The future of fuel

Interesting topic... whatever happens, the oil companies will be in it for the max they can get. Yes... they do need to make a profit, as we wll do.

My question is: How much interest (control) do oil companies have in the manufacture/development (or not) of particular engines?
regards

cheez, are you sugar cane farmers up at Bundy already gearing up for all the E100 to be guzzled up by those V8 monster trucks :)
Seriously, I doubt that there's enough arable land available to produce enough E100 for all of us (numbers still rising fast).
So there will be other, cheaper options.

In my opinion, an equal contender to ethanol is CNG, and in some regions LPG.

And, like it or not, another is internal combustion/electric hybrid, particularly for countries with an abundance of coal (or nuclear).

cheers, Peter

Can see a definite ceiling on the amount of ethanol produced for two reasons at least.

As world population rises more of the agricultural land currently used to grow crops for ethanol production will be needed to grow food for human consumption.

Also assuming that more sustainable practices WRT rainforest clearing and water extraction are actually implemented (admittedly thats a big IF) then the available land and water will again be required for food production.

In Oz maybe the use of wheat as feedstock for ethanol production is limited as food demand increases. That leaves sugarcane and production there is limited in terms of available land and water.

Suggest it might be more likely that we see more diesel produced from coal seam gas, and more sedans, small cars running on diesel.

Cheers,

ever seen the movie "The Inconvenient Truth" ???? yes it is extreme but you and me can both sit down and very quickly do up some simple sums ....
How many cars are on the road now...
How many kids alone getting there licence this year and buying there first car ....
20 years time those kids have had kids ....
Combined consumption of that .....
Inflated each year ....
How much is there actually left ... and how long will it last ....
My way of looking at it is that in 10 years time those type of fuels will be so expensive that a car will be treated like tobacco, taxed heavily, frowned on as it uses "bad" fuels, and only a select few will be able to have or afford one, yep ten years time ....... people are talking "Ethanol" fuels as the next thing to save the world, as far as i can see it is a "food" product that is used to make it, we barely produce enough food to feed us as it is with millions across our world that are starving so why would we channel it into fuel, i cant see that lasting...

But with all that in mind why are we NOT looking at steam power and before we go on about water being a problem steam power is now so far advanced that they completely recycle every drop of water using a fully sealed system with condensers so it returns to water and starts again, community generation systems are on the drawing board and even being tested, steam engines for cars (late model) have been designed and built but shot down in flames by the petroleum company's ......

So why Ethanol ??? why not steam ??? all the rubbish we burn at last can be recycled at a ground level ....

Complete non-issue Tour Boy , I could give you almost the same answer as I gave some ten years ago and in between in relation to this , peak oil and similar matters.


1/ ULP did not dissappear

2/ ULP is not going to dissappear

3/ Even E10 is a struggle to get implemented let alone E85

4/ Most cars in Nineties don't suffer issues with E10 (just a minority)

5/ The price of petrol has basically only moved with inflation with the odd ups & downs.

Hi tour boy,

Interesting debate What about biodiesel?

I believe 90% of the worlds challenges disappear if we had a more realistically sustainable population less then 5 million people would be a start.

Cheers Wilko

That is an unlikely senario. I remember hearing a quote that said that at current fuel usage for a year in the US you would need to plant the entire African continent with fuel crops. Not sure how you would then feed the world population. Ethonol based bio fuel has a low yield from memory it takes 1 litre to make 3 liters of ethanol. So you could look at as you consume 1/3 of your end product actually producing the ethanol. Biodiesel is more efficient but still no where near the 1:30 ratio for petrolium based fuels. The current trends to produce biofuels is already raising the price of food crops. A large percentage of crops in the USA are already going this way and creating shortages in third world contries. Third wourld countries used to benifit from a general over production of food crops.

Steve

We are selling hundreds and hundreds of shiploads of Natural Gas to China and others every year. We have more Natural gas than we can use
Why not convert our vehicles to Compressed Natural Gas, its cheap and the technology is already with us and used extensively in buses throughout Australia.

regards..............jeff

ULP is a petroleum product and I'm not sure it is correct to say that it is 'derived' from diesel, ULP is simply a more refined fuel.

