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Comment by _FKS_ | Hacker News Reader

Side-note: a barrel of oil gives a fixed amount of gasoline and diesel fuel, and that's hard to change [1]. A given refinery could slightly change the amounts, but not much, and that's billions in investments. Even if you replaced diesel vehicles by electric ones, the diesel fuel will be burned somewhere else.

[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/fsc432/content/overview-refi...

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You get a fixed ratio of distillates, but you can use cracking to convert heavier distillates into lighter distillates. The majority of the world's gasoline is cracked rather than distilled. Refineries in the US produce a substantially different mix of products than refineries in Europe and Asia because of different market demands (including significantly lower demand for diesel).

Changing that production mix is capital-intensive, but everything in the petrochemical business is capital-intensive. US refineries are having to substantially change their operations because of the increasing production of unconventional oil, which yields a very different mix of distillates compared to conventional crude.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/cs/c5cs0037...

The article doesn't make it clear - but "elsewhere" seems like it would clearly be better than urban busses. They assert that even in areas where grid electricity to charge the busses comes entirely from fossil fuels, there is less pollution produced - presumably because it is somewhat easier to make a fossil fuel plant cleaner at scale than 100s of busses. Fossil fuel plants could be any of natural gas (very clean), coal or.. oil, which in this case is something resembling diesel, or the diesel constituents of crude.

The title is (of course) fairly misleading - while we've got electric boats and semis it is unlikely that long haul transport for either will be electric any time soon. But - at least they are away from urban areas, for the most part.

You can essentialy use the batteries of electric vehicles as energy storage. Most passenger vehicles don't need to run at noon when everybody is at work and surplus solar is available. They don't need to run at night when people sleep, electricity demand is low and wind whirls. Buses can also be scheduled for loading during these periods as they can run 200 km on a charge and transport capacity is adjusted according to demand - only a fraction of the fleet operates during low demand periods mentioned above, the rest can sit and charge. Long haul transport can run on plug in hybrids using HCCI internal combustion engines and/or gas turbines powered by diesel/gasoline or ideally DME/LPG. This can be all tuned using economics. Coal needs miners for extraction and is dirty to burn. Gen III+ and IV nuclear and geothermal are much cleaner and safer alternatives for base load.

That's incorrect. Refineries have crackers (catalytic cracking units) that can be used to tune the yield. It varies seasonably at the same refinery.

From your own citation:

"Separation processes, such as distillation, dewaxing, and deasphalting make use of the differences in the physical properties of crude oil components to separate groups of hydrocarbon compounds or inorganic impurities, whereas conversion processes cause chemical changes in the hydrocarbon composition of crude oils. For example, Fluid Catalytic Cracking process breaks chemical bonds in long-chain alkanes to produce shorter chain alkanes to produce gasoline from higher boiling gas oil fractions"

Soooo we should just keep using diesel and stop longterm electrification trends because "someone's going to burn it"?

This is fud.

The point of electrification is to get a path towards sustainability. If it means demand for barrels of oil decreases, or in the most extreme, all that extra diesel becomes a stranded asset, all the better (unless you're a refinery owner).

Burning it elsewhere might not help when it comes to CO2 emissions (though if it ends up being burned in a much more efficient engine/powerplan, at least you get more useful work out of it), but it can help a lot when it comes to health[1]. Diesel is particularly dirty, and burning it in densely populated areas should definitely be phased out. Long-haul trucking might make sense, but buses and garbage trucks should at the very least run on hybrid natural gas, until they are electric.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5352477/

>Diesel is particularly dirty, and burning it in densely populated areas should definitely be phased out.

The latest EU diesel standards for passenger cars are actually on par with the gasoline standards. Don't know what the standards are for heavy trucks though.

> The latest EU diesel standards for passenger cars are actually on par with the gasoline standards. Don't know what the standards are for heavy trucks though.

Can we trust any of the big automotive manufacturers to actually meet those standards without cheating?

Look at how widespread the issue is [Dieselgate](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/dieselgate-timeli...)

Yes, because of Dieselgate. There is much more scrutiny now and the costs were high.

Not sure if they learned though

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2018/07/26/carmaker...

> The automotive industry says it has cleaned up its act. But this week the European Union’s executive branch, the European Commission, revealed it has discovered a whole new form of cheating – this time on CO2 emission tests. The 2016 scandal concerned air pollution tests on diesel vehicles, where automakers were using so-called ‘defeat devices’ during tests to make the cars seem like they were emitting less pollution. Now, the carmakers are accused of doing the opposite – artificially inflating the level of carbon emissions produced by new cars coming onto the market now. Why would automakers want their cars to look more emissions-intensive than they are? Because a new EU law will require automakers to reduce their fleet average CO2 emissions by 15% by 2025 and 30% by 2030 – based on 2021 levels.

