Subnostr

Yeah, it's more energy dense & cheaper to make (given the availability of viable waste products) & easier to store. It's better all around IMO. The negatives are the engines are generally heavier & more expensive which is probably the main reason gasoline vehicles became dominant. But technology has brought weight & cost down pretty dramatically & gasoline engines are moving to direct injection like diesels anyway which removes some of the cost benefits. From what I understand there is a portion of crude oil that gets distilled into gasoline either way, so gasoline engines probably aren't going away either, but diesels with mechanical injection will run on pretty a wide range of stuff.

Low Information Voter 1y ago

"A little yes", as my old boss used to say.

The difference in energy density between a straight-run diesel fraction and a straight-run kerosene or gasoline is on the order of 1%, depending on feedstock.

The reason commercial gasoline is usually much less than diesel is because there are competing uses in the chemical industry for many of the high-energy compounds that used to just go into gasoline and be burned - benezene, toluene, xylene among many others. Heavy fractions like diesel don't have competing uses at present, so the good stuff is left in.

Waste-derived fuels have the opposite problem - the feedstock contains so much oxygen already that the energy density is typically half that of diesel if you're lucky. There are ways to upgrade it, but they have losses of their own.

This feels disloyal to my old boss, and YMMV, but the best place for plastic waste is in landfill.

- Its an avenue for carbon sequestration.

- Can be reasonably expected to stay there out of the atmosphere and biosphere for millions to hundreds of millions of years.

- Big holes in the ground are usually free, and liners and capping is orders of magnitude cheaper than the USD$120/tonne that BlackRock gets paid to pump CO2 into old natgas wells.

- PVC is a minor but still common component of mixed plastic waste, and breaks down to form dioxins in any thermal process. Yes the exhaust stream can be treated, but that sends the cost in capital, materials and energy so high the whole process becomes net negative.

- Landfilled plastics are adequate "strategic petroleum reserves" in an emergency for countries with historically irresponsible governments and little domestic fossil fuel production (Australia).

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Discussion

The Bird 1y ago

I remember when diesel was a fraction of the cost of gas then got ramped up in cost when more diesel were on the road and the environmental push was really ramped up.

The Bird 1y ago

That's an interesting take. I remember seeing a woman in the US who developed a way to reverse engineer most waste plastics to diesel use. The story aired on the MSM then quietly disappeared. If I remember correctly she figured out how to do it with grocery bags and 2-3 other common plastics that was environmentally responsible and exonomical

Jeff Swann 1y ago

Waste oils appear to perform within a few % on dyno & fuel mileage tests from what I have seen with pretty low tech diesel engines.

CO2 is just NOT an issue IMO, it's plant fertilizer, & actually appears to be a completely desirable thing to put into the atmosphere. I think sun cycles are the real driver of average temps, but to whatever degree we are causing climate problems, monocropping, destruction of soil, & city building are at the heart of the human tendency to produce deserts.

Low Information Voter 1y ago

Waste motor oil is a pretty sweet feedstock, just need to centrifuge and filter to remove as many abrasive particles as possible.

PET and PE, not so much.

CO2 we might have to agree to disagree on. It is a plant fertilizer, and it does improve crop yields, water and nutrients permitting. But CO2 does block outgoing radiation in the few far-IR bands not already blocked by water vapour.

I don't think humanity can possibly decarbonize quickly enough to prevent a global mean 6C rise. Not without mass death, technological regression and nuclear war. We are going to have to learn to roll with the punches on climate, and government is the biggest obstacle.

But I equally think we shouldn't SUBSIDIZE unnecessary carbon emissions. Most government spending on climate change is fraud, but some is actively harmful. Subsidies and grants for glass and plastic recycling are BS but drive the whole industry.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

I just don't think CO2 can ever practically make up a significant enough % of the atmostphere to have any meaningful effect. I think it's literally all an excuse to sell the idea of spraying industrial waste into the skies & to advance authoritarian goals. CO2 levels have naturally been orders of magnitude higher in the past according to ice cores. And in any case, a warmer earth supports more life, not less.

But large corps have been pulling these environmental scams for decades. The hole in the ozone nonsense was an effort to get refrigerants with expiring patents banned so Dow (or which ever major chem corp it was) could be the exclusive seller of replacements. Flouride is costly waste so they convinced govts to spread it thinly into the water supply. Demonization of CO2 just gives the govt a new way to tax all production & all life, while corps get a new reason to spray out more things they can't easily dispose of.

a source familiar with the matter 1y ago

My understanding is that water vapor absorbs most of the spectrum of radiation that CO2 covers (so the CO2 has little effect compared to the pure physics expectation) and CO2 at current levels is basically saturating the current portion of the spectrum that water vapor does not cover (so additional CO2 has little effect)

Also we are in an Ice Age now (look it up)

Low Information Voter 1y ago

Yes, we are in an Ice Age, or would be if it weren't for preindustrial methane emissions from wet rice agriculture.

