Electric cars, does everyone really think they are amazing.
Discussion
DonkeyApple said:
otolith said:
DonkeyApple said:
But that level is not a substantial decline. Naphtha use is growing, kerosene is also. Gasoline and diesel will still be produced in excess amounts. Substantially so. It's the inconvenient truth for the eco argument as they don't have an answer and as evangelists they don't want to face this issue.
Are you sure that the demand is specifically for heavier fractions, and not just for cheap hydrocarbon feedstock which is surplus to fuel refining?'According to the IEA, the projected 1.4m bbl/day expansion in crude demand in 2018 will be largely driven by rebounding industrial demand, with liquefied petroleum gases (LPG), including ethane, accounting for approximately 35% of the projected global demand increase, while gasoil and diesel will account for another 30%. Gasoline and jet kerosene will account for 17% and 12%, respectively, of the projected global growth.'
https://www.icis.com/resources/news/2017/06/14/101...
Ie there are two big elephants in the room for the eco lobby.
Firstly their belief that oil consumption will decline if we stop needing gasoline.
And secondly, what do we do with the gasoline fraction as it will still be being produced (it won't be being refined out into specific fuel types but it will obviously still be being distilled out) but we have no commercial use for it?
otolith said:
Yeah, but what I was getting at is that we fractionally distil crude. We use the lighter fractions for fuel. We then sell the heavier fractions for other uses. You're assuming that the lighter fractions aren't useful if we're not burning them - given that one of the significant things we do with the heavier fractions is to crack them to make lighter ones for fuel (and also for other industrial uses), I'm not sure it's that way round. I think that if we stop using those fractions for fuel, we'll use them as industrial feedstock.
Mtgats really my question, other than burning for cars or energy what industrial use do the shorter chain molecules have?We will be splitting out the higher grade for naptha and kerosine still but that massive slug that sits in between those two has no apparent major use outside of tipping it into cars and making sweet music.
This thread is going all over the place with people quoting posts from 20 pages ago, it's almost as though some of those who seem more likely to criticise others points are deliberately trying to make the thread unreadable.
I've answered Tinrobot's 'questions' about what happens if range of cars that have petrol engines (including hybrids) goes up, fuel prices also go up as the government still needs the same revenue from fuel duty, so half price ice fuel (LPG) is still just as viable. Check historical evidence if this seems incorrect - years ago an average car might have got 20mpg but was as cheap to run as a car that does 50mpg today.
Lots of talk about power stations and peaks and troughs in electricity usage throughout a day (less power used at night, more at dinner time etc).
Most people agree we will need a greater number of power stations as EV numbers increase. Most EVs might charge at night to make use of the spare generating capacity during what is currently the trough in electricity usage. People talk about installing mass storage batteries at various sites to help balance EV charge load on the grid too. Has everyone missed the point that if we currently need X power stations because they need to meet peak demand, and such batteries are feasible, then we could install such batteries at some of the current power stations we already have (and far easier to install them at power stations than install them elsewhere) and could even demolish some of the current power stations if we don't have EVs? If these batteries (and load balancing) are indeed feasible then we don't need to consider peaks and troughs in electricity demand much at all and can instead look solely to generating capacity in a day versus usage in a day. And now the number of power stations you need just to push EVs is 9 (or you work out the number of power stations needed just to push EVs!). If it turns out batteries are not so great or are too expensive for this (as in, what, more expensive than nuclear power stations?) this would reflect on the price and ability of EVs anyway.
The problems with 40 ton trucks being EVs are compounded. A car might way 2 tons, so the truck weighs 20 times as much, for it to have the same range as the car it will need close to 20 times as big a battery (10 tons out of the trucks 40 ton capacity). Now when you need to charge it you have to wait either 20 times longer or have 20 times as great a rate of charge. I'll take it as read that a Tesla can be supercharged to 80% of it's 80kwh battery capacity in 40 minutes, implying a charge rate of nearly 1mw. For the truck to charge to 80% of it's battery capacity in 40 minutes would need a charge rate of near 20Megawatts.... Good luck with that one! And of course 20 Teslas charging to 80% in 40 minutes would also need a charge rate of 20Megawatts, so good luck with that one too... Without the local massive storage battery (bigger than even the £30million battery so far suggested) or pylons to the charging site how are you going to have a handy 20Mw power feed at the site? Battery regeneration during braking and going downhill is a mute point, this isn't to say it doesn't have a massive effect, it is to say that a 2 ton car going downhill with make 1/20th as much regenerative power going down the hill as a 40 ton truck.. so if you need X battery for the 2 ton car you still need a 20X battery for the truck. Some people's overstatement of the pros of regenerative power might have us believe that we only ever need a 1X battery regardless of the size and weight of the vehicle.