They've gamed the tests quite a bit over the years. Yet so far, even after all the scrutiny, VW is the only one that was actually caught cheating. VW is probably enjoying the muddy message everywhere that "everyone does it" but so far only VW has actually been found to be cheating.

Heavy duty are supposedly cleaner (per unit of fuel) both on paper (standards) and in reality, because manufacturers don't shy away from exposing business customers to the maintenance burden of exhaust treatment systems. But trucking is a border-crossing low-margin business, corners will be cut at every opportunity.

I wonder if there's data on the difference between engines with factory settings, and vehicles that have been modified to roll coal. My hometown had a number of people change their trucks to roll coal and it would get noticeably hazy in busy intersections

I used to work at a 4 wheel drive shop in a previous life- there are likely more modified diesel trucks out there than you think. The idiots that purposely modify trucks to 'roll coal' are a minority compared to owners who have bypassed pollution controls for increased reliability and fuel economy. A truck with the EGR bypassed or DPF removed spews more particulate than stock, but this isn't visually apparent. Most of the smoke from rolling coal is unburned fuel in the exhaust gas, this phenomenon seemed to be mainly restricted to younger people, especially oil field workers.

I know this is anecdata, but at least in CO, UT, WY area there are more modified trucks than what is immediately apparent, since often a truck w/ bypassed emissions equipment isn't heavily cosmetically modified.

I live in a small Texas town outside of Austin. I think my diesel pickup is the only unmodified one here. It's really that common. The exhaust after-treatment and DPF systems are fairly complex and most owners just take 'em out. There's emissions inspections in this county, but diesel vehicles are conveniently exempt.

why do they take them out? and when do they take them out? when it broke?

A bit late to the reply, but mostly it's perception: when the urea-injection exhaust-aftertreament systems first came out in 2013 or so there were a few reliability issues that dealers didn't do a good job of fixing. It's much improved now and my truck hasn't had any issues at all.

And, I'm sad to say, some folks just like the whole "rolling coal" thing and the ability to put out huge plumes of black smoke.

That's not even something I would argue. I guess my real question would be "what is the difference between a car that passes emissions tests and a car that is modified about 30 minutes after an emissions test"

There are a fair amount of people who will actively pollute because you asked/told them not to, and I wonder if they have a significant effect on the environment

The big win is that diesel is nasty and nobody enjoys breathing in diesel exhaust. Most Americans don't realize how awful diesel exhaust is because almost nobody drives them, so you aren't exposed to it as a pedestrian or person living near a well-used road.

It doesn't combat overall pollution, but it does improve the quality of life for people living in urban areas.

There are many automakers that are still putting diesels in cars and trucks, they just arent advertised on the tailgate.

Interesting - but there is lots of opportunity to burn it on boats or remote generators.

And phase out that nasty bunker fuel ships burn in international waters. But then there’s the issue of what to do with the bottoms from the column.

More oil for asphalt in infrastructure repair.

Indeed, but—since you mentioned it—there are a lot of missed opportunities in electrifying short range passenger ferries. Many ferries might only sail for 20 minutes and remain docked for a while where they could be recharged. Even on a busy ferry routes, a natural gas powered boats might actually make a lot more sense then a diesel powered one. The only real use for a diesel engine now might be for long distance cargo vessels, cross ocean passenger ferries, and very very huge fishing trawlers (although I would very much like to see the big trawlers vanish into history).

> there are a lot of missed opportunities in electrifying short range passenger ferries

About that:

https://electrek.co/2018/02/03/all-electric-ferry-cuts-emiss...

Not just that but diesel is just kerosene + some additives for lubricity so there are plenty of uses. Kerosene + some other addditives is jet fuel.

I don't see diesel being phased out for agriculture or construction equipment anytime soon, usually too remote from the grid and they can't afford charging downtime. However, I welcome replacing what we can with electric. It's a slightly specious argument that simply because we can't replace all use of diesel there isn't a point to replace some usage. City buses are a major use, and are located in a much worse spot for pollution, at least as it affects people's health. How is less fossil fuels being used a bad thing, there is no possible way we can replace all uses in one fell stroke.

I figure the mid-term goal should be to end up only refining oil for jet fuel and petrochemicals. So either the products have to be converted (as others have explained) or burned in a power plant. We will need more energy for all those electric vehicles after all, so more oil burning power plant may be needed in the transition.

Long term goal is of course to not extract oil at all, but some products will be hard to replace without radical new technologies.

Gasoline powered vehicles are also replaced and Big Oil can invest in electric vehicle companies and renewables as they diminish the output to account for the lower demand.

Also, diesel engines can be converted to DME which is cleaner and offers a path for CO2 recycling. DME/electric plug-in hybrids is a solution mainly for trucks and shipping because they can automatically switch to electric near populated areas and use the ICE for extensive range.

Maybe they can create something new out of Diesel?

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