On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 17:57:33 GMT, Robert Redelmeier
You know it makes awful difficult to have a normal Usenet discourse when
the other party clips sentences & paras down to bite sized chunks...
conversation equivalent would be talking over someone who's trying to have
a two-way exchange... but maybe that was your intention?;-) Quite honestly
I don't have the time to re-dissect such a mess and won't again.
I am _more_ than aware enough. I work in the research/tech
support center of a major oil company.
Out of the closet huh?
Many years ago I worked for the Technical
Research Dept of a major too... fuels & then lubes. In fact at one time I
was involved in an investigation as to why the ethanol was disappearing
from the mix. Short of sending down specialized equipment -- what we have
today was not available -- to the bottom of the depot pump/storage tank...
we couldn't find an answer; normal bottom-sampling showed no water. The
chief chemist proposed various possible scenarios but bottom line: we never
found out... but lab testing showed no sign of alcohol after a few days.
Doh! Why would you want to, since many locations don't need it.
Especially into the big pipelines (Colonial & Plantation), the
rule is fungible only, unadditized.
There are a lot of places which use ethanol mix now -- it's certainly
pretty big in volume -- and a lot of different pipelines. My info is that
ethanol, quite recently, was mixed in in the product tank, at least by some
producers, but the practice was changed -- the pipeline transfer of gasohol
*has* been tried with disastrous results.
Doh! You can't store regular gasoline all that long either.
It _does_ contain up to ~10% olefins.
By your statement above you must know, it's relative: in fact olefin
content is getting near-zero in many places due to regulations and the
enhanced stability is quite obvious. My own observation is that, whereas,
at one time, gasoline would not last in a lawnmower tank more than 3 mnths
max, it now happily lasts 9 months... without any signs of "gum" formation
- I have a chemist's trained nose.
The water uptake and eventual
separation -- taking most of the ethanol with it -- can happen in days.
As are many additives. Perfectly good so long as it's done
ratably, inline. No bucket dosing, please!
Ethanol is not really an additive - it's more of a "blending agent" and the
political msg is that ethanol global volume can/should be increased...
implying to me higher %age mixes to come.
Engines break every day. Why not blame the fuel?
The effect is easily explainable... and I did *not* say this was to blame
for every broken engine
IIRC the BRON of ethanol is ~130. At 2% that's 0.8 number on
91 fuel. Frankly, there are bigger problems. It's very easy
to plug FI filters. Many people in the ethanol-mandate areas
add various gasoline antifreezes, often containing methanol.
AFAICT, close: ethanol seems to vary from 120-135 BRON & 95-106 BMON,
depending on what you mix it with but there are err, "variations" in the
data. I'm sure the refiners would be delighted to find a HC blendstock
with a BRON of 130 and might get quite alarmed if its effect was
disappearing en-route; even at your 2% value, and assuming linear response,
Weights & Measures could get quite interested too and at 10% it's getting
extremely serious.
On antifreeze/methanol, your point is?...: methanol is the worst of the
"gas-line" antifreezes - almost totally ineffective in the target
climate/season and has a higher solvent effect on gaskets; isopropanol
(99.9% obviously) is the best but even there the relative solubility in HCs
vs. water is pretty poor - IOW you need to use a lot of it if there's water
in the tank/lines. FWIS I'm afraid most people use it as a corrective
rather than preventative.
Fully agreed.
Of course it can be compared. It's about 1/4 the size,
but has been running 10% ethanol for 30+ years.
I disagree - the car-population density vs. acreage available is no
comparison at all. It's also one of the umm, busted economies.
No, it's hot & humid all the time.
IOW no problem.
Underground is remarkably constant temperature. And anyone
seriously storing fuels ought to have a drier on the vent,
if not full gas blanketting. Tank breathing is the big
problem with temperature changes.
There are lots of floating roof above-ground gasoline storage tanks. With
gasohol and small amounts of water + temp oscillations, there's a (one-way)
pumping effect on separation... and there's always some water present.
Pipelines, storage tanks, bulk plants, but especially many gas station and
car tanks are polluted with small amounts of water. Final products at the
refinery are close to saturated with water at fairly high temps.
This is a *known* problem; I'm surprised you seem to not know about it.
Economic viability can be reached different ways. Reduced cost
would be nice, but increased alternative cost is far more likely.
What happens when crude oil creeps to $100/bbl or higher?
We might get effective and fair rules/economics which encourage reduced
usage by that point... hopefully before. In many other countries they are
effectively already paying ~4 times what we pay in the U.S. at the pump so
that $100. might easily be supported; obviously, ultimately there's a
crisis point but that's not solved by a product which has a negative energy
balance.
Hardly. Dewars and send the boil-off through fuel-cells for
keep-warm, battery charging or back-into-grid. Probably best
suited for large, high-duty-cycle vehicles like busses (of
which there will be many more).
There's always special cases but then you have fragmentation of the fuels
market... i.e. new inefficiencies... which I'm sure will be paid for by
govt., IOW taxes. If you think that hydrogen, high pressure and cryogenics
are viable for personal auto and can fit into something resembling current
inrastructure, I give up - they'll have to show you.
[magnesium hydride is one] but again not very practical... the
disposal problem as just one example.
I _love_ to dispose of magnesium!
While the fundamental research could be valuable, producing
vehicles at this stage is just a waste of the energy which
is supposedly so precious - the pollution balance is even
less convincing.
There are lots of practical problems that can only be discovered
with fleet testing. This _is_ fundamental (engineering) research.
No that's the prototyping/sampling stage - what we are seeing at the moment
is just politically driven - it's much too early to be out of the
experimental lab IMO.