My first car (in 1986) was a barn find 1964 Triumph TR4a. If I had that car today, I'd EV swap it in a heartbeat because
- The car is not super rare
- The inline 6 it came with is under-powered, un-reliable, and I've never seen a triumph engine that went more than a few years without a leak (have had 5 between myself and my parents)
- it would massively increase the likelyhood that I'd daily drive it, if I knew it would start and run reliably & wouldn't leave me stranded.
- engine parts are not easy to find.
But I'd never EV-swap something super rare, or something that has a better, more common, more reliable engine
Modern cars already exist, you can just use those. There aren’t enough proper classics in existence to matter from a carbon perspective.
Thinking of the Bizzarrini Manta, the Ferrari Modulo, the Maserati Boomerang, or the Citroen Karin.
The EPA and carb need to be a lot more concerned with 90% use cases and much less concerned with 100% cases. Lower emission standards for PHEVs.
Why is aviation fuel the most difficult to replace?
The specific energy of gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, while that of a Samsung inr18650 Li-Ion cell is 958.1 kJ/kg. Even accounting for the much lower efficiency of a turbofan engine the difference is quite significant.
If they can find a way to transform carbon-neutral electricity into a hydrocarbon, then they can keep airplanes going without having to burn fossil fuels. But it's hard to make that efficient enough to be economically viable.
And typically the car can't go as far on a single charge as a tank of gas. I can usually go about 200 miles on a typical charge in my (cough) "300" mile EVs, but my last gas car could go about 400 miles between visits to the gas station. (But I don't care because I just plug in when I get home.)
That being said, I once rented an Infiniti that could barely do 200 miles on a single tank of gas.
To get back to the point: Batteries are just too heavy for airplanes, so unless there is a major breakthrough, synthetic gasoline is currently the most promising way to make airplanes carbon neutral.
That being said: For hobbyists who use a classic car as a base for something custom, I have no problem with whatever method of propulsion they use.
>You fight with the army you have.
Building an "army" of E-Gas synthesis capacity (and worse, an "army" of the 300+% increase in wind and solar to cover inefficiency) is harder than replacing that "army" of cars with EVs.
E-Gas greenwashes fossil fuel stranded assets, but it's not a serious attempt at an energy source.
Key word: "potentially". Because it is less accurate than the word "currently" - as in, "currently, the cost of production is a significant barrier" - I would argue the word "potentially" at the outset frames the whole description of benefits as an unsubstantiated faith.
When all processes for deriving synthetic gasoline require more input energy than available energy from the output, you're not describing processes that "potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels."
Like, "ok, you win, but if I drop this gigantic adjustment onto your math, then I win," and an honest conversation would then move to whether or not the adjustment was justified but that's not what happened, the conversation turned into yelling at anyone who didn't want to take the outcome-determinative adjustment on faith. Lol. Being a crusader doesn't make you wrong, but it does make the whole accusation of unsubstantiated faith / appeal to reason quite hypocritical.
And to be clear, I wouldn't have a problem if only the facts were put down: current methods, advantages (probably compared to other methods) and drawbacks. But to say this is "potentially offering a more sustainable alternative to fossil fuels" is like saying: "I can use a 74GW data center and a prompt to get the answer to 2+2, it potentially offers a more sustainable alternative to calculators."
The science keeps walking away from the Searchinger 2008 result (100g GHG/MJ iLUC for corn ethanol) and towards the biofuels industry claims that this was absurdly high, yet green rhetoric still behaves like the argument was 100% settled in 2008 and anyone who thinks otherwise is a shill.
>and that’s the best you can do
For cars and trucks at least, scaling battery manufacturing is simply a much easier challenge vs more-than-tripling the required size of the entire fleet's renewable energy supply.
E-Gas can't compete on land, even assuming e-Gas converters were free and 100% efficient. This isn't a matter of waiting for the tech to get better and become The Sustainable Future, it's already been made obsoleted by electric cars.
Emergency generation is another application where density is important. It's extremely difficult to beat the a gas turbine + tanker truck on cost and flexibility, it's the energy equivalent of "don't underestimate the bandwidth of tapes in a station wagon."
>You were careful to say "on land," but I wanted to highlight it for anyone who isn't familiar enough with the argument to spot the hedging.
