The dirty cost of one man's hypermiling?

[RedDevil]

Cars have undeniably grown much cleaner over the years...

[betasniper]

Originally Posted by Midnight Drifter

By the way, P&G is impossible with my new car. Damn push-to-start won't shut the engine off unless I'm < 5 MPH. But I did lose an entire cylinder and 500 lbs, and gaines 10 MPG...

I think you have to hold the Start/stop button for three(3) seconds when moving to shut the engine off.

[SentraSE-R]

Found it in pp 15-16 of this thread.

02-20-2012, 05:17 PM
Thanks very much for not giving up on me!I am revisiting the issue after reading this article, which states "April 23, 2009 The Guardian has reported on new research showing that in one year, a single large container ship can emit cancer and asthma-causing pollutants equivalent to that of 50 million cars," and "15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars." Certainly my paltry 226 gallons of gasoline burned last year and 11,650 miles driven aren't even a hiccup of a giant cargo ship's pollution: 1/50,000,000 of that cargo ship's pollution, if it runs its engines 24/7, is .63 seconds. It emits more in .63 seconds,\ than the average car does in a year. Even if my car emits 75X more HCs than the average car, its annual HC output isn't a minute of the cargo ship's annual pollution.If someone could quantify the claims about the amount of air pollution the refineries produce to produce my 226 gallons of gasoline, or other examples of how insignificant my personal pollution is, I'm teetering on the brink of coming back.I'm still trying to wrap my mind around how much of a problem 80 million pounds of unreported volatile organic compounds is. If my 226 gal. of gasoline = 1356 lbs of VOC, that's one thing, but if we're talking about those 226 gallons equaling 25,764 lbs of CO2, with 40 million cars in CA, 80 million pounds isn't that much.

02-20-2012, 09:06 PM
Thanks Mark y Carlos,I found a fairly comprehensive analysis here. There are 67 pages in the transportation chapter, and the Transportation Life Cycle Analysis proves that diesel is ~20% less costly in life cycle costs. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a separation of production/shipping cost (upstream cost) v. on-road cost (downstream cost) in the life cycle analysis.Just a WAG tells me you LCA guys are right. If we're employing fleets of supertankers to import millions of barrels of crude oil from the middle east annually, what is the cost? 160 million bbls/yr from Saudi Arabia alone = >160 shiploads X 6000 miles each way (at 20 mph X 24 hrs/day) X 25 days RT each. That's 4000 days of supertanker operation, or 10.95 supertankers' annual pollution - as much as 547 million cars would produce in that same year. Add other middle east exporters we buy from, and it's easy to see transportation pollution just for middle east crude exceeding all our US car-produced pollution.

05-11-2012, 07:06 AM
Time for an update. I quit clean hypermiling at the end of April, after completing a 3664 mile round-trip to Texas with a non-hypermiler. We set the cruise control to 60 mph, but did no more. Sum total of my clean hypermiling was 6600 miles at 43.6 mpg, about a 6 mpg penalty for not shutting the engine off.I haven't updated my mileage logs, but I'm averaging 50.1 mpg on my current 1300 mile trip to New Mexico, v. 41.1 mpg on the 3664 RT to Tx. 9 mpg for just P&G - I'll take it.

[elhigh]

^^
Avoided personal fuel consumption has a significant cascade effect, as you have pointed out. Even if your thrifty ways pollute more at your tailpipe, there are a great many tailpipes involved. Your reduced usage cannot affect their emissions in any way but to reduce them.

[wdb]

Originally Posted by kennybobby

The judge could have charged him under the penile code, but the evidence wouldn't stand up in court...

Fixed it for you.

[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 ?

[nemo]

The thought here using of less fuel at the consumer level while creating more pollution might create less pollution big picture. The use of less fuel would require less exploration, drilling, shipping, refining, shipping and there by less pollution.

[rmay635703]

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 ?

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.

[American Viking]

I disagree with your statements that pre-obdII cars more polluting..

OBD II protocols are biased to keeping the catalyst hot, at the expense of mileage and efficient combustion. In fact if you make a modification that reduces the emissions significantly, the computer will enrich the mixture to extremes to get exhaust dirty enough to burn in the catalyst.
That's just a gross waste of fuel.
Its actually easier to tune an engine to run clean enough to not need the god awful catalytic converter at all. And don't let the EPA tell you that it cannot be done, it can.

I'm not big fan of the crazy lean burn engines either, but I like to be just a bit leaner than stoichiometric ratio.

If these hybrids and the new ICE's that shut off at traffic lights, either have to some quick heat-up protocol (either a shot of raw fuel directly at the cat to flash it off, a blowtorch hot air injection just ahead of the cat to thermally kick it up, or an electric heater built into the casing & honeycomb matrix) or they must have some exemption from the startup flash-off time. It used to be called the 240 (second) test.

[serialk11r]

Originally Posted by American Viking

I'm not big fan of the crazy lean burn engines either, but I like to be just a bit leaner than stoichiometric ratio.

If these hybrids and the new ICE's that shut off at traffic lights, either have to some quick heat-up protocol (either a shot of raw fuel directly at the cat to flash it off, a blowtorch hot air injection just ahead of the cat to thermally kick it up, or an electric heater built into the casing & honeycomb matrix) or they must have some exemption from the startup flash-off time. It used to be called the 240 (second) test.

Uh, I don't know if you notice but cold engines running stoichiometric smell horrible. I don't know if mixed port/direct injection engines are able to not use a catalyst, but they'd fail NOx, and so would your lean of stoichiometric burn.

Cars do not run rich to heat the cat up, they retard timing. Wastes fuel, but doesn't increase pollution. Start stop is usually disabled when the engine is cold, again not a problem.