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Comment by peterjlee | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what will happen to the price of jet fuel once electric cars are wide spread. Petroleum production will go down as demand for gasoline will go down while jet fuel demand will probably remain similar. So will that lead to a rise in jet fuel price?

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> Of the 7.13 billion barrels of total U.S. petroleum product consumption in 2015, 47% was motor gasoline (includes ethanol), 20% was distillate fuel (heating oil and diesel fuel), and 8% was jet fuel, 4% plastics.[1]

Jet fuel is only 8% so if there is less auto usage, probably cheaper initially until supply is constrained due to lower demand. Then, other methods will start to get cheaper like wood to fuel[2].

But overall fuel and heating oil are about 70-80% of all oil use, we still use it for plastics which will be hard to get rid of which are 4% of usage. My guess is initially both jet fuel and plastic production prices will go down when autos are electric, at least initially.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=41&t=6

[2] http://www.denverpost.com/2016/11/14/first-commercial-flight...

Probably temporarily. It'll likely cross a point where more synthetic production methods reach economic viability.

The field requires such a great energy density that I suspect only a remarkable breakthrough in energy density for weight would allow a fully electric solution. Hydrogen is also likely out as the storage cells would be under unimaginable stresses.

In the long term it might actually incentivize the creation of moderate/high speed rail lines in the US.

Unless someone figures out how to bulldoze the Rocky mountain range, high speed rail as a replacement for coast to coast air travel is a non starter.

The real transit corridors are Boston-Atlanta and New York-Chicago, as well as Seattle-San Diego on the west coast. Coast to coast would be nice but even just those would be an enormous boost to our transport infrastructure and potentially a huge emissions cut (depending on where the power comes from).

The high speed part of the California high speed rail is mostly to relieve congestion at the coastal airports. Idea being that passengers flying between the Bay Area and LA/San Diego will instead take the train. Hardest part of that is it'll require a number of tunnels, one 14 miles long, through the mountains into the LA Basin.

I'm curious about why you think the Rocky Mountains would preclude this (as opposed to the distance, where ~ 500 mph via air vs. ~250 mph by train seems like a larger obstacle). Tunnels, and picking a relatively flat route seems to alleviate any concerns about the Rockies.

A route roughly following the I-80 corridor would top out somewhere below 9000 ft[1]. The California high speed rail is already being designed for what I would guess are similar elevations (and perhaps steeper grades)[2].

You could also route through southern Arizona and New Mexico, completely avoiding significant mountains.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_80#Wyoming

2. http://articles.latimes.com/2012/nov/12/local/la-me-bullet-m...

Actually, it's when someone can figure out how to make meal service on trains profitable. Most Amtrak routes without meal service makes operating profits, and only one or two routes with meal service might make an operating profit.

Given current train speeds, that comes out to around 500-700 miles being the upper limit of viable HSR. This is roughly the distance between Chicago and DC and also roughly the distance of the largest axis of most European countries.

Jet fuel is more similar to Diesel than gasoline. Different oil wells produce varying mixtures of fuels; I would expect 'sweet' (gasoline-rich) crude to decrease in price much more than heavier crudes, as the demand for the latter is likely to persist for longer, though we may also see shifts in the types of fuels being used.

Doubtful. Under basic economic theory, as demand goes down, so does price. The petroleum production that shuts down first will tend to be the most expensive production, causing a drop in the average cost, and price (we should see a similar effect in upstream products like crude).

The main way this effect breaks down is if the market shrinks so much that we loose the economy of scale; but it seams unlikely demand will fall far enough for that to occur.

That was not his point. When you extract oil, you don't really get a single product but multiple ones (heavy oils, lubricants, etc.)

Before you might be selling lubricants cheaply, because after refinement you had lots of lubricants as a by-product. If you need less car fuel, this changes the cost equation and lubricants (and other byproducts) might become more expensive even if car fuel becomes cheaper.

Electric aircraft.

https://machineroadmap.ece.illinois.edu/files/2016/04/Madava...

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0953-2048/20/8/005...

You can see this at work already with gasoline for small planes, which commands a huge premium over automotive gasoline now. Around here, the cost is 2x higher or more. The premium used to be smaller, but when gas prices came down from their $4 high, avgas didn't really follow.

87UL and 93UL aren't much more expensive than automotive gas, since it's pretty much the same thing. It's 100+ octane leaded gas that's expensive, and it'll stay that way until general aviation gets out of its carburetor & fixed timing rut and join the modern world of direct fuel injection and FADEC.

Which will not happen quickly because FAA certification makes re-powering small aircraft expensive and strict maintenance requirements keeps half century old planes running

The're working on an unleaded 100 octane avgas: http://www.eaa.org/en/airventure/eaa-airventure-news-and-mul...

I didn't realize there was 87/93 avgas. What's the difference between that and what goes in cars?

Chemically, they're identical. They might be taxed differently though.

> I wonder what will happen to the price of jet fuel once electric cars are wide spread.

Probably the same thing that happened to coal, it just gets used elsewhere.

Historically used for heating, trains and ships

Or would it potentially increase the supply of Jet A (jet fuel), as less oil needs to be converted to automobile fuel.

Is the refining process flexible enough to do that? I was under the impression that refining is more of a separation process so the amount of each petroleum product you get is already determined by the petroleum you have before you even start the process.

There's all sorts of processes used to convert stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracking_(chemistry)

You can crack the fuel to go from heavier to lighter grade, and use Fischer-Tropsch process to go the other way.

If the price go down, people will travel more, increasing the demand and the price of oil.

It's self-stabilizing.

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