14 ms·

Where our gasoline comes from

196 points by avonmach 4y ago

bradgessler 4y ago
Makes you wonder what it would be like to run your car on single origin gasoline.
- autotech 4y ago
  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?
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    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). https://brewhaus.com/how-to-distill-ethanol-with-a-moonshine-still.html https://brewhaus.com/how-to-distill-ethanol-with-a-moonshine...
    - dontlaugh 4y ago
      Lost of engines don't even need modification. Almost all direct injection petrol engines work well with almost 100% ethanol, for example.
      - londons_explore 4y ago
        Depends what you mean by 'work'. 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.
        dontlaugh 4y ago
        Sure, but filling tanks is fast. 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.
        fuzzfactor 4y ago
        >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. One reason Indy cars use alcohols.
    - Qwertious 4y ago
      >combustion engines modified 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.
  - bunabhucan 4y ago
    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. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/refining-crude-oil-inputs-and-outputs.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
    - adrianN 4y ago
      Hopefully we'll leave the oil in the ground and synthesize what we need from atmospheric carbon.
  - buildsjets 4y ago
    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.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  >run your car on single origin gasoline. 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.
- elil17 4y ago
  Certainly it would have a richer aroma that only true gasoline snobs could appreciate
- johnrgrace 4y ago
  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. Here is a simple overview on blending https://inside.mines.edu/~jjechura/Refining/11_Blending_Optimization.pdf https://inside.mines.edu/~jjechura/Refining/11_Blending_Opti...
btgeekboy 4y ago
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. For the raw material, crude oil, you need to jump over to https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/where-our-oil-comes-from.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  the way i understand it america basically doesn’t want refinery in our country due to what it does to air quality it’s like, “let’s let another country bare the burden/suffer” we pay for the luxury i guess at least that’s how i understood it, could be wrong, would love to learn otherwise
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    https://www.valero.com/about/locations/benicia-refinery https://www.valero.com/about/locations/benicia-refinery (there are refineries in the United States)
  - repiret 4y ago
    Most of the oil consumed in the United States is refined in the United States. We import relatively little already-refined petroleum products.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    The US imports <1% of its gasoline: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_a_epm0f_mbbl_a_cur.htm 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.
    - Brybry 4y ago
Yhippa 4y ago
This was a good overview. I was curious about how crude oil got turned into gasoline and found this gem if anybody else is interested: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2018/market-snapshot-how-does-refinery-turn-crude-oil-into-products-like-gasoline-diesel.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma....
- prennert 4y ago
  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?
  - detaro 4y ago
    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.
  - tkgally 4y ago
    One method for doing that is catalytic cracking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking https://www.britannica.com/technology/petroleum-refining/Visbreaking-thermal-cracking-and-coking https://www.britannica.com/technology/petroleum-refining/Vis...
  - ljf 4y ago
    Hopefully we can move to non-oil based 'plastics' at the same time. In an idea world we could leave these carbon deposits where they are.
    - PM_me_your_math 4y ago
LeoPanthera 4y ago
Imagine how much carbon is released transporting all that crude oil and refined gasoline even before you burn it.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Relatively little, actually. Most of that flow happens via pipeline, which is by some distance the most energy-efficient means of transportation.
  - thombat 4y ago
    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) [0] https://channelnz.com/what-we-do/terminal-pipeline-services/#:~:text=We%20distribute%20fuel%20via%20the,next%20door%20to%20our%20site https://channelnz.com/what-we-do/terminal-pipeline-services/....
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    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. [1]: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XD5M9z3Kg8o/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XD5M9z3Kg8o/maxresdefault.jpg
  - SigmundA 4y ago
    15% is lost in refining.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    Lots of oil gets shuttled around the world on ships, which emit lots of CO2. The "last mile" of oil delivery in the US is all with dirty diesel trucks as well.
rkagerer 4y ago
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?
- andromeduck 4y ago
  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.
- teruakohatu 4y ago
  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! https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2023/01/auckland-motorists-cars-break-down-after-filling-up-fuel-with-water-at-caltex-station.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2023/01/auckland-...
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > 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.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  >skimp 'just a little' on quality 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.
buboy 4y ago
dinosaurs
Carrie0Schnapp 4y ago
[dead]
oaiey 4y ago
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).
frozencell 4y ago
Why not call it petroleum and does the US still buy 8% of this oil from Russia through Allied proxy countries like India who buy from Russia?
- iolo 4y ago
  Gasoline and petroleum are different products as pointed out in the sibling comment. You may be thinking of petrol, which is what gasoline is often called outside the US.
- Synaesthesia 4y ago
  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)
  - mycall 4y ago
    Oil chemistry can determine country of origin and sanction enforcement is possible at port.
- bilqis 4y ago
  The same reason why Russian gas is still getting transported through Ukraine’s territory and why Ukraine gets transfer fees from Russia for it.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
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!
- adrianN 4y ago
  I can buy a number of dangerous chemicals in my local hardware store.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  You can buy a costco pack of bleach and another of ammonia for about the same.
Thorentis 4y ago
I can't see how batteries will ever be a more efficient or convinient way to distribute energy for use in transportation.
- ysleepy 4y ago
  Remember that combustion engines are only 25% efficient in extracting the energy from gasoline.
  - cdot2 4y ago
    And gasoline has such a high energy density that even at 25% efficiency it's more effective at storing and transporting energy than batteries.
    - SigmundA 4y ago
      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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  Batteries are not a distribution method, no one plans to distribute batteries. We will use the same transmission systems we do now for that...
- SigmundA 4y ago
  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.
wonderwonder 4y ago
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.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  They don't mix very much. Octane is a measured property of the final mix. Some things boost it and so on, so it can be added in some sense.
- jgeada 4y ago
  All the gasoline is the same, octane is controlled by a very small amount of additives added at the end. Midgrade (90 octane) and Premium (93-94 octane) are not higher quality gasolines, they are the same gasoline with slightly more additives. It is a major scam how much gas stations charge per gallon for some micrograms of ignition retarders and detergents.
  - johnrgrace 4y ago
    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.
willyt 4y ago
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.
- elil17 4y ago
  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.
  - staringback 4y ago
    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)
    - ben7799 4y ago
      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.
daneel_w 4y ago
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?
- kiliantics 4y ago
  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 [1] I believe I heard that in this kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc
  - daneel_w 4y ago
    I'm only interested in the cost of the fuel itself. Most of the periphery is in decent parity with EVs.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    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.
ben7799 4y ago
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.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  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".
  - simfree 4y ago
    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.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      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.
    - nfriedly 4y ago
      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.

