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Comment by foepys | Hacker News Reader

Will there be gas stations, though?

If it’s like how analog photography shops were going, no not really. Perhaps you will get specialized shops for fuel and biofuels?

Or we'll just go full circle and gasoline will be available at pharmacies:

https://radair.com/blog/2011/11/10/automotive-history-benz/

Wondering… Is it possible to make tiny refineries for say a town or area? So locally produced or is that a environmental nightmare?

There's a refinery next to one of the highways exiting Vienna, Austria:

https://www.google.com/maps/@48.147145,16.5005479,3a,75y,168...

People live on the other side of that highway, so I guess it's possible, but I used to drive through that area on a regular basis and the smell hard to forget.

Apart from that such facilities need to be large to be cost-effective.

Many engines can be converted to run on ethanol.

This gets thrown out quite a bit but I don't really buy it. If it is not designed for alcohol, it probably isn't going to work. Alcohol has too many weird interactions with stuff like aluminum.

Many countries are running on part-ethanol already; the UK is on "E10" (up to 10%)

partial ethanol and full alcohol are not even close.

Close enough. E10 is enough to see most of the issues you will see with pure Ethanol. Most engines just need to run is different fuel maps. ideally you would make other changes (increase the compression ratio), but they are expensive.

Some engines (SAAB, I'm looking at you) will detect knocks and adapt the map on the fly.

Then, there's the more insane stuff:

https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1024086_ethanol-powered-...

most gasoline available in the eastern USA is E10. I go out of my way to get E0 for a vintage high-performance vehicle I drive on occasion, it's noticeably happier without the ethanol, even if it can drive on E10 without damage.

Which was why I didn't say "all" or anything like that. But basically a lot of engines from Ford and Volvo can run on ethanol. Any old iron block can if you replace pipes and hoses. And so on.

Sure, if you rebuild an engine to run on ethanol it'll run on ethanol.

Which is why I said converted. The wrong kind of rubber will get brittle from ethanol. But for an iron block, it's not rocket science. Any shade tree mechanic could do it.

It's not economic and it's both an environmental and safety nightmare.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire "largest peacetime explosion in Europe"

I live in Edinburgh, and there's regular complaints about flaring from the Mossmorran refinery, which lights up the night sky, produces smoke, and is incredibly loud.

Wow, that’s a gigantic fire right there. So it seems local refineries are not very interesting.

It makes orders of magnitude more sense to have one centralized large refinery and then many dispersed holding tanks to distribute fuel. This model may sound familiar.

It's like people have forgotten that ICEVs started without any of that infrastructure in place. Even if we can't buy petrol from pharmacies, methanol and ethanol engines are a mature technology and the fuel is both cheap and easy to get. The practical reality is that lack of fuel stations is a pain in the ass, but the strength of ICEs is that they can be modified to run on different fuels. And fueling them is easy.

> plenty of used ICE cars

Hence plenty of customers for gas stations

I'm not so sure.

I think at some point, the cost of operating gas stations will fall below a threshold that it doesn't justify keeping them open, even if there is still _some_ demand.

E.g. imagine if demand were cut in half -- I think more than half of the gas stations would shut down.

It will happen, but I reckon it'll be more like 2045 than 2035 (and even then they'll still be some gas stations, just far fewer and you might have to start keeping emergency supplies with you).

Here in the UK, we call them petrol stations. But "gas" is still appropriate, because 15 years ago LPG conversions were all the rage, and every petrol station had gas too.

Nowadays I can only think offhand of a single local retail fuel establishment that will sell you both US and UK "gas".

Would running one of those off a gas drum be possible? Most petrol stations around me stock them. Need to match brands to return a drum though.

I assume the 11-ish litre butane capacity wouldn't be enough to be practical.

And will there be enough power stations to generate all the electricity?

Yes, but what will they be powered by?

not sure why you're so confident of that when we don't even produce enough power for our current needs let alone powering millions of cars

How much more generation do we actually need. For one, charging typically does not happen when the grid is at peak load, so a lot of spare capacity is available. Second, it takes approximately the same amount of energy to refine a tank of gasoline as it does to completely charge an EV, so it'll be a wash.

Certainly "for a few good years."

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