[Quinny]

Some people just don't get it (or do and deliberately obscure the facts). One point that seems to be continually missed is scaling up and the associated costs and consequent effect on the market. I have actual experience of the problems on a small scale.

I ran my car for several years on used vegetable oils that I sourced from various restaurants and pubs in the area where I lived. We actually started by using a pre-heating device and then changed to converting to bio-diesel which was easier. I saved a lot of money over those years and my friends all encouraged me to 'expand', so I put a business plan together and it saved half a dozen people a lot of money even though some of them only used the recycled oil half the time. We had a haulier who operated a fleet of 6 artics and we did a plan to refit the vehicles, set up a processing plant for used oil and storage for new. It worked out that at the prices at the time running the fleet on vegetable oil only would save about 20% on fuel supply. When used oil was used to supplement this there would have been much higher savings. I wasn't really happy with the idea of using new oil, but the idea was to use it to guarantee supply until a network of used oil suppliers could be built up. The haulier was impressed so we spent some time researching sources of both new and used oil. This is where the plan fell down. We actually had an inkling that this could be problematic with used as the 6 of us in our little club had had problems with supply when supplying 10's of gallons per week from the local area population approximately 100,000. We were more surprised when the suppliers of 'new' vegetable oil rather than being happy with a new customer asked for fixed supply contracts and expressed concern about the level of payments. The prices quoted for bulk delivery were actually more than I'd bought vegetable oil in the local wholesaler in 20 litre drums.

So the supply of 6 people with used vegetable oil and supplying one haulier with new vegetable oil had repercussions in a local market. We have evidence of how this works on an international level with increasing food prices causing severe economic problems in many countries.

Scaling up is simply not as easy as most people make out.

[meemoe_uk]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '&')quot;The EIA have already taken your intended point into account." Wrong! Lie! EIA considers all produced NGL's to be liquid petroleum, not only the fraction used in special transport applications (warehouse loaders, circuitous routes in dense cities).

[Tanada]

Actually by converting Propane into Isopropyl or n-Propyl alcohol by adding one Oxygen atom or making n-Butyl or iso-Butyl alcohol by adding one Oxygen atom to Butane makes each of them miscible with gasoline and a valuable constituent blending agent because all four alcohols are liquids at "room temperature". You can also run many standard gasoline engines on strait the alcohols of these hydrocarbon with little or no modification, they are not nearly as corrosive as their lighter brothers Ethanol and Methanol.

[Buddy_J]

Sounds like all this nonsense about NOT counting liquids is just bullocks then. Not that I can buy a butane fired car, but I could certainly build one if I wanted to, and if I can, then Ford can. Gasoline itself being a manufactured product, seems to me that counting all the things we can use to manufacture it with really matter.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Buddy_J', 'S')ounds like all this nonsense about NOT counting liquids is just bullocks then. Not that I can buy a butane fired car, but I could certainly build one if I wanted to, and if I can, then Ford can. Gasoline itself being a manufactured product, seems to me that counting all the things we can use to manufacture it with really matter.

[Tanada]

Butane has been a component of gasoline from the begining of the use of the fuel in automobiles in the late 1800's. Petroleum Condensate aka Liquified Petroleum Gas aka Propane and Butane were not even seperated from straight run gasoline early on, it was only once it was realized that they would form bubbles and boil out of your tank that any attempt to seperate them in quantity was even made. Butane is cheap compared to many other octane boosting components of gasoline so the refineries always added in as much as they could reasonably get away with until the EPA put caps on the RVP of Gasoline sold in the USA. Alaska is exempt from RVP regulations by the Federal government because it stays cool enough for winter blend fuel mixtures all year long in most of the state.

LPG AKA Butane and Propane make up a small portion of natural gas, in the USA they are seperated out of the gas stream before it is sent off to the end user. Adding either or both into gasoline does not make it some strange new defenition, they were components of gasoline long before any of us were born.

