Would it cost too much to make? Is the current political/economical environment against it?
Yes, and therefore Yes.
I mean look how much hooha there is when petrol goes up by 10 or 20 cents a gallon. What would happen if you tried to sell it for, say, 5 or 10 times the current price?
Is the R&D needed to make it cheaper not going to be funded due to lobbying by the current dead dinosaur burners?
Certainly not by the current generation of execs running them. There are oil supplies to last until they retire (10-50 years) so why should they care?
In any case we’re much closer to having viable alternative sources than having to make synthetic petrol. After all it would be made from coal so switching to it would do nothing to slow down the generation of greenhouse gasses. Almost anything else would be better.
Dan it’s not going to be cheaper so long as fossil fuels are as available as they are now. With fossil fuels you have large amounts of easily transported fuels available at a few points that can be converted to gasoline with a little distillation and cracking. To produce a synthetic gasoline you need to gather a lot of plant material from a large area of farmland and process it heavily. That means there will be an inherent economic cost as well as needing to burn a lot of coal to power the conversion process which is an environmental cost.
It’s not that the R&D isn’t being funded, it’s just that there is no way it will be competitive against fossil gasoline any time in the near future. I doubt if it will ever be economical. Ethanol is a far more realistic way to go if you are talking about biomass fuels.
I was assuming synthetic Gas = plant material via biodiesel.
The Germans during WWII and the South Africans during Aparthied both made synthetic gasoline, when they couldn’t get enough from outside sources. The reason you don’t see it used more is that producing synthetic fuels is quite expensive, though there are a number of people researching it at the moment - The Thermal Depolymerization process looks interesting; it can create synthetic petroleum from almost any carbon source - from turkey offal, to sewage, to waste plastic, into usable fuel, and is much more efficient than previous processes; using turkey offal, for every 100 barrels of oil they produce, they need only 15 barrels to create.
sorry to disillusion you, but synthetic oil is just more refined petroleum oil. It still comes from the petroleum stream.
"Mobil 1 is known as a fully synthetic oil, but ‘synthetic’ is actually a misnomer. All oil products used as engine oils originate from crude oil. Crude is a cocktail of thousands of components that are separated at an oil refinery using catalysts. The many resultant products include light gases, gasoline petrol), diesel oils and lubricants, and the heavy products such as tars and asphalts.
Without losing me (too much!) in the chemistry, Mike explained that it’s the long-chain polymers that are used for automobile-industry products, with general mineral lubricants a by-product of gasoline production. These general lubricants are further separated for use as engine, gear or other heavy oils. It’s the extent of this second refining process that gives an oil its basic viscosity (or, in rather simpler terms, what might be termed its stickiness).
When the oil by-products are refined still further poly-alpha olefins (PAOs) are produced. These are clear, almost waterlike fluids, and it’s these that form the base constituent of a true synthetic oil. The real advantage of these third-phase PAOs is that they are extremely stable, and have a layered structure that can be manipulated (unlike the second-phase mineral oils, which have a relatively random structure).
A semi-synthetic oil falls somewhere between the two types, and these are refined in a further process called hydrocracking. This removes undesirable waxes and toxic products from the oil."
from http://www.dragbike.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=824&get=last
As a side note, a lot of motor oils that advertise “Synthetic” in fact contain no PAO, but rather use a highly refined version of hydro-cracking that we might refer to as “Group III oils”, which are the next step down from PAO.
Examples of oils that aren’t really “PAO Synthetics” but claim to be synthetics are Shell Rotella T 5W40 Synthetic, Walmart’s Super-Tech 5W30 synthetic motor oil, and domestically produced Castrol Syntec in many if not all grades.
Back to the OP. In NZ in the 70’s we built a synthetic petrol plant. The idea was that we would then be less dependent on importing fuel. NZ has fairly decent natural gas reserves, but next to nothing in liquid hydrocarbons. Hence the gas to gasoline project.
I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but the whole plant was refitted and now produces methanol. I think it is one of the world’s largest methonal manufacturers.
You can google Methanex if interested. And Motonui synthetic petrol for more detail on the OP.
That’s not really practical, either. We don’t make nearly enough such waste.
Keep in mind that with oil, you’re looking for lubricity. With gasoline, you’re looking for energy. These are two fundamentally different goals. Any method of producing gasoline or a viable gasoline substitute will still require packing a lot of chemical energy into the substance, and that’s neither easy nor cheap.
The thing about the thermal depolymerization process is that you can use almost any type of waste with it, from sewage to offal to used tires. Using this process, the agricultural waste produced in the US alone would produce ~4 billion barrels of oil a year. In comparison, the US imported 3.3 billion barrels of oil in 2002.
I should have been more clear: we don’t produce enough concentrated waste. We’d have to spend millions and maybe billions to collect, sort, and process the waste into gas. Its not at all clear we’d be seeing much in the way of savings. Aside from that, it would lead to increased pollution and fertilizer demand.
Man, whoever at dragbike.com posted that, botched their descriptions mightily.
Here are the API base oil categories:
Group I - Viscosity index between 80 and 120, and less than 90% saturates and/or more than 0.03% sulfur.
Group II - Viscosity index between 80 and 120, and 90% saturates or greater and 0.03% sulfur or less.
Group II+ Viscosity Index between 110 and 119, and 90% saturates or greater and 0.03% sulfur or less.
Group III - Viscosity index of 120 or higher, and 90% saturates or greater and 0.03% sulfur or less.
Group IV - All polyalphaolefins (PAOs).
Group V - All other base stocks not included in Groups I through IV.
Put in more layman’s terms, Groups I-III are refined petroleum, with Groups II, II+ and III being hydrocracked/hydrofinished to achieve their VI/saturate targets. Group I is just solvent-refined.
Group IV is made of polyalphaolefins, which are created as polymers of ethylene molecules, which can be produced in several ways.
Group V is everything else- esters, alkylated napthalene, etc…
In commercial terms, motor oils with base stocks made of Group II+ or below are considered “conventional”, while anything with base stocks made of Group III or higher are considered “synthetic”. It’s more of a marketing issue- there’s a raging debate about Group III = synthetic or not, and Mobil actually sued Castrol over this some years ago.
Semi-Synthetic oils are usually a blend of Group I-II+ and Group III-V oils. There aren’t any regulations as to how much Group III-V there must be, so you may get more value by getting a predominantly Group II/II+ oil such as Chevron/Havoline/Pennzoil. (anything with IsoSYN, Purebase, etc… on teh label without being labeled synthetic is probably Group II/II+)
My Cites:
http://www.cpchem.com/pao/products/overview.asp
http://www.universallubes.com/BaseOil.htm
http://www.chevron.com/prodserv/BaseOils/faq_answers.shtml
As for the OP, the main reason that we have synthetic motor oil is that it offers a significant performance advantage versus regular oil, and consumers are willing to pay a premium for that performance. Mobil 1 costs roughly $5 USD per quart, but Chevron Supreme costs only $1.10 per quart.
As far as I know, synthetic gasoline might offer similar performance advantages like higher octane. Shell Optimax fuel might be synthetic to some degree, but it’s not common in the US at all.
Basically the cost would be prohibitive versus the benefits.