VW TDI vs. Gas comparison

[arb]

Originally Posted by theunchosen

alright scratch that. found the numbers
It takes 165 KWH or 5 GGE(Gallons of Gasoline(or) Equivalent) to refine gasoline. if thats coal powered only its 330 lbs of CO2 per gallon of gasoline. if it follows the national average then at least half the energy is from coal. so just 150 lbs of CO2 per gallon. . .

so 150 lbs is less than 20 lbs of CO2 my car can possibly produce per gallon.

That's just to refine it. It does not include the coal to make the steel for all the equipment to drill, refine, and move the fuel..

On moving it, the pipe line pumps are powered by the fuel they move. This is called "shrinkage" and is usually about 5% for transport from the Golf to Michigan. We have a large refinery outside Detriot. So, throw another chumk of CO2 for this.

In Michigan today, the cheapest gas is $1.51 / gal at Clark - 7975 Middlebelt & Ann in Westland, and Diesel is $2.38 at Marathon - 3199 Gratiot Ave & Mack Ave in Detroit. That's a 37% difference at the lowest end.

But guys, who buys a car simply by the calulator ? For me, the ability to drive 800 miles without stopping for fuel is worth much more than the operation cost. Diesel's get about 40% better mileage in real world non-hybrid biases EPA mpg numbers, and diesel cars also put out about 30% less CO2 than gas cars - again, big value to me..

[arb]

Another thing to remember is states charge different tax rates. Florida is the worste for diesel as they charge almost double the tax as they do for gas...
Gas Taxes

[trebuchet03]

Originally Posted by theunchosen

Trebuchet. . . you have to work 125% harder to clean things up at the refinery. thats the 5:4 issue. It's possible to make refineries cleaner. . .but the people who run them have no interest in doing that because it goes from cutting into their profits to draconian cuts into profits.

I never said it was easy.

If you want to cut global emissions - cut it where it's being emitted. Increasing fuel economy is one part of a solution - but it's not the entire solution.

And yes, the people that run them have no interest in doing it by themselves, at least generally.... These are the same people that have no problem poisoning customers. A gross example would be the Love Canal incident.... Closer to home, Here's the long term national priority Superfund sites in New England alone. All because someone didn't clean up their mess.. Now we're so lucky, after being exposed in the first place, to foot the bill to clean it up.

Increase MPG
Reduce End User Emissions
Reduce Production Emissions
Efficient Infrastructure
R&D for all of the Above and Diverse Alternatives

Fixing one while ignoring else what is not a solution, it's a stop gap and a very long one either.

Aptera
It gets something like 240 odd MPG after its batteries have gone dry.

This is false. When the batteries are fully depleted, it's 120mpg But that's on a variant that is not being sold....
Untitled Document

[theunchosen]

Originally Posted by arb

Another thing to remember is states charge different tax rates. Florida is the worste for diesel as they charge almost double the tax as they do for gas...
Gas Taxes

See this doesn't make any sense. Diesel has a lower tax, both federal and state (21-18 TN, 18-10(?) Federal), and some how they are within 11%?

I would enjoy the having to fill up less, not if it cost more though. Neat Idea that I hadn't given alot of consideration to. I get around 400 miles out of a tank, but fill up only when I go out of town(weekly commute is 30 miles or less)

I also don't have any engine life complaints because mine is still fine at 230K mi.(gas)

[arb]

Originally Posted by theunchosen

I also don't have any engine life complaints because mine is still fine at 230K mi.(gas)

The diesel engines typically have twice the life. If they are geared to turn even slower, they can last 4 - 5 times longer. All the vehicles in the Dodge million mile club are diesel pickup trucks. That's another factor in cost, but of course OEM's don't want you to keep your car fro 400K miles !!

[theunchosen]

Yes I am aware its a stop gap.

I'll be happy to say this again. Congress is not going to get the emissions protocols any lower on plants or refineries, because we live in a capitalistic society that I like. If you have to squeee for hours to get a dollar out of something we don't do it. minimum wage is 7 something now so unless you can squeeze 7 an hour nobody will do it.

The point being people will abdicate their corporations sell their stock and walk out before they do something that sees no profit. Then thousands of people don't have jobs and there is no gas. I'm not saying changing the emissions to be slightly more strict will kill them, but what you want is 125% more control to my 100% improvement. Improvement doesn't make business harder on anyone. 125% less emissions means refineries, coalfired plants pipelines diesels, freighters all go out of business.

It's like vacuuming through a filter. you can only get space down to 0 PSI(air normal being 14.7) but you can increase pressure on the otherside and push as much as you like. It's also much easier to increase pressure to 29 PSI opposed to vacuum it to 0 PSI.

You want to vacuum to 0. I want instead of wasting energy trying to get that to 0 just push from the otherside and apply 36 PSI instead.

The emissions lines for refineries are reading around 4 PSI and getting the last 4 lbs out is not going to happen, so let off the vacuum take an equal amount of energy and solve the problem from the otherside.

[theunchosen]

Yeah, every time I take my car in to pick up some parts the dealer tries to get me to sit in an S2000.

my only real beef with diesel is it powers trucks. . .and trucks get right on my bumper and run traffic lights and try and flatten me ^_^

[roflwaffle]

Originally Posted by theunchosen

Waffle I agree entirely that a refineries NOx per mile is terrible lol. For that reason I was computing grams per gallon since refineries don't move(because cars and refineries both have metrics for gallons).