196 points by avonmach 4y ago

bradgessler 4y ago

Makes you wonder what it would be like to run your car on single origin gasoline.

autotech 4y ago
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?
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  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). https://brewhaus.com/how-to-distill-ethanol-with-a-moonshine-still.html https://brewhaus.com/how-to-distill-ethanol-with-a-moonshine...
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    Lost of engines don't even need modification. Almost all direct injection petrol engines work well with almost 100% ethanol, for example.
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      Depends what you mean by 'work'. 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.
      - dontlaugh 4y ago
        Sure, but filling tanks is fast. 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.
        fuzzfactor 4y ago
        >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. One reason Indy cars use alcohols.
  - Qwertious 4y ago
    >combustion engines modified 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.
- bunabhucan 4y ago
  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. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/refining-crude-oil-inputs-and-outputs.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...
  - adrianN 4y ago
    Hopefully we'll leave the oil in the ground and synthesize what we need from atmospheric carbon.
- buildsjets 4y ago
  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.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
>run your car on single origin gasoline. 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.
elil17 4y ago
Certainly it would have a richer aroma that only true gasoline snobs could appreciate
johnrgrace 4y ago
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. Here is a simple overview on blending https://inside.mines.edu/~jjechura/Refining/11_Blending_Optimization.pdf https://inside.mines.edu/~jjechura/Refining/11_Blending_Opti...

btgeekboy 4y ago

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. For the raw material, crude oil, you need to jump over to https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/where-our-oil-comes-from.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
the way i understand it america basically doesn’t want refinery in our country due to what it does to air quality it’s like, “let’s let another country bare the burden/suffer” we pay for the luxury i guess at least that’s how i understood it, could be wrong, would love to learn otherwise
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  https://www.valero.com/about/locations/benicia-refinery https://www.valero.com/about/locations/benicia-refinery (there are refineries in the United States)
- repiret 4y ago
  Most of the oil consumed in the United States is refined in the United States. We import relatively little already-refined petroleum products.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  The US imports <1% of its gasoline: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_snd_a_epm0f_mbbl_a_cur.htm 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.
  - Brybry 4y ago

Yhippa 4y ago

This was a good overview. I was curious about how crude oil got turned into gasoline and found this gem if anybody else is interested: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2018/market-snapshot-how-does-refinery-turn-crude-oil-into-products-like-gasoline-diesel.html https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/ma....