And water vapour has enormous absorption bands, running from just above terrahertz radio all the way to near-IR.

There are gaps, though, particularly the one of which is between 8um and 12um. This is where Earth radiates a great deal of its thermal energy into space. Its also where thermal scopes operate, and where CO2 absorbs. CO2 has other absorption bands, but they're either covered by water vapor already or irrelevant to Earth's radiation budget.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

CO2 absorbsion should be a non-issue, reflection might make some sense because other stuff holds heat, but gasses cannot possibly hold enough heat to matter. A desert isn't going to be any less cold at night because you increased the CO2 in the atmosphere. Desert temp swings are basically proof that moisture is about the only thing that is relevant anyway.

BitcoinSandy 1y ago

Stop thinking, follow the climate change herd. I love the constant grey skies from incessant spraying to save us. All going really well

Low Information Voter 1y ago

Our governments aren't doing sh-t, except stealing money from us, and lying about why they're giving it to their friends.

They are an incomparably greater problem than climate change, and their overeach blocks all practical low-cost mitigations.

Why should high-sulfur jet fuel become and remain illegal? Especially if was doing more good than harm in the stratosphere?

Why is sequestering carbon in landfills demonised, and billions in taxpayers funds spent liberating the carbon in waste into the atmosphere?

Its almost like government is trying to create the problem they're warning about...? Oh wait...

BottleTeams 1y ago

The government is concerned only with continuing the grift. Everything the state does is in the interest of preserving the state. We will peacefully obsolete the apparatus.

Low Information Voter 1y ago

The ocean has:

- specific heat of ~4J / g / K

- a mass of ~1.4 x 10 ^ 24 g

- a much lower viscosity than rock and soil, so it can convect on meaningful timescales

As such, it completely and utterly dominates short-term thermal storage on Earth's surface, and damps short-term fluctuations.

100%, no argument, you're right there. "Continental" desert climates far from the ocean are evidence of this.

But the atmosphere doesn't need thermal mass to warm the surface, it needs only finite optical depth at IR wavelengths, non-zero emissivity, and a nonzero kinematic viscosity.

Its thermal mass is insignificant compared to the ocean, just as your blanket's thermal mass is incomparably less than yours.

So your blanket, like the atmosphere, quickly heats up and starts conducting and radiating your own IR back at you.

A greater thermal mass would delay this, and make it LESS efficient at retaining heat over 24hrs.

Jeff Swann 1y ago

Idk man, you're still talking about a change in a GAS that currently makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere. It just seems ridiculous to think that has any appreciable impact on warmth. It seems to me, given the dramatic impact of moisture & water vapor on temps, combined with the effect that greater amounts of CO2 has on plants, CO2 could legitimately cause temps to be lower because plants with pores that don't have to open as much to breathe will lose less water to evaporation...?

I think to whatever degree there are problems it all tends to really center around the lack of permaculture in terms of farming practices, the increasing loss of topsoil, & what all of that does to moisture retention. And then the lack of stable moisture levels leads to greater temp swings & potentially increases the likelihood of fires & other issues. But CO2 just seems to have nothing to do with any of it. It's like they just paid someone to come up with some mildly plausible thing to justify communist policies based on the fact that CO2 lasers exist & to apply the idea in a way that really makes no sense ouside of the gas mixture in a laser tube. And the idea that the atmosphere can actually be managed based on controlling a gas of such tiny % is like peak hubris. It seems far more ridculous than trying to manage an economy & we know how well that works.

I think desertification & micro managment & killing more than we grow are really the major problems, & those are the only things that really put us at odds with the environment or the atmosphere or anything else. The environment created us. If we just figure out what makes more things grow & do more of that, then we are on the right track. And I think more CO2 means more plants, & more plants mean more animals, & more animals & plants together create more stable water cycles, & all of that means more food, which means better lives for all of us.

a source familiar with the matter 1y ago

That's exactly what the Rockefellers did, according to Ivor Cummins (who in my opinion usually has a good basis for what he says)

His story is that the Rockefellers came up with climate & pandemics as things that would justify a world government with no scientists in the room