Anyone who doesn't understand gasoline mix variations should read
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/9/13/234043/431
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')In the summer, when temperatures can exceed 100 degrees F in many locations, it is important that the RVP of gasoline is well below 14.7. Otherwise, it can pressure up your gas tanks and gas cans, and it can boil in open containers. Gas that is boiled off ends up in the atmosphere, and contributes to air pollution. Therefore, the EPA has declared that summer gasoline blends may not exceed 7.8 psi in some locations, and 9.0 psi in others.

A typical summer gasoline blend might consist of 40% FCC gas, 25% straight run gas, 15% alkylate, 18% reformate, and 2% butane. The RVP of the gasoline blend depends on how much of each component is in the blend, and what the RVP is of each component. Butane is a relatively inexpensive ingredient in gasoline, but it has the highest vapor pressure at around 52 psi.

In a gasoline blend, each component contributes a fraction to the overall RVP. In the case of butane, if there is 10% butane in the blend, it will contribute around 5.2 psi (10% of 52 psi) to the overall blend. (In reality, it is slightly more complicated than this, because some components interact with each other which can affect the expected RVP). This means that in the summer, the butane fraction must be very low in the gasoline, or the overall RVP of the blend will be too high. That is the primary difference between winter and summer gasoline blends.

Why Prices Fall in the Fall

Winter gasoline blends are phased in as the weather gets cooler. September 15th is the date of the first increase in RVP, and in some areas the allowed RVP eventually increases to 15 psi. This has two implications for gasoline prices every fall. First, as noted, butane is a cheaper blending component than most of the other ingredients. That makes fall and winter gasoline cheaper to produce. But butane is also abundant, so that means that gasoline supplies effectively increase as the RVP requirement increases. Not only that, but this all takes place after summer driving season, when demand typically falls off.

These factors normally combine each year to reduce gasoline prices in the fall (even in non-election years). The RVP is stepped back down to summer levels starting in the spring, and this usually causes prices to increase. But lest you think of buying cheap winter gasoline and storing it until spring or summer, remember that it will pressure up as the weather heats up, and the contained butane will start to vaporize out of the mix.

And that's why gasoline prices generally fall back in the fall, and spring forward in the spring.

[SamInNebraska]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', ' ') Every time you burn 11 gallon's of Gasoline you are burning 1 Gallon of liquid Butane this winter. So are all those millions of other drivers going to the mall in every state that uses winter blend gasoline.

[sparky]

.
Thanks Tanada ! , I read and have been enlightened

[meemoe_uk]

>That butane has recently been redefined as "oil"
Butane hasn't been redefined recently. It's been counted as C&C at least as far back as the 1970s.

>In the years since, it has contributed little or nothing to offsetting American oil declines.
This statement is wrong, because america (US) hasn't declined, its C&C production has risen. Same for most american countries. Ethanol adds about 10% of production for the US. For Brazil, its much higher.



[i>]Truth is you are no more likely to drive a ethanol vehicle today than you were 10 years ago.[/i]
Correct. All cars in the US run on 10%-15% ethanol now just like they did 10 years ago. Victory for ethanol!

Ethanol is inferior and expensive.
Its lower pollution in processing and use. It makes use of all the cropland we have spare due to the green revolution. Might as well do something with all that sunlight. Sunlight isn't expensive, its free. If it was so inferior and expensive then Brazil wouldn't bother with it.

Double counting of the petroleum used to grow/harvest/grind/ferment/distill the corn and the final liquid.
Of course we're allowed to use some of the fuel we have to obtain more fuel.
Your effectively saying that since the 1st caveman used a lump of coal on his campfire, all the fuel gotten since then doesn't count because its a knock on effect of the prosperity afforded by that 1st lump of coal.

What does corn ethanol have to do with butane, propane, other NGL's? It is this: energy is used up, burnt, and lost to use these liquids.
Yes. Also same for the 2nd piece of coal used by a caveman. He was slightly more prosperous due to that 1st piece of coal.

>You can't store them in a jerry can, a tank in the yard, large containers.

It's really not that hard.

NGL's do not flow like liquid petroleum.
Yes they do.

