Where are the diesels?

Taxes, supply and demand make it confusing. In US maybe one out of ten pumps at gas stations have diesel and it costs maybe 10-20% more than gasoline. Home heating oil also costs more but tax situation is different. If governments would just step back and let free market forces take control, I'm sure we would all adjust to more expensive fuels by going diesel in US.

Reply to
Frank
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I am sure that the emissions challenge is one of the reasons that we havent gone more toward the smaller diesels. Red tape in this country can be insurmountable.

Reply to
HLS

Destructive distillation of wood is very, very polluting and very inefficient. But it was traditionally how wood alcohol was made before the modern era of petroleum.

In fact, the cheapest way to make both methanol AND ethanol today is by synthesis from natural gas.

In Brazil, they mostly make ethanol from sugar cane, which is fairly efficient (still very polluting... burning sugar cane fields is not something you want to be around during harvest time). On the other hand, their deforestation issues have to do with slash and burn agriculture. Folks knock down trees, plant a crop for a couple seasons, then when the soil is depleted they go and knock down more trees for more land. Modern fertilizers or medieval crop rotation methods will prevent this, but there is really no perceived reason for farmers to do it when they think forest land is free and will never run out.

The REAL solution would be to have proper synthesis of ethanol or methanol from cellulose, more or less a higher tech version of destructive distillation. Folks are working on this and a pilot plant should be coming online soon. This will allow just about any kind of cellulose waste from old newspapers to switchgrass and wood scraps to be used to make fuel.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

They are indeed improved, but the fuel is even more improved. You can pick up a 1970s Mercedes for very cheap today, and they run very cleanly on modern fuel. Much better than they did in the seventies.

They still aren't very responsive to the throttle, though, and that is something that the more modern designs have fixed. There's plenty of power in the old designs, it can just take a while to get it after you hit the mushroom. But they are fun cars, and very overbuilt.

I saw him just the other day, having tea with Huey Long.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

Oh, we've had it. The problem is that it's in the direction of more profits for companies that lobby a lot, rather than in the direction of actually benefitting the country at large.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

I own a 1960s four cylinder Mercedes Benz diesel engine.I bought it from J.C.Whitney in the 1970s. cuhulin

Reply to
cuhulin

Do you have a boat that needs an anchor?

Seriously, if I had that engine, I would couple it to a generator head in case we have another serious hurricane

Reply to
HLS

Elvis had been there, but had gone to p**

Reply to
HLS

snipped-for-privacy@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote in news:fr3e98$inb$ snipped-for-privacy@panix2.panix.com:

I have to call BS here. they do NOT abandan the land after a couple of years. or any amount of time. Once it is farmable it is farmed from then on. It is only not farmed if it needs to be fallow for a time or the cost of production does not make it attractive that year. It cost a lot of money to bring the Jungle into production, slash and burn is not all that cheep. The cost of running a dozer is not a little cheep and you have to fertilize it right away. It won`t grow squat after being in jungle for years. KB

Modern fertilizers or medieval crop rotation

Reply to
Kevin

If it's what I think it is, that's precisely what it's for. I believe we had a similar one on an aircraft start cart a few years ago.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

My old 1960s four cylinder Mercedes Benz diesel engine was originally used/installed in a MB car at the MB factory, I believe so.There are still some of those four cylinder diesel engine powered 1960s MB cars in use today, in some parts of the World.My older brother was in Germany in

1963, he said those old MB cars are tough, built like a Tank. cuhulin
Reply to
cuhulin

I havent been to those areas in Brasil in a long time so maybe things have changed.

The kind of agriculture we are talking about has traditionally been slash and burn, no dozers, no fertilizer.

Winter burnoffs (June through August maybe) used to make it hard to fly into or over some of those places. The loss of visibility due to smoke could be pretty poor.

Some of those soils are not really very fertile anyway, and have to lie fallow after minimal use. There have been some projects with mucuna beans to put nutrients, particularly nitrogen and organics, into the soils but I believe those projects are more to the south.

Trying to use chemical fertilizers on those lands can be too expensive.

One good thing about growing mandioca, it doesnt really need much in the way of fertilizer...Water, CO2, air, and sun will make a crop. And you can eat it or make ethanol out of it, as you wish.

Reply to
HLS

Europe has indeed had low-sulfur diesel (and stupid-high gas prices) for much longer than most of North America.

Reply to
Steve

The US was behind on ULSD (probably thanks to the Teamsters union), however we are not and have never been behind on most environmental issues, at least on a per-capita basis. Fer cripes' sake, Europe still had LEADED gasoline all through the 80s and somewhere into the 90s. I have European friends who could not imagine that the US went unleaded in

1975 (yes, sales of leaded fuel continued a little longer- until the mid 80s- but catalysts appeared in '75 with the requirement of unleaded fuel)
Reply to
Steve

But probably still not quite as clean as, say, a modern Cummins/Dodge Ram 3500 ;-)

Once again, I cite the Cummins/Dodge Ram. Unbelievably responsive for a vehicle that heavy- and I know of no gasoline truck that is any quicker either, especially when loaded.

Reply to
Steve

Well, now that you've piped up that's true....

Reply to
Steve

Emissions wise the US was way ahead. Even the leaded had less and less lead until it was just phased out.

However there are other ways the US lags, head lamp regs for instance. The US also lagged badly on tires back in the 70s... there all sorts of things here and there and that's what I thought he was getting at.

Reply to
Brent P

epa declared today in the detroit news that diesel fumes and particulate kills

21000 pe> HLS wrote:
Reply to
mr.som ting wong

Look in Popular Science or Popular Mechanics magazines, a few monhs ago..Vsit your local area libraries.About new European diesel engines.

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cuhulin

Reply to
cuhulin

No kidding on the headlamp issue. The US should just ditch the entire DOT regulation set and adopt the ECE headlamp regulations (right-side drive version, obviously) wholesale.

Reply to
Steve

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