Here's a solution to all your EV issues... Start making Sinclair C5's again but fit them with laptop batteries. People only drive 20 miles a day so should be happy in a C5 with a pram like rain cover. C5's will only use a fraction of the power of a Leaf and really could be charged quickly at any domestic socket. Take the bigger batteries you were going to fit in EVs and fit them at power station sites, now you don't need any new power stations and can even demolish some of those we already have, just keep one or two of the stations you were going to demolish because they will still be needed to keep the C5s charged.
I've answered Tinrobot's 'questions' about what happens if range of cars that have petrol engines (including hybrids) goes up, fuel prices also go up as the government still needs the same revenue from fuel duty, so half price ice fuel (LPG) is still just as viable. Check historical evidence if this seems incorrect - years ago an average car might have got 20mpg but was as cheap to run as a car that does 50mpg today.
Lots of talk about power stations and peaks and troughs in electricity usage throughout a day (less power used at night, more at dinner time etc).
Most people agree we will need a greater number of power stations as EV numbers increase. Most EVs might charge at night to make use of the spare generating capacity during what is currently the trough in electricity usage. People talk about installing mass storage batteries at various sites to help balance EV charge load on the grid too. Has everyone missed the point that if we currently need X power stations because they need to meet peak demand, and such batteries are feasible, then we could install such batteries at some of the current power stations we already have (and far easier to install them at power stations than install them elsewhere) and could even demolish some of the current power stations if we don't have EVs? If these batteries (and load balancing) are indeed feasible then we don't need to consider peaks and troughs in electricity demand much at all and can instead look solely to generating capacity in a day versus usage in a day. And now the number of power stations you need just to push EVs is 9 (or you work out the number of power stations needed just to push EVs!). If it turns out batteries are not so great or are too expensive for this (as in, what, more expensive than nuclear power stations?) this would reflect on the price and ability of EVs anyway.
The problems with 40 ton trucks being EVs are compounded. A car might way 2 tons, so the truck weighs 20 times as much, for it to have the same range as the car it will need close to 20 times as big a battery (10 tons out of the trucks 40 ton capacity). Now when you need to charge it you have to wait either 20 times longer or have 20 times as great a rate of charge. I'll take it as read that a Tesla can be supercharged to 80% of it's 80kwh battery capacity in 40 minutes, implying a charge rate of nearly 1mw. For the truck to charge to 80% of it's battery capacity in 40 minutes would need a charge rate of near 20Megawatts.... Good luck with that one! And of course 20 Teslas charging to 80% in 40 minutes would also need a charge rate of 20Megawatts, so good luck with that one too... Without the local massive storage battery (bigger than even the £30million battery so far suggested) or pylons to the charging site how are you going to have a handy 20Mw power feed at the site? Battery regeneration during braking and going downhill is a mute point, this isn't to say it doesn't have a massive effect, it is to say that a 2 ton car going downhill with make 1/20th as much regenerative power going down the hill as a 40 ton truck.. so if you need X battery for the 2 ton car you still need a 20X battery for the truck. Some people's overstatement of the pros of regenerative power might have us believe that we only ever need a 1X battery regardless of the size and weight of the vehicle.
Here's a solution to all your EV issues... Start making Sinclair C5's again but fit them with laptop batteries. People only drive 20 miles a day so should be happy in a C5 with a pram like rain cover. C5's will only use a fraction of the power of a Leaf and really could be charged quickly at any domestic socket. Take the bigger batteries you were going to fit in EVs and fit them at power station sites, now you don't need any new power stations and can even demolish some of those we already have, just keep one or two of the stations you were going to demolish because they will still be needed to keep the C5s charged.