Adding in the g/mile is not sweat. EPA average for all gasoline vehicles is 17.something mpg, so I just used 20mpg, but it's fairly easy to accurately approximate the emissions associated w/ NOx production at refineries in g/mile for vehicles. Course like someone mentioned their externalized impact depends on location, so YMMV.

[trebuchet03]

Originally Posted by theunchosen

Congress is not going to get the emissions protocols any lower on plants or refineries...

I disagree - because it's been done already In any case, the last time more strict standards were proposed was about a month ago

I'm not asking for 125% control - and I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth

I would like to see, in the big picture, emissions go down. Be that with emissions controls or with R&D for more efficient processing. Steel used to be incredibly inefficient to make (by comparison to today) - until someone found a better way which resulted in cheaper manufacturing and created industry.

You don't need to doom and gloom about investors bailing and job losses when someone asks for higher efficiency Plenty of companies have/are reaped/reaping the benefits from it For example, the estimated savings from upgrading efficiency - $7 million per year 04/30/2008: Petroleum Refineries to Take Steps to Reduce Air Pollution

The agency expects over the next five years, that the final standards for new process units will reduce the combined emissions of particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and nitrogen oxides from 30 petroleum refineries by nearly 31,000 tons per year. The cost savings from energy recovery associated with these amendments is estimated to be about $7 million per year.

....
The standards also include options for controlling emissions through work practices.

I just did a quick search for refineries AND 2008 on the EPA's website and clicked the first thing that looked related to emissions

[theunchosen]

Originally Posted by trebuchet03

I disagree - because it's been done already In any case, the last time more strict standards were proposed was about a month ago

I'm not asking for 125% control - and I'd appreciate it if you didn't put words in my mouth

I would like to see, in the big picture, emissions go down. Be that with emissions controls or with R&D for more efficient processing. Steel used to be incredibly inefficient to make (by comparison to today) - until someone found a better way which resulted in cheaper manufacturing and created industry.

You don't need to doom and gloom about investors bailing and job losses when someone asks for higher efficiency Plenty of companies have/are reaped/reaping the benefits from it For example, the estimated savings from upgrading efficiency - $7 million per year 04/30/2008: Petroleum Refineries to Take Steps to Reduce Air Pollution


I just did a quick search for refineries AND 2008 on the EPA's website and clicked the first thing that looked related to emissions

Well your source is being deceptive. 31,000 tons of waste is more NOx SOx than the biggest 3 refineries in the world produce. Those plants only produce 32,000 tons of waste other than CO2 and those are the biggest 3 in the US. I hardly see how it would be possible for 30 refineries to reduce more than 31,000 tons each if some of them don't produce that much.

What they mean is they are reducing carbon dioxide which can qualify as an organic compound and then if they just reduce it by a few percentage points they skip right over that 31,000 tons easy. But if you want to talkabout CO2 a refinery produces 125% more CO2 than your car. Power plants produce as much CO2 as your car and there are alot of other contributors that point to improving FE means saving emissions at all cost.

If you want to talk about NOx and SOx and reducing emissions as I said, refineries are the biggest contributors.

As you said limit refineries. Fine. But once again you will never be able to get refineries to produce less emissions that your car. If thats true then there is no point wasting vast amounts of resources on it. Those resources are much better equipped to solve FE problems.

If we eliminated the EPA for gasoline engines and put that to funding more FE engines you would solve your emissions, energy and dependence issue much faster.

It MIGHT be possible to slow the problem through emissions controls that hamper production and efficiency. It's definitely possible to build better more efficient engines. The best engines get 39.5%. refineries already clean up 75% or more of their pollutants. On an exponential curve it takes much more effort to clean to 76% than it does to go to 41%. If they have the same effect why waste your time worrying about the 75% its pretty good to start with.

On the ACT and SAT its easy to bump your score from 1200 to 1300 or 27 to 28. It's incredibly difficult to move up from 32-33 or from 1450-1500 because it takes tremendous amounts of effort to move up the percentages as it gets larger.

So in that regard why not focus on the subject thats lower and improve it, instead of spending fortunes moving 1% of global emissions you spend the same fortune and get 4%.

I'm not doom and gloom about the economy. Adam Smith would tell you anytime you raise taxes on a business its likely a large part of that business dies and quits. effectively emissions controls in a large number of areas are taxes. I have no respect for a source that throws out deceptive data but what probably happened was the refineries(like Chiba) realized instead of just torching some of their pollutants they can create electricity from it(not much compared to consumption levels).

They did this almost two years ago. The amount of electricity could forseeably be 7 million. What usually happens is someone develops a good idea and the government comes along a long time later and mandates everyone do it. Then they also expect them to be able to develop another technique to lower it further, but companies don't spend anywhere near as much on pollution control R&D than they do on efficiency R&D. Fortunately for emissions efficiency means less emissions. . .Like I said a long time ago in this post. . .

For the record also as long as gasoline is below 4 dollars a gallon the US government walks away with a larger cut of gasoline profits than the gas companies. Maybe they should spend the money on making the process better instead of demanding companies do it and implement it at their own cost.