E-Gas won't work for airplanes either.
That's because A) E-Gas converters are not free and not 100% efficient, so it's more like 5x the cost in best-case-scenario (vs 10x today), and B) the aviation industry is well aware that corruption is simply cheaper.
E-Gas will not happen. What will actually happen is more of the same:
1) aviation will continue to use E-Gas (and some costly demo flights) as a greenwashing tactic while behind-the-scenes working to soften climate goals,
2) eventually the intermediate technical-economic-policy compromise will be to only use fossil fuels for aviation, and
3) in the long-long term aviation will go electric too, only with slightly different routing and network design to accommodate the reduced range (this has a cost, but by then fossil fuels will be costlier).
E-Gas is good for nothing except greenwashing fossil fuel assets, hence the big push on HN. Gotta fool your talent pool that they're not 'really' part of the problem. This both lowers labor cost and delays effective regulation, since engineers tend to be thought-leaders in crafting future policy.
Sorry, what? Even charging a battery "require more input energy than available energy from the output". Obviously it's not a source of energy, it's a way to store energy.
* wherever there are wells with condensate that isn't too nasty
Non-stylistically, the non-answers to questions or misinterpreted questions (read the bolded final sentence under "What is the octane rating of synthetic gasoline?") are a tell.
[†] Q&A format: https://archive.is/20250828121105/https://www.nytimes.com/20... ;
Bulleted list with bold format: https://archive.is/g8K5w#live-feed-items
[1] https://bikermtb.com/kilo-bicycles-2/
[2] https://www.bikeforums.net/general-cycling-discussion/129598...
alexandrehtrb•3d ago
https://en.clickpetroleoegas.com.br/haru-oni-plant-starts-pr...
https://www.siemens-energy.com/global/en/home/stories/haru-o...
PaulHoule•3d ago
https://www.exxonmobilchemical.com/en/catalysts-and-technolo...
but still making methanol from syngas. Two attractive routes though are just using methanol or blending methanol into gas and turning the methanol to dimethyl ether.
I dunno if it is really practical but I like this image of this personal fuel synthesizer
https://www.carsauce.com/car-news/start-up-invents-home-petr...
which makes about a gallon a day which is about what my Honda Fit uses.
gsf_emergency_2•2d ago
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S24688...
fuzzfactor•2d ago
It just physically gives the lowest mileage per gallon compared to other alcohols, which still all give shorter range per tank compared to plain hydrocarbons. This is not really that big a deal on the road but for aviation it can make all the difference, so that would have to be where it makes sense to process all the way to a synthetic hydrocarbon fuel. Or if there was actually surplus energy, more energy could be stored by processing the alcohols into lower-oxygen-content higher-energy-density liquids. On a per-tank storage basis too.
Regardless of less energy per gallon, methanol and ethanol do burn with higher octane ratings than most premium gasolines.
Plus in case of fire, alcohols burn with a blue flame too faint to see in sunlight so 15% hydrocarbons are added which would result in a yellow flame instead. That's why the M85 and E85 are only 85% alcohol.
I have seen some renewable naphtha that smelled pretty sweet but like ordinary petroleum naphtha, is not a drop-in replacement for finished gasoline since the antiknock rating is way too low. But naphtha of some kind still makes up the bulk of gasoline blendstocks which are then enhanced with more costly higher-octane hydrocarbons and often 10% ethanol too to barely meet specifications for consumer gasoline. After running it through the analytical lab this renewable stuff was clean clean and I would have to estimate as a liquid it was way less toxic than the natural organic virgin straight-run naphtha obtained from crude oil. And the virgin sweet petroleum naphtha is concentrated from "sweet" crude by distillation without depending on any chemical reactions, and it gags you a lot less than the catalytic naphtha which has been chemically or physically "cracked" into different nasty-smelling hydrocarbons that did not exist naturally within the crude oil to begin with.
lazide•7h ago
On the plus side, I read your comment like a sommelier critiquing the latest wine - my mental imagine was you lightly sniffing and then sipping the latest syngas.
‘A strong note of toluene, with a remarkably clean and sharp benzene aftertaste, with an earthy finish reminiscent of the best Texas light crude.’
A+