Edited by SimonYorkshire on Thursday 21st September 11:47
DonkeyApple said:
Mtgats really my question, other than burning for cars or energy what industrial use do the shorter chain molecules have?
I think generally the short chain molecules are more useful for synthesis, and that the first thing you do with the longer chains for industrial use is to crack them. Indeed, I believe natural gas is used for plastics more than oil is.otolith said:
Yeah, but what I was getting at is that we fractionally distil crude. We use the lighter fractions for fuel. We then sell the heavier fractions for other uses. You're assuming that the lighter fractions aren't useful if we're not burning them - given that one of the significant things we do with the heavier fractions is to crack them to make lighter ones for fuel (and also for other industrial uses), I'm not sure it's that way round. I think that if we stop using those fractions for fuel, we'll use them as industrial feedstock.
Yes. In the early days of refining, they just fractionally distilled. They got a few % of octane out, and used that in cars. There was very quickly a serious problem, as they had loads of pretty useless fractions, and not enough petrol. Light fractions are useful (methane etc), medium fractions are useful (octane etc) but there is a limit to the amount of heavier stuff you can use. The real problem with heavy fractions as a feedstock is the inconsistency: are you dealing with chains 15 long or 25 long. Organic chemistry on an industrial scale is about turning most of your input into something you want. You'll never get 100%, but the more consistent your input, the better chance you have.
So cracking was invented to break up the big stuff. Starting with thermal cracking (just make it effing hot, incredibly dangerous, particularly with 1920s technology), now we have catalytic and hydrocracking that turn heavy fractions into lighter fractions. We're so good at it now we can say "I want 6 carbons, but I don't want hexane, I want cyclohexane.
If demand for Octane declines, they'll just alter the crackers (temperature, pressure in the main) to produce more ethane (base feedstock for lots of plastics) and other useful things. It really isn't a problem.
DonkeyApple said:
e30m3Mark said:
Is this going to be like diesels, where the Government keeps pushing and quoting electric vehicles as being the future and a planet saving solution, right up to the point where we discover that actually it isn't as green as we're being led to believe? Maybe even an electric vehicle scrap page scheme?
Woa. You've jumped a big step there. It's hybrids first. Over the next two decades everyone will be switched to hybrids and then those will be discovered to be evil etc. Then we can move onto EVs. But in all likelihood by then the whole concept of energy consumption in general being evil will be well ensconced and so will the taxes on personal/household electricity and gas usage. Very few households can self generate in the UK so an enviro tax on domestic gas and electricity is perfect. Not only does it cover the car but it's an easy sell to the electorate as it penalises scum in big houses. And it will deliver absolutely enormous VAT receipts and cash flows as millions of people rush to spend billions of GBP on energy efficient household appliances in order to save tens of GBP on the annual utility bills. Plus, the less society eventually begins consuming power the more you ratchet up the tax.
Mark may have more of a point that it seems at first consideration. Imagine having gone to all the expense and effort to get people out of their ice cars and into hyrbids or pure EVs... only for nuclear fission to be invented shortly afterwards. I can't see fission being invented (it would help if the money and effort being spent on hybrids and pure EVs was instead spent on developing fission) but if it is invented we could then have hydrogen fuelled cars and run them in much the same way as we do our current cars... no range anxiety, no long charge times, comparatively very small changes to infrastructure. It is an inefficient use of energy to produce hydrogen to power cars (via either fuel cells or ice engines) in comparison to charging batteries to push cars, but the battery method means you need the batteries, an upgraded grid, a change in the way we use vehicles and you still ultimately need power stations. It doesn't matter how inefficient in terms of electricity it is to produce hydrogen to push cars is if you have an unlimited supply of clean electricity from fusion power stations and the hydrogen is produced next door to the fusion power stations with the fleet of tankers delivering hydrogen to forecourts also running on hydrogen.
otolith said:
Welshbeef said:
I remember reading something years ago about what bhp for 70mph and it was 30bhp - on a flat no strong headwind.
Will obviously vary with frontal area and drag coefficient, but that sounds about right.
rxe said:
Yes.