You need to understand the concept of EROEI and it affect on available fuel.
Good. I do.

Butane is difficult to ship and store.

It's easy.


For the USA to convert to use, would mean special compressor-pumps at every gas station.


Special airtight storage tanks.


Special delivery trucks.

compare this with a gasoline tanker...


Special cars.

Hardly. It's easy to convert gasoline and diesel engines over to lpg.

Special tanks.


Special NGL gas lines all over the country. (You can't just truck butane efficiently.
The worlds trucks have trucked butane for decades. The worlds pipes have piped gas for nearly a century at least.

>The upshot is that we must expend ever more energy just delivering energy.
Same with any commodity. More of it, more work in shifting it. The caveman had to take the 1st lump of coal to his fire. It just gotten worse since then...

Not only does declining "net-energy" drive up costs beyond our ability to pay

More energy per person than ever, and its going up.

That is why it is disingenous to measure NGL's from the ground, when the real energy asset is mostly used up getting it from the ground.
Absurd. Not more than 0.1% of the energy in history's LPG reservoirs has been needed to tap those reservoirs. Same today.

So while it may appear that the downsides of unconventional oils are only economic (fixed/rectified by higher prices and more potential reserves) that is WRONG.
Yep. Totally wrong. There are no downsides to them at all.

It actually take more energy to produce ethanol then is measured in the final liquid
Another doomer myth. Humans have been producing ethanol fuel before modern agriculture gave them petroleum powered tools. The energy in ethanol fuel comes mostly from the sun.
http://library.thinkquest.org/07aug/018 ... _hist.html
If you stopped spinning in your doomer hysterics for a moment, you'd realise that since its been possible to farm food for 11,000 years ( that is, get the sun's energy into bio-chemicals ) without petroleum, then we could burn this energy instead of eat it. A lot of the worlds ethanol is made from sugarcane.
>So remaining useful liquid is actually less and cost more.
Nearly right. The remaining useful fuel is actually more and costs less.
The kicker: our society (and many like ours. And many very different) was built on inexpensive, abundant petroleum.
Good, because we've got plenty more inexpensive abundant petroleum for a century to comes, natural gas and coal for a thousand years, and nuclear reserves for billions of years. These energy sources have kicked us into an advanced civilization.
We must commute by heavy car (in dangerous traffic) to our jobs.
Woah... did you say dangerous traffic? Forget peak oil, we'll all be dead by dangerous traffic by the end of today.
Our manufactured goods all come from far away.
Boats have extremely low transport costs. It's cheaper per good to ship goods around the world than it is for every community to have their own factories produce their own stuff. Society has fallen towards a global economy because its cheaper than hundreds of local economies. There was careful analysis done on this years ago in our energy concerned community, but if you've spent the last 10 year spinning around in hysterics just singing the old LATOC myths to yourself you won't have noticed.

The system is fragile, automated, complex, and very vulnerable. And it is rusting.
No. It's very robust, automated, complex and very strong. It's getting newer and brighter every day.

[meemoe_uk]

>What is this? The Butane-User's Fan Club? Oh jeez! Give me a break.

Well since it lowers the cost of car fuel and you doomers have a fixation on moaning about the cost of car fuel, then yes, every doomer ( including you ) is automatically a member of of the butane user's fan club.

Hi Tanada, nice to read your interesting and informative post amongst all the doom and hype.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')First, as noted, butane is a cheaper blending component than most of the other ingredients. That makes fall and winter gasoline cheaper to produce. But butane is also abundant, so that means that gasoline supplies effectively increase as the RVP requirement increases.

[Buddy_J]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SamInNebraska', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', ' ') Every time you burn 11 gallon's of Gasoline you are burning 1 Gallon of liquid Butane this winter. So are all those millions of other drivers going to the mall in every state that uses winter blend gasoline.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SamInNebraska', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', ' ') Every time you burn 11 gallon's of Gasoline you are burning 1 Gallon of liquid Butane this winter. So are all those millions of other drivers going to the mall in every state that uses winter blend gasoline.