by Tanada » Thu 28 Dec 2017, 10:14:27
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('AirlinePilot', 'I')t matters because its important to compare apples to apples.The devil is always in the details.
Fair enough, in light of the comments here I think a more accurate unit of measure would be energy than volume. Doesn't matter if you use ergs, Joules, BTU's or some other unit so long as it is consistent across the various molecular formula's for the petroleum and alcohol molecules produced and fed into the system.
In Technical terms a barrel of extra heavy oil will have more energy than a barrel of condensate recovered from a Natural Gas 'wet' well. However the refining process to convert either barrel of mixed molecules into vehicle fuel will require different steps and my understanding is the extra heavy oil needs a couple extra steps to break the long molecules into shorter molecules and stabilize them at those lengths by reacting them with free hydrogen gas.
Then again I have also read about Diesel engines for large ships that can directly burn that extra heavy petroleum without refining, so that creates a whole new spectrum of confusion over what is useful and what is not. It all boils down to what your end goal is, if you want to move a huge diesel powered ship them raw extra heavy crude petroleum or even heated asphalt can work just fine. If on the other hand you want to run a Moped with a little four cycle gasoline engine on it that same extra heavy crude has to be extensively modified before the engine can operate on its energy content, but the condensate from the 'wet' natural gas wells in the Utica in Ohio will run it almost without modification.
If we take a step back and think about it early oil crude was mostly the medium grades that flowed relatively easily. We learned how to refine those into all grades of fuel above and below the medium weights and it was easy because they were a thorough mixture of all grades from methane to super long extra heavy asphalt. Now we are using more of the light and heavy ends of 'crude' in our mixture because there are not as many sources of the medium grades as we desire to refine and use, so we are struggling to fit modern blends into concepts that date back over a century of refining. It is no wonder we have so much contention over what is or is not 'oil' when even the blends we call gasoline and diesel are much different from what they were in 1917. Heck the first generation gasoline formula included Propane as one of its constituent chemicals, but outside of the far north in Alaska or Siberia propane forms bubbles and escapes out of the tank before it can be used by the engine. Next up the chain is Butane and modern gasoline formula's limit how much of that you can have in the blend in summer time because it does exactly the same thing, in a hot summer environment it evaporates right out of the gasoline in places like Atlanta, Georgia or Los Angeles, California. On the other hand it is 2F outside my house right this moment and without at least 10% butane in my gasoline tank my little Honda Civic would not want to start or run. A century ago this was not well understood and you got whatever blend the local refinery made from whatever crude it happened to have available to process. Now this is all regulated fairly tightly, at least in the USA and Canada where I have driven vehicles.