can anyone tell me the difference between these certain fuels/ gasoline,propane,methane,kerosene,home heating oil that is about all i can think of from petrolium base i was under the assumption that they are just refined differently .also i was under the assumption that refining meant to boil off the natural water in oil thanks in advance
Crude oil contains a lot of nasty stuff, so just concentrate on the single long chain hydrocarbons. They all have the formula CnH2n+2 (Where n, and 2n+2 are supposed to be in subscripts, Help!). Methane, ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane, heptane, and octane have one thru eight Carbon atoms, respectively.
To refine crude, you boil it and capture the condensation at different levels up the cooling tower. The higher you go up the tower, the lighter the fractions you capture. Gasoline is a mixture of compounds ranging from pentane to something above octane, which I forget. Kerosene, diesel fuel and jet fuel are all basically the same thing, and are just heavier than gasoline. Home heating oil can be just about anything, including the even thicker gunk left at the bottom of the tower after refining, which is why we call it “residual” fuel.
Hope that helps.
I just bothered to check, and gasoline is a mixture of compounds containing from 4 to 12 Carbon atoms, or butane thru dodecane.
It might also help to know that oil companies maximize their gasoline production by catalytically cracking the larger compounds in a reducing atmosphere. This about doubles the percent of compunds in the gasoline range over what is normally found in crude.
Home heating oil is #2 fuel oil, as is diesel fuel. Just don’t get caught running your vehicle on it - you didn’t pay road taxes on it for use in your furnace. About the only difference you’re likely to find between them is that “road grade” is lower sulfur.
Kerosene (#1 fuel oil) and diesel fuel are different petroleum fractions, and I wouldn’t use one when the other is called for. Yes, I am aware that truckers sometimes mix kerosene into their diesel fuel for easier starting. Jet fuel is very close to kerosene, but there are grade differences, and I don’t know how well a jumbo jet would run on the kerosene intended to go in your space heater.
Propane is usually produced from natural gas, which is mostly methane. Methane, ethane, propane and butane are all simple hydrocarbons with a low enough number of carbons to be gases at STP. I just gave them in order - methane (CH4) to butane (C4H10). There are many alternate sources for methane being investigated. LP gas is a mixture of hydrocarbon gases liquified under pressure.
Coleman fuel, or white gas, is another petroleum fraction, sometimes called naptha, and, yes, you can burn it in your car in a pinch. It will probably knock like hell, as the octane rating is something in the 70’s - you wouldn’t want to run it for very long.
Yabob, I see you can’t subscript either.
Just as an aside, my boss used to roughneck in the oilfields of Oklahoma in the 70’s and told me that during the energy crisis, a lot of people would steal “drip” for their cars.
Apparently, drip was just the crude oil that accumulated around the base of the oil rigs and looked like a greenish, slimy gasoline as opposed to the black stuff you see on TV while watching The Beverly Hillbillies. Anyway, people would collect it and burn it in their cars. The cars would run, but would emit large clouds of smoke and knock rather loudly so you could always tell who was “burning drip”. I can’t imagine that it did the cars any favors either, but with the simpler engines, it wasn’t quite as bad or hard to repair as burning it in one of today’s cars.
Subscripting - Just too lazy to look up the tags when C4H10 conveys the meaning adequately.
As long as we’re on the subject of kerosene, maybe somebody has an answer to an old thread I started:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=23151
I suppose it could be for people to add to their diesel fuel, but the road tax warning would suggest they are risking a fine.
Rats. Got here too late to add to the subject, so I’ll have to content myself with enlightening on subscripting. It’s {sub} and {/sub} around the numbers, replacing {} with . Knock yourself out.
Jophiel said “Apparently, drip was just the crude oil that accumulated around the base of the oil rigs and looked like a greenish, slimy gasoline as opposed to the black stuff you see on TV while watching The Beverly Hillbillies.”
As one who has burned a fair amount of drip gas, I can speak with some authority. Drip condenses from natural gas as it comes up from the gas well. In some cases there are dehhydrators at the well head that remove the drip because they don’t want it in the pipeline. As a rule drip is a clear, 70 octane (approx) gasoline that often contains some butane. The butane could cause ice to form in the carburetor’s venturi (back when cars still had caburetors) and stalling would result until the ice melted. The low octane would cause some cars to ping, but in the early 60s there were a lot of cars with low compression engines and many would run pretty good on it.
Other than stalling and pinging, drip was not a bad fuel, and the price was right - if you didn’t get caught liberating it.
Thanks Diver. You’ll have to excuse any errors I made in describing it as I’ve never so much as seen the stuff and was speaking second hand (and no doubt messed up some details).
On another note…
I hold in front of me an advertisment from one of those catalogs of worthless junk which describes a small thingamajig that “clips onto the fuel line of your car” and “immediately starts breaking down the hydrocarbon chains in your fuel, letting it burn cleaner and more completely” thus saving me $4-$5 on ever fill-up. Any truth to this? I should note that it’s only pages away from a VHS tape of secret Russian hand to hand combat techniques that even the CIA doesn’t know about (I might buy the CIA a copy of the tape in the spirit of national defense and pride).