Current cost of fuel.

I can't see that happening anytime soon John.

 

I don't know the cost of petrol here, I only fill up once every few months these days ... I go mostly on a bus now (although the services could be improved) but I may as well use my free pass, and driving in the car on my own makes me feel as if the world is empty since B died.
Saves pollution too

 

I paid £1.85 at Morrisons today.

 

Diesel was 10p dearer.
And so it should be.

Petrol was £1.91 last time I filled up.

 

Diesel is the biggest scam. It used to be cheap because it's a byproduct of the petrol making process, but someone cottoned on to the fact that diesel cars were becoming popular due to their fuel efficiency.

Not that it bothers me. I'll never buy a diesel car again. I've had 3 so far. One blew up. The next one just sort of fell apart, and my last one blew it's turbo, got fixed, then the timing belt slipped and caused it to mash up all the valve heads.

 

If anyone is interested, on Monday I paid $1.76 approximately £1 of your money. It had gone up over $2. For a short while.

 

Never worked out how diesel could be a by product, surely they are separate parts of crude oil and you get some diesel and some petrol from every barrel of oil.
So, I see more diesel cars than petrol so surely if they didn't refine oil for petrol they would still have to for diesel.

 

Is that a Litre Lori, the kind of litre we have or one of those American liters.
Or is it a gallon, US or Imperial.

 

It is an imperial liter.

 

Until trucks go electric we will need diesel for the haulage industry. It is sad that we buy much of our diesel from Putin.

 

I might get this a bit wrong because I'm not a chemist, or whatever discipline it is. But I did work at a petrochemical plant for a while. I was in IT, but my job required me to talk to all sorts of people about all sorts of processes. Here's my basic and probably slightly inaccurate understanding of it.

So crude oil becomes many things. You get a highly flammable gas from it called naptha, which incidentally is apparently where the name napalm comes from. It's extremely volatile. At the other end you get plastic.

The science bit blows my mind but I'll give it my best shot.

If you put crude oil in a cylinder under extreme pressure, then you heat one end to very high temperature, and cool the other end to extremely low temperature, then some molecular magic happens and the oil will split into layers of different molecules. The base product of plastic forms at one end, like a heavy wax. Extremely volatile gas at the other end, and different materials in layers in between. One such layer is basically the start of petrol. You can't use it in your car because it's just the raw stuff, ungraded and without additives. So having got the plastic wax out, the gas (which really frustratingly is often vented and burned in the flare stack), and all the other high value bits, you end up with a few byproducts. One such byproduct is like a nasty sludge that as far as I know is used for nothing. Another is a light oil, far less viscose than the crude oil that went in, but less refined than the petroleum layer. This, if I understand correctly, is the start of diesel. It will be filtered and graded and additives will go in it before it becomes fuel, but its basically the 'raw' diesel.

So basically, diesel is what you get from crude oil after you've took your plastic base, petroleum and naptha.

 

Yeah but if you want it as fuel for a car and there were no petrol cars you would still have to refine crude oil for it.
Its a bit like a while ago when there was a shortage of CO2 because the fertiliser industry was shut down.
By product, maybe, but if you need it you still have to make it regardless.

When does a by product become an essential.

 

Petrol was made first. It's the easy part. You only need to boil the crude oil, catch the steam and cool it back to liquid. That's basically petrol. I guess as people improved the refining process beyond basically a moonshine still, they got other products, and entrepreneurs find a way to use them.