Drago
Legendary Member
- Location
- Suburban Poshshire
Oh aye, but it takes less energy, a lot less, to extract and refine crude oil into fuel that the fuel itself returns when burned. T'was covered in my Masters syllabus (fuels for space launch, pros and cons, let's light this candle stuff.) For every BTU consumed in its extraction and production the finished product delivers about 10.5 BTUs' of usable product, not to mention the handy unused fractions that have other industrial uses and cost benefit, which further offsets the expense of production.
Synthetic fuels are, with the currently favoured state of the art, not even in the ballpark. Depending on the method used every BTU equivalent used creating synthetic fuels returns only 0.4 to 0.6 BTU's of usable petrol. That's horrifically inefficient. Thats like using a torch tompower your solar panels, then usingnthe panelsmto recharge the torch batteries. It's a nut people have been trying to crack since the early 70s to break OPECs grip on western cojones and no one is anywhere near making it viable in anything beyond tiny quantities because of the energy expenditure, and hence cost. It'll do for niche stuff like F1, but ideas that it'll power road cars at scale is just wishful thinking in the extreme,
The important difference is with fossil fuels is that it is refining and altering an existing substance, and the substance itself can be heated and the gas extracted to power the whole process. Synthetic fuels of the sort being played with these days are using vast amounts of energy to crack atoms from air, and then all the chemistry on top of that to make it into a drop-in fuel. As I'm sure you know all you're doing with that is introducing a trophic level, to steal a term from ecology, that doesn't exist with fossil fuels.
And then of course these synthetic fuels need to be transported to the point of sale/use just like any other fossil fuel, so that aspect is closely comparable.
It kinda makes you realise how messy and nasty combustion fuels are (and apologies for dragging a Skoda thread on a tangent, but I guess they use ⛽️ too) and how oil is really far too unique and valuable a substance to be wasted by burning it.
Synthetic fuels are, with the currently favoured state of the art, not even in the ballpark. Depending on the method used every BTU equivalent used creating synthetic fuels returns only 0.4 to 0.6 BTU's of usable petrol. That's horrifically inefficient. Thats like using a torch tompower your solar panels, then usingnthe panelsmto recharge the torch batteries. It's a nut people have been trying to crack since the early 70s to break OPECs grip on western cojones and no one is anywhere near making it viable in anything beyond tiny quantities because of the energy expenditure, and hence cost. It'll do for niche stuff like F1, but ideas that it'll power road cars at scale is just wishful thinking in the extreme,
The important difference is with fossil fuels is that it is refining and altering an existing substance, and the substance itself can be heated and the gas extracted to power the whole process. Synthetic fuels of the sort being played with these days are using vast amounts of energy to crack atoms from air, and then all the chemistry on top of that to make it into a drop-in fuel. As I'm sure you know all you're doing with that is introducing a trophic level, to steal a term from ecology, that doesn't exist with fossil fuels.
And then of course these synthetic fuels need to be transported to the point of sale/use just like any other fossil fuel, so that aspect is closely comparable.
It kinda makes you realise how messy and nasty combustion fuels are (and apologies for dragging a Skoda thread on a tangent, but I guess they use ⛽️ too) and how oil is really far too unique and valuable a substance to be wasted by burning it.
