Pet peeve: "clean diesel" greenwashing

[gone-ot]

Diesel Dave -- I can't argue pro or con with your SCR/DPF statements, but I base my original comment on the fact that when I walked through our local VW dealership and one of the diesel engined vehicles was started-up by the salesman for another customer, there was an immediate "...latrine..." (piss) odor in the air. Don't recall which VW vehicle it was however. Doesn't VW use the same "blue-juice" that the Mercedes-Benz Bluetec diesels use?

[UFO]

@Old Tele man -- No, Dave is correct. The VW diesels with DPF do not use the urea for NOx treatment.

[gone-ot]

...hm-m-m-m, then there must have been a 'polecat' hiding under that VW when it was started (ha,ha).

[UFO]

My Jeep CRD has a strange exhaust smell as well, maybe similar to the new VWs, and I attribute it to the catalytic converter. No exhaust fluid for my CRD either.

[mechman600]

Isn't it only the smaller VW diesels that use the NOx absorber as opposed to SCR? I believe (at least) the Touareg uses SCR.

Originally Posted by Old Tele man

I base my original comment on the fact that when I walked through our local VW dealership and one of the diesel engined vehicles was started-up by the salesman for another customer, there was an immediate "...latrine..." (piss) odor in the air.

What's the difference between this and any other engine sold right now? Every engine, gas or diesel, smells like something bad when they fire up cold.

I am around SCR engines all day. Under normal circumstances, I have never smelled ammonia by being around them, unless someone was filling the DEF tank. When started cold, DEF isn't metered into the decomp tube until SCR catalyst inlet temp is pretty hot, like 400F or so. It takes a few minutes, as it is all post DPF, so the last thing to warm up. So smelling "piss" on a cold startup? Either something is seriously malfunctioning or the rank smell is merely the nastiness that goes on whenever a bunch of unburned fuel hits a cold catalyst, gas or diesel - aka: normal cold startup.

Not that I am an absolute advocate for SCR. I just think it is a decent solution compared to other solutions.

[wdb]

Originally Posted by Ed-in-Maine

I don't remember which car it was but about 20 years ago, there was an "Ultra Clean" car who's exhaust was "cleaner" than the intake air I was in LA back then at Hughes Aircraft and from our hill top we could only see Long Beach about once a month I was happy to leave that city in the rear view mirror. So yeah clean is a relative term.
Ed

I haven't read the entire thread yet so pardon me if this has already been discussed. My recollection is that it was a Volvo, that the comparison was specifically in terms of NOx, that it was some city or another in Cali, and that it was due in no small part to the quality of the air going in.

[gone-ot]

Originally Posted by Ed-in-Maine

I don't remember which car it was but about 20 years ago, there was an "Ultra Clean" car who's exhaust was "cleaner" than the intake air I was in LA back then at Hughes Aircraft and from our hill top we could only see Long Beach about once a month I was happy to leave that city in the rear view mirror. So yeah clean is a relative term.
Ed

...Huge Aircrash Company (HAC)? When were you there? The HAC corporate offices were sold off years ago. I joined HAC over here in Tucson, AZ, but made quite a few trips over to the 'Atrium-on-the-Hill' (huge open central space). Back then, HAC was considered "...the Cadillac of the aerospace industries..."

[slowmover]

Re "Greenwash"

We're gonna drill till we die (as a species) . . so hand-wringing or purity in the midst of the consumer society (as distinct from living in one composed of an informed citizenry) is off-putting. Simeon Stylite. We could go on all day about common misconceptions in the image-driven, non-literate world. One can point out the discrepancies, but facts (if indeed they are so) don't sway people, especially fine distinctions.

None of us are exempt from advertising having formed our world would be the salient point.

And on the scale of importance where propaganda is at work ("war": is it physical force exclusively or do large financial maneuvers also count in the definition?) clean diesel is accurate enough in a relative sense as has been noted above per historical references. On that, there is no question. One might as well call it "modern diesel", but "clean" is truly more accurate, thus applicable.

By it's very definition as a chemical compound diesel is dirty. Always will be, a priori, even if perfectly consumed by a motor. But among refining methods, are some better that others? (would be the actual question).

Were this my concern I wouldn't ever concede that the arguments which arise in naming or labelling should be discounted. Or turned, Manichean-like, into black::white distinctions. They don't exist, except for those same benighted un-thinking masses to be swayed. Walter Lippmann and Edmund Bernays (Freud's son-in-law) covered this so long ago that my fathers marketing classes read them as a matter of course more than sixty years ago.

Is it clean diesel? Only by every existing definition. That marketers are doing a disservice couldn't be more wrong (headed).

Gettin hung up on details of "purity" like this is always a little beside the point, is it not? If there were a cheap way to convert bunker fuel powered vehicles to "clean diesel" we'd be all over it, wouldn't we . . as someting to be proud of.

.

[larrybuck]

Maybe we just need to work on water power/steam more!

Plenty of rain water to work with around here! (smile!)

[mechman600]

Originally Posted by larrybuck

Maybe we just need to work on water power/steam more!

Too bad you still have to burn stuff to make steam.