Quote:
Originally Posted by Cd
Sentra : It seems as though what you are saying is that you give up trying to create less pollution due to the fact that someone else is creating much more pollution than you are.
Shouldn't that fact make us want to try even harder to reduce pollution ?
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The most important type of pollution to reduce in terms of a consumer is waste. Which means for gas its reducing the amount of CO2 emitted, there is no possible way to emit less CO2 while also getting lower FE.
Remember our credo is
1. Reduce
2. Re-use
3. Recycle
the author of that classic credo noted that the first 2 were more important than the last one by a long mile.
I took some rather scant and shoddy information on the average emissions of powerplants and the average emissions of a fuel refinery (both in rather non-standard ideotic units of measure that requried a lot of math to convert from multiple unrelated studies, I remember one study with lots of data was talking up the reduction in pollution by adding specialized controls and CNG injection to coal) To compare the supposed Nox, CO, and VOC emissions from My Honda Insight on a per gallon basis (and on the subsuquent per mile basis) to the emissions relating to the production of the gallon of gas in terms of just the transportation, the refinery emissions and the emissions from the electricity required by the refinery on a per gallon basis.
I did not fully encapsulate the transportation element in my analisys (poor data) so it was a very small part of the pollution (likely undestated) but It appeared that the powerplant + refinery + a small amount of the transportation emissions = roughly 10x+ more pollution to make a gallon of gas than my car put out the taillpipe.
Even with the very poor incomplete data it appeared that the ONLY reasonable way of reducing emissions was to reduce fuel usage.
I believe I had a snippet of this information posted somewhere on chevy volt forums and I had a full post on one of the many yahoo groups I used to frequent (7 years ago
)
I tried to get some of this info together a while back but unfortunately nobody doing studies wants to focus on the massive upstream pollution and present it in a way that can add to our discussion (must not be fashionable) but most of our gains still lie in focusing on large industrial polluters, I think the industrial side of gasoline still pollutes like its 1950, while our domestic cars have gone past the point of dimished returns. (many refiners run their own outdated "powerplants" which are usually small enough to be more excempt from the laws that normally apply to large power producers meaning the data may be squewed even more than I mention here)
Ah well.
PS (Units like 1000's of metric tons per year pollution on a certain max output powerplant or refiner without a comparitive energy unit means ESTIMATE, maybe I should talk to some of the guys that put together studies so they make usefull data; I make 300tons less pollution but I can't tell you how much usable energy thats over, bleh)
Anyone else want to try? the studies I find lately are not complete enough to not make estimation over the amount of fuel/kws the pollution is over, but given we know the size and normal duty cycle we can get a closeish estimate (1/3 to 3x) Which when we are talking 10x the pollution still gets us in the range of 3x-30x which is still "more" comparitively speaking.