In the early days of refining, they just fractionally distilled. They got a few % of octane out, and used that in cars. There was very quickly a serious problem, as they had loads of pretty useless fractions, and not enough petrol. Light fractions are useful (methane etc), medium fractions are useful (octane etc) but there is a limit to the amount of heavier stuff you can use. The real problem with heavy fractions as a feedstock is the inconsistency: are you dealing with chains 15 long or 25 long. Organic chemistry on an industrial scale is about turning most of your input into something you want. You'll never get 100%, but the more consistent your input, the better chance you have.
So cracking was invented to break up the big stuff. Starting with thermal cracking (just make it effing hot, incredibly dangerous, particularly with 1920s technology), now we have catalytic and hydrocracking that turn heavy fractions into lighter fractions. We're so good at it now we can say "I want 6 carbons, but I don't want hexane, I want cyclohexane.
If demand for Octane declines, they'll just alter the crackers (temperature, pressure in the main) to produce more ethane (base feedstock for lots of plastics) and other useful things. It really isn't a problem.
Thanks. This looks to answer much of that question. In the early days of refining, they just fractionally distilled. They got a few % of octane out, and used that in cars. There was very quickly a serious problem, as they had loads of pretty useless fractions, and not enough petrol. Light fractions are useful (methane etc), medium fractions are useful (octane etc) but there is a limit to the amount of heavier stuff you can use. The real problem with heavy fractions as a feedstock is the inconsistency: are you dealing with chains 15 long or 25 long. Organic chemistry on an industrial scale is about turning most of your input into something you want. You'll never get 100%, but the more consistent your input, the better chance you have.
So cracking was invented to break up the big stuff. Starting with thermal cracking (just make it effing hot, incredibly dangerous, particularly with 1920s technology), now we have catalytic and hydrocracking that turn heavy fractions into lighter fractions. We're so good at it now we can say "I want 6 carbons, but I don't want hexane, I want cyclohexane.
If demand for Octane declines, they'll just alter the crackers (temperature, pressure in the main) to produce more ethane (base feedstock for lots of plastics) and other useful things. It really isn't a problem.
SimonYorkshire said:
The problems with 40 ton trucks being EVs are compounded. A car might way 2 tons, so the truck weighs 20 times as much, for it to have the same range as the car it will need close to 20 times as big a battery (10 tons out of the trucks 40 ton capacity). Now when you need to charge it you have to wait either 20 times longer or have 20 times as great a rate of charge.
Weight (mass) isn't a factor in range for given speed, only acceleration. At a set speed its rolling resistance and drag. A truck of course has a greater rolling resistance, but to simply say that its a multiple based on weight is just being thickEdited by SimonYorkshire on Thursday 21st September 11:47
But you knew that being in the top 1% of PH Engineers didn't you
SimonYorkshire said:
Pleased to read DonkeyApple agrees with my point that the less of something you need the more tax can be applied to it.
You won't remain pleased for long as you very clearly cannot read. As such you have totally misunderstood what I was saying or much more likely deliberately distorted to try and make it fit your extreme and incorrect beliefs. In reality I have actually wholly disagreed with you as what I and others have been discussing is the wholesale migration away from fossil fuel taxation at the pumps and to the far more efficient taxation of household energy consumption.
With regards to your belief that taxation on petrol would rise to maintain the tax take on fossil fuels? Er, no. I disagree with you. It isn't exactly how economics work. Hence why all new taxation mechanisms will almost certainly be introduced. Exactly as we are currently facing with media consumption in the U.K.
GT119 said:
The oil and gas companies are confident that consumption will not decline.
They are expecting that any reduction in developed countries will be offset by rising consumption in the developing world.
I think they are wrong with a capital W, the developing world much of which is in the tropics, will develop a EV charging infrastructure very quickly simply because they have no minimal legacy ICE infrastructure to support, same way whole towns and villages that are totally off national grids will develop alternate power supplies (solar) They are expecting that any reduction in developed countries will be offset by rising consumption in the developing world.
I keep using the mobile phone market as an analogy, the reason farmers and goat herders alike have mobile phones in some of the poorest regions on earth is because their countries bypassed to a large extent the cabled infrastructure of the western world.