The major determinant for the price of any refined fuel, ULP/Diesel etc will be governed by the price of oil + margin to refine it. I'm not sure why we will need to be using 85% ethanol in our fuel in 20 years time, unless you are arguing we will run out of it?

Given the investment that is being made on exploring for oil, and the cost of extraction, it would seem that the concept of 'peak oil theory' is not concerning oil explorers or refiners. The cost of building the super refineries in south-east Asia runs to billions of dollars, so I'm not sure we would be seeing that investment if there was a strong case being made that we will run out of oil to refine in 20 years time.

Mind you if you were correct and ethanol makes up 85% of ULP 20 years from now, the cost of fuel will be the least of our concerns because under this scenario we won't be able to afford to put food on our tables if it was linked so heavily to the price of fuel. Farmers will divert crops for food production to crops for fuel production... Look at what happened to crops that are used in the manufacture of ethanol when the oil price spiked to over US$150 a barrel a couple of years back......


All food for thought though......

Cheers, The Landy

I saw a quote in one of the weekend papers last week from a Mercedes Benz engineer saying that he thought in the next 10-15 years we will see the demise of the diesel engine. ............hope not,I've just discovered them!

Interesting debate.

I don't know enough about ethanol to comment on that but I can provide a few other pieces of information.

ULP is not derived from diesel. ULP comes from a different fraction of the barrel and depending on what crude you use you get different amounts of ULP feedstock and diesel.

Fuel companies (presumably people are mean BP, Shell, Exxon, etc, when they refer to fuel companies) do not control the price of oil. These companies only control about 10% of the worlds crude oil supply. The other 90% is controlled by the governments of the countries where the oil reserves are located. Even OPEC (Organisation of Petroluem Exporting Countries) only contols about 27% of the worlds oil and while they can have some impact on the price of oil (by selectively increasing or decreasing the amount of oil they put on the market at any time) they only have limited impact on oil price. The recent (last few years) massive changes in oil price, both up and down, have been driven by speculation and market forces. e.g. a forecast of a cold winter in the US or Europe drives up price because demand will be higher. Oil is a commodity and its price reflects what people think it is worth, not how much profit the oil companies think they can make.

In regard to LNG, while we do have an abundance of it (and should be even more in the next few years when the coal seam gas projects come on line in Qld) its energy density is somewhat lower than diesel. On a energy per unit volume basis (e.g. MJ/m3) diesel contains about 48% more energy than LNG which means that for the same volume of fuel you can only go about 2/3 the distance on LNG or you need to carry 48% more fuel. While this may be workable for vehicles that only travel short distances it rules out LNG for trains and most trucks.

Finally, the comment by the Mercedes Benz engineer is a little odd. Not only are more and more car manufacturers bringing out more and more diesel engines (remember they would not be making them if people did not want them) but the emerging economies of the Asia- Pacific are all diesel based. The demand for diesel and diesel engines is going to increase dramatically over the next 20 years.

Some diesels in Vanautu are running on Coconut oil, Dont know much about it but it was extremely cheap and stunk when they drove past.

Cheers Wilko

Here's a thought:
There seems to be a lot of different kinds of hydrocarbons around that can be converted, at various costs, into some kind or other of motor fuel. This issue seems to be price, more than supply. And the price is probably going to go up a lot faster in the future than it has in the past, rather like electricity has.
Maybe the scenario is that we don't use big 4WD vehicles as drive cars any more. We will run around in some tiny fart powered Japanese micro-dot and save up all year to buy the fuel to run the 4WD for holidays only.

Just think, if they design a nuclear powered car in the future you could honestly say that your car was a bomb.

It wont matter what fuel we use cause if the carbon tax comes in none of us will afford to run a 4wd lol,

Cheers Wilko

Anyone had a look at diesal trees,aparently found in late 1800s being imported into qld produce diesal from the tree similar to the way rubber is recovered from trees,just put diesal trees into google and see.

"Seeing as ULP is derived from diesel"
Wrong - refining crude oil delivers many fractions, ULP is one, Diesel is another. Not much of a debate, if the assumption is totally wrong.


"nearly extinct production of ULP "
- what ?????