More U.S. diesels = no imported oil needed?

Factual Questions
1

One of my trade journals says the following: “Today, only 8% of vehicles on U.S. roads are diesels…One study suggests that if 30% of vehicles in the United States were diesels, we could virtually eliminate our dependence on foreign oil!” Could anyone provide me with, or point me to, data/figures that show just HOW DAMN WRONG that claim is? Or tell me how it could be right?

My BS meter pegged reading that. A quick Googling shows the U.S. to import over 60% of its oil. So even if all oil in the U.S. went to vehicles, and even if diesels don’t use any of it, that would mean that reducing the gasoline vehicle population by 24%* would reduce oil use by 60+%! Neat trick there. :stuck_out_tongue:

*[70% of all vehicles] being 76% of [92% of all vehicles]

2

Where do these guys think diesel fuel comes from?

Oh wait, I know. This is one of those “studies” where they say the whole country can run on french-fry grease and ethanol.

3

Well, we have massive reserves of coal and that can be converted to diesel. It’s probably not economically efficient – we would surely be paying a premium to do so.

But I’m not sure how the math in the OP’s question works out.

4

I wonder if they are expecting the diesel to come from locally produced biodiesel.

5

I think coal can be converted to regular gasoline as well, although once again it is probably less economical than oil. Sasol in South Africa do quite a bit of this, both for diesel and gasoline.

6

Diesels generally get better MPG than gas cars. The article could be saying that if 30% of cars were diesel the overall fuel consumption would go down enough that we wouldn’t need imports. Sounds improbable.

7

Well, your trade journal is accurate: some crackpot study, somewhere, did in fact say that.

I’m guessing you subscribe to this, or a related journal:
http://www.asashop.org/autoinc/aug2010/manage.htm

My google-fu wasn’t able to find the source material for that.

8

Do we even need to import oil? I was under the impression we have large reserves both in-ground and in tanks that we reserve, and in the meantime, we purchase foreign oil because it’s cheaper and we’re depleting someone else’s resources.

9

Dead on, Mr. Slant, that is indeed the journal and the article.

While I assume the author of the article didn’t make up that “study result,” I find it pitiful that he passed it on without questioning it. This evening I mailed a mildly scathing, mildly (I hope) self-righteous letter to the magazine’s editor, included below.

I look forward to receiving AutoInc. and usually find helpful information among its articles and columns. Thus I am sad to say that the August 2010 issue brought some serious disappointment. Specifically, the I found the article “Deisel Opportunities: Are You Ready for the Profit Tsunami?” by Charlie Polston to be poorly written, incompletely thought out, and, in part, factually ridiculous. I think your readers deserve better.

While I could give a detailed critique of many of the article’s shortcomings (available on request), for now I’ll summarize a few things. Mr. Polston states that there will soon be a lot more diesel vehicles on the road (“The diesels are coming!”, “The diesel wave is rolling in fast.”) but doesn’t give any facts to support this claim. He does mention an incentive towards it (CAFE standards), so it sounds like it may be a reasonable contention. But any shop that wants to intelligently consider his advice to prepare for diesel service needs to know how many and how soon. A familiarity with past attempts to produce or import [diesel] vehicles for U.S. roads would certainly lead one to wonder when and if we’ll see this increase, but the article doesn’t even give a hint about actual facts and figures in this area.

The discussion of sulfur content in diesel fuel wasted a lot of words on aspects that are not relevant to the matter of injector cleaning. Lubricity, corrosiveness, longeveity, stability, and cold weather performance are certainly concerns, but have nothing to do with the issue of desposits, and their mention clouds the issue needlessly. What’s worse, there’s no clear statement that low sulfur fuel leads to increased deposits. It’s hinted at in a “beating around the bush” manner (“poses a real threat to injector cleanliness”) which leaves one wondering just how big a problem this low sulfur fuel is.

The article’s third paragraph has the statement “One study suggests that if 30 percent of vehicles in the United States were diesels, we could virtually eliminate our dependence on foreign oil!” Wow. Did that not strike Mr. Polston as a grandiose claim? Did no editor or even proofreader at your magazine question whether that was possible? It’s easy to find that our country imports more than 60% of its oil. I would love to hear how reducing our gasoline vehicle population from 92% of all vehicles to 70% percent of all vehicles (that’s a 24% reduction) yields a 60% saving. That’s not even remotely close to mathmatically possible. I find it terribly irresponsible – and, frankly, not very smart – to throw out a statement like that without any explanation or facts and figures to make sense of it.

In sum, I found this article to be more confusing than informative. I feel that Mr. Polston was careless about what he included, and lacking in what he didn’t include. I would be afraid to trust him as an instructor, and now wonder how much I can trust AutoInc. to provide reliable information. I’ll hope to see higher standards of journalism in future issues.

10

Define “need.” Need to because it’s the only option, probably not. Need to in order to get the most for our money, probably so.