The biggest producers of EVs are the Chinese, who are aiming at the cheaper mass end of the market, same with solar panels, batteries are the main existing stumbling block and EVs might just provide that missing link.
Why buy a 20year old golf when for say triple the outlay they could have an EV that stores power from their house & provides cheap transport as well as electricity for the home.
DonkeyApple said:
rxe said:
Yes.
In the early days of refining, they just fractionally distilled. They got a few % of octane out, and used that in cars. There was very quickly a serious problem, as they had loads of pretty useless fractions, and not enough petrol. Light fractions are useful (methane etc), medium fractions are useful (octane etc) but there is a limit to the amount of heavier stuff you can use. The real problem with heavy fractions as a feedstock is the inconsistency: are you dealing with chains 15 long or 25 long. Organic chemistry on an industrial scale is about turning most of your input into something you want. You'll never get 100%, but the more consistent your input, the better chance you have.
So cracking was invented to break up the big stuff. Starting with thermal cracking (just make it effing hot, incredibly dangerous, particularly with 1920s technology), now we have catalytic and hydrocracking that turn heavy fractions into lighter fractions. We're so good at it now we can say "I want 6 carbons, but I don't want hexane, I want cyclohexane.
If demand for Octane declines, they'll just alter the crackers (temperature, pressure in the main) to produce more ethane (base feedstock for lots of plastics) and other useful things. It really isn't a problem.
Thanks. This looks to answer much of that question. In the early days of refining, they just fractionally distilled. They got a few % of octane out, and used that in cars. There was very quickly a serious problem, as they had loads of pretty useless fractions, and not enough petrol. Light fractions are useful (methane etc), medium fractions are useful (octane etc) but there is a limit to the amount of heavier stuff you can use. The real problem with heavy fractions as a feedstock is the inconsistency: are you dealing with chains 15 long or 25 long. Organic chemistry on an industrial scale is about turning most of your input into something you want. You'll never get 100%, but the more consistent your input, the better chance you have.
So cracking was invented to break up the big stuff. Starting with thermal cracking (just make it effing hot, incredibly dangerous, particularly with 1920s technology), now we have catalytic and hydrocracking that turn heavy fractions into lighter fractions. We're so good at it now we can say "I want 6 carbons, but I don't want hexane, I want cyclohexane.
If demand for Octane declines, they'll just alter the crackers (temperature, pressure in the main) to produce more ethane (base feedstock for lots of plastics) and other useful things. It really isn't a problem.
Max_Torque said:
SimonYorkshire said:
A car might way 2 tons, so the truck weighs 20 times as much, for it to have the same range as the car it will need close to 20 times as big a battery
^^^ Self proclaimed Mathematical and Engineering genius doesn't know the difference between Mass and Drag......GT119 said:
It shouldn't be too too difficult to work out the size of the battery, a simple ratio of typical diesel mpg between an average sized truck and an average size car would give a reasonable indication.
I would have thought that the heavier the vehicle, the more worthwhile the effect of regenerative braking is, mind.otolith said:
GT119 said:
It shouldn't be too too difficult to work out the size of the battery, a simple ratio of typical diesel mpg between an average sized truck and an average size car would give a reasonable indication.
I would have thought that the heavier the vehicle, the more worthwhile the effect of regenerative braking is, mind.I found this quote from a PHer from 2013 in a thread about truck mpg, "My place of work has a target set at 8.3mpg as an average per driver and across the fleet. The vehicles can easily do it and we pretty much always run right on the cusp of 44 tonne."
So that would suggest to me that across a fleet of trucks the average range per kWh would be around 0.5 -1 miles, let's call it 750 miles per MWh.
How many miles per charge does a truck need to have?
GT119 said:
Max_Torque said:
SimonYorkshire said:
A car might way 2 tons, so the truck weighs 20 times as much, for it to have the same range as the car it will need close to 20 times as big a battery
^^^ Self proclaimed Mathematical and Engineering genius doesn't know the difference between Mass and Drag......In addition mass is a major factor in acceleration (f = ma), and all of that energy is lost in an ICE truck. In an EV Truck you can recover a large proportion of that so even if it takes more energy to accelerate, you also have a large amount of KE to recover.
This thread is gold.Gassing Station | General Gassing | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff