fuel, and isn’t explosive. It would boost the incomes of farmers across the country and its supply route is ridiculously short: the vehicles in every state in the US could be operated on fuel that originated and was processed in that state.
And the exhaust smells likes French fries. Make that Freedom fries: freedom from the fuel from hell.
Next article from Al: Biodiesel is the future.
Posted by Joe Anybody
at 8:06 PM PDT
Updated: Thursday, 19 July 2007 8:36 PM PDT