prennert 4y ago
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?
- detaro 4y ago
  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.
- tkgally 4y ago
  One method for doing that is catalytic cracking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking https://www.britannica.com/technology/petroleum-refining/Visbreaking-thermal-cracking-and-coking https://www.britannica.com/technology/petroleum-refining/Vis...
- ljf 4y ago
  Hopefully we can move to non-oil based 'plastics' at the same time. In an idea world we could leave these carbon deposits where they are.
  - PM_me_your_math 4y ago

LeoPanthera 4y ago

Imagine how much carbon is released transporting all that crude oil and refined gasoline even before you burn it.

jcranmer 4y ago
Relatively little, actually. Most of that flow happens via pipeline, which is by some distance the most energy-efficient means of transportation.
- thombat 4y ago
  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) [0] https://channelnz.com/what-we-do/terminal-pipeline-services/#:~:text=We%20distribute%20fuel%20via%20the,next%20door%20to%20our%20site https://channelnz.com/what-we-do/terminal-pipeline-services/....
- londons_explore 4y ago
  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. [1]: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XD5M9z3Kg8o/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XD5M9z3Kg8o/maxresdefault.jpg
- SigmundA 4y ago
  15% is lost in refining.
- ben7799 4y ago
  Lots of oil gets shuttled around the world on ships, which emit lots of CO2. The "last mile" of oil delivery in the US is all with dirty diesel trucks as well.

rkagerer 4y ago

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?

andromeduck 4y ago
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.
teruakohatu 4y ago
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! https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2023/01/auckland-motorists-cars-break-down-after-filling-up-fuel-with-water-at-caltex-station.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2023/01/auckland-...
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > 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.
fuzzfactor 4y ago
>skimp 'just a little' on quality 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.

buboy 4y ago

dinosaurs

Carrie0Schnapp 4y ago

[dead]

oaiey 4y ago

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).

frozencell 4y ago

Why not call it petroleum and does the US still buy 8% of this oil from Russia through Allied proxy countries like India who buy from Russia?

iolo 4y ago
Gasoline and petroleum are different products as pointed out in the sibling comment. You may be thinking of petrol, which is what gasoline is often called outside the US.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
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)
- mycall 4y ago
  Oil chemistry can determine country of origin and sanction enforcement is possible at port.
bilqis 4y ago
The same reason why Russian gas is still getting transported through Ukraine’s territory and why Ukraine gets transfer fees from Russia for it.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

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!

adrianN 4y ago
I can buy a number of dangerous chemicals in my local hardware store.
Schroedingersat 4y ago
You can buy a costco pack of bleach and another of ammonia for about the same.

Thorentis 4y ago

I can't see how batteries will ever be a more efficient or convinient way to distribute energy for use in transportation.

ysleepy 4y ago
Remember that combustion engines are only 25% efficient in extracting the energy from gasoline.
- cdot2 4y ago
  And gasoline has such a high energy density that even at 25% efficiency it's more effective at storing and transporting energy than batteries.
  - SigmundA 4y ago
    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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
LatteLazy 4y ago
Batteries are not a distribution method, no one plans to distribute batteries. We will use the same transmission systems we do now for that...
SigmundA 4y ago
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.

wonderwonder 4y ago

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.

maxerickson 4y ago
They don't mix very much. Octane is a measured property of the final mix. Some things boost it and so on, so it can be added in some sense.
jgeada 4y ago
All the gasoline is the same, octane is controlled by a very small amount of additives added at the end. Midgrade (90 octane) and Premium (93-94 octane) are not higher quality gasolines, they are the same gasoline with slightly more additives. It is a major scam how much gas stations charge per gallon for some micrograms of ignition retarders and detergents.
- johnrgrace 4y ago
  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.

willyt 4y ago

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.

elil17 4y ago
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.
- staringback 4y ago
  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)
  - ben7799 4y ago
    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.

daneel_w 4y ago

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?

kiliantics 4y ago
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 [1] I believe I heard that in this kurzgesagt video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiw6_JakZFc
- daneel_w 4y ago
  I'm only interested in the cost of the fuel itself. Most of the periphery is in decent parity with EVs.
- ben7799 4y ago
  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.

ben7799 4y ago

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.

dsfyu404ed 4y ago
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".
- simfree 4y ago
  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.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    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.
  - nfriedly 4y ago
    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.