11

Can you imagine what this country would smell like if all cars were diesel? You’d have to move to Mars to get away from it.

12

Musicat,

The passenger car diesels envisioned by this article would be more along the lines of a modern VW or Mercedes diesel in a passenger car.
You can ride behind those cars on a bike or in a convertible and not smell the exhaust. They still sound like diesels, albeit quieter than diesels of the past, but they also won’t emit soot when they take off after the light turns green.
Here are some examples of what I’m talking about:
http://www.practicalenvironmentalist.com/automobiles/overview-of-2009-diesel-cars.htm

Now, most of the above engines are clean when new. I’m pretty sure that if they are poorly maintained, they’ll have increased emissions, but states already know how to keep that in check with inspection regimes.

13

I had a 2003 VW Jetta TDI and it was pretty clean. In cold weather it would have the diesel smell when it started up but otherwise you’d never know it was a diesel.

14

The newer ones aren’t bad - I just got a “clean diesel” few months ago. They’ve had to do a few things about the particulates and nitrogen oxides to pass EPA. They still rumble a bit, but they don’t sound like a Massey Ferguson tractor anymore.

15

Me, too – I bought an Audi A3 TDI back in February. It uses a particulate filter & catalyst for NOx, as opposed to the urea-injection systems used on Mercedes/BMW and the larger VW diesels. It does sound a bit different than gasoline engines – a bit more clanky at idle. Driving somewhat aggressively, I’m getting around 32 mpg in town, 40 on the highway, roughly twice the mpg I had on my previous car.

Modern diesels also put out less CO & CO2 per mile than equivalent gasoline engines. A European commercial for the Audi A5 pointed this out rather humorously – an A5 owner decides to end it all, so he goes into his garage, sits in his A5 & starts the engine, hoping to kill himself with the carbon monoxide. He eventually falls asleep, only to wake up the next day to discover that the A5 is out of fuel – an entire tank’s worth of diesel didn’t produce enough CO to kill him.

16

I’ve got a VW Jetta Sportwagen. Same engine. The catalyst technique they use works well enough to get the little 2 liter TDI down to EPA levels. They have to go to the urea system for the bigger engine. The need to periodically fill a “urea tank” conjures up pictures of a rather novel form of automotive maintenance. Soon after I got the car, I took a long road trip. With the engine still pretty new, I got 48 mpg on one interstate stretch. Should get a bit better eventually, as most small automotive engines will hit their peak mpg somewhere around 40K miles, give or take a wide margin.

17

BTW, biodiesel is arguably a better bet than replacement biofuels for gasoline engines, such as ethanol. Note that I said arguably. I still think cellulosic ethanol holds a lot of promise. Current commercial biodiesel in the US is mostly made from soybeans, and has a positive energy balance. However, like corn ethanol, you can still argue that it’s using a food crop to make vehicle fuel. It’s not clear, though. Some soybean oil available as feedstock for biodiesel is waste oil from processing of soybeans as animal feed. Like ethanol, there is potential to make biodiesel from a lot of feedstocks. Algae, for instance.

That said, the statement from the OP’s journal sounds absurd, as we seem to have agreed.

18

I see three possibilities (other than the most obvious one, that someone just pulled “facts” out of a randomly-selected bodily orifice):
1: We could eliminate all dependence on foreign oil by switching over 30% of cars and taking a bunch of other steps that got forgotten about later.
2: We could eliminate all dependence on overseas oil, or middle-eastern oil. The numbers might work out for this one; a lot of the oil the US imports comes from Canada, and there’s also some from South America. Importing oil from Canada might not feel like “importing”, given how close relations between the US and Canada are.
3: It said we could virtually eliminate dependence. Maybe the meaning of “virtually” is just being stretched to a ridiculous extreme.

19

Maybe the journal expected the non-diesels (70% of the fleet) to be full-electric, and the US to build a few thousand nuclear power plants to drive them?
That article could sure as frog have used a footnote.

20

It would smell like London, which is mostly made from trucks and diesel taxis. PM10 pollution is a bit of an issue, and a good nose-blow at the end of a day in The Smoke is more akin to sweeping a chimney.

Diesel cars are very popular in the UK, due to a combination of their better economy and high fuel prices. Not so long ago, before advanced diesel engines and turbochargers made diesel cars properly viable, diesel was about 2/3 the price of petrol/gas, and with the extra fuel economy of diesels the fuel savings were considerable. However, the open market reached a curious equilibrium last year. When petroleum is processed, the relative percentage of the various fractionates is more or less fixed, so there used to be a glut of diesel as the refineries couldn’t help but produce too much. However, now that diesel cars are very popular, it came about that the price of diesel fuel exceeded the price of petrol/gas, and for a short period there came about the ridiculous situation where diesel was so much more expensive that it was actually cheaper to run a petrol/gas car, even with the mpg differential. That’s settled down a bit now, and both fuel prices are currently on parity, give or take a few pennies.