Cars today run on “gasoline” which has the hydrocarbons that work with the air and make the combustion possible, but why design engines like this, especially since the refining process is so arduous? Would it not have been easier and more logical to try using the crude oil straight from the Earth?
In: 16
Oh a major reason especially back then was the extreme variations of the quality, the volitilty of the liquid that was collected.
What made standard oil was that they chemical engineered a product that you could expect had a specific level of flamability.
in the mid 1800s thousands of people were horrificially burned, killed because when you poured oil into a lantern you had little idea whether it was like cooking oil or rocket fuel. serioiusly it was dangerous. one of the reasons whale oil was so popular was it was far more consistent. as a percent of population, as many people were killed filling, lighting or using gas lanterns, cook stoves, heaters, etc than are killed in car wrecks every year.
Asphalt, that thick black goo they make streets out of, thats one of the things they ‘refine’ out of crude oil.
up to the 70s we guzzled gasoline and let all kinds of nasty chemicals fly free in the air, then we realized that’s why the sky in cities were so dark brown and acidic.
if you look at your car engine now there’s all kinds of tubes running here and there, you need an engineering degree to work on a car, because all that is to keep pollution down. (and they work SOOO much more efficiently now, a big V8 getting 8mpg hardly had 280 horse power, now you have family sedans pumping out 300 and getting 30mpg)
some of those big container ships with engines bigger than a house can run on ‘bunker’ oil but nobody seems to care what kind of pollution they do on the ocean.
think of gasoline as whisky, it starts out as soup that gets filtered, then distilled…and modern distilleries borrowed the invention of a collum with separation plates that lets various chemicals collect and siphon away at specific temptures for a very pure product.
Undistilled crude oil is not very combustible since it contains asphalt. Lighter distillates like acetone are too flammable and prone to accidental explosion. Gasoline is stable enough not to explode without an open flame, but volatile enough to combust near an open flame.
Some very large industrial fuel engines could run on straight up crude, but they would seize after prolonged use due to the present asphalt. Engines dont like asphalt.
Originally it’s because gasoline was cheap.
The first uses for oil was kerosene as a replacement for whale oil in lamps, tar to replace that made from trees, and paraffin wax. Those are the heavier things in the oil and all the lighter stuff like methane, propane, and gasoline was mostly either burned off or just dumped.
Gasoline is easier to vaporize and burn than heavy fuels like kerosene. That means it was a natural choice to fuel the small engines in early cars, and the oil companies were happy to collect and sell something they used to throw away.
At the end of the 19th century, catalytic cracking was developed which let us split the tars and waxes into liquid fuels and production of gasoline and diesel fuel really took off.
For an internal combustion engine to run effectively, the fuel needs to be a few things. It needs to be energy-dense, reliably combustible, but not too easily combustible for handling reasons, free-flowing, and clean-burning.
Gasoline checks all those boxes, despite it needing to go through the refining process. Some of the lighter distillates tend to be too volatile, and the heavier ones are too viscous or burn dirty and leave engine deposits. Crude is a mix of all of them, so it can burn too fast AND too slow for an engine, burn dirty, be too viscous to handle/pump easily. It’s kinda the worst of all worlds when it comes to fuels.
Engines (at least internal combustion engines) work with explosions, not fire. They mix gasoline and air, compress it, and then add a spark, which creates an explosion that drives the piston. Crude oil simply isn’t explosive in the way that gasoline fumes are. Early engines used kerosene, which was OK, and some people experimented with an engine that used gunpowder. (You can imagine how well that worked out when the engine got hot.) Eventually, gasoline became the standard fuel, because it works.
You can, technically, use crude oil in a diesel engine, but it’s going to make a lot of really black smoke, and it will gum up the engine much faster than cleaner diesel fuel.
A common early internal combustion engine was the *hot bulb engine* which burnt (amongst other things) fuel oil – still not undistilled crude, but a heavier fraction than either petrol or diesel.
The problem with pure crude oil is that it is such a wide mix of fluids that no one burner can easily burn everything. The lightest fractions will explode, and the heaviest will just get burnt onto your combustion chamber. This had been worked out before the dawn of internal combustion engines by operators of steam engines.
There were several types of cars being manufactured in the early days, so the internal combustion engine was only one type. Oil is flammable and helped lubricate the moving parts, but the engines required “small” explosions (it is ELI5) in the piston chambers to drive the cars drive train, etc. oil did not provide that crucial capacity. The oil companies were already producing kerosine for home lighting so it was not arduous to further refine into gasoline, especially as electricity became the dominant source for home illumination
At the time of the invention of the automobile, gasoline was a mostly unused byproduct of producing kerosene which was used for heating and lamps.
Crude oil is not flammable enough. People made torches by dipping wood in crude, it barely burns better than wood.
The first engines use kerosene, which was available in the lab at low cost because it was used in lanterns. Then they found that a more volatile substance, gasoline, produced more power in the engine.
Cars today run on “gasoline” which has the hydrocarbons that work with the air and make the combustion possible, but why design engines like this, especially since the refining process is so arduous? Would it not have been easier and more logical to try using the crude oil straight from the Earth?
In: 16
Oh a major reason especially back then was the extreme variations of the quality, the volitilty of the liquid that was collected.
What made standard oil was that they chemical engineered a product that you could expect had a specific level of flamability.
in the mid 1800s thousands of people were horrificially burned, killed because when you poured oil into a lantern you had little idea whether it was like cooking oil or rocket fuel. serioiusly it was dangerous. one of the reasons whale oil was so popular was it was far more consistent. as a percent of population, as many people were killed filling, lighting or using gas lanterns, cook stoves, heaters, etc than are killed in car wrecks every year.
Asphalt, that thick black goo they make streets out of, thats one of the things they ‘refine’ out of crude oil.
up to the 70s we guzzled gasoline and let all kinds of nasty chemicals fly free in the air, then we realized that’s why the sky in cities were so dark brown and acidic.
if you look at your car engine now there’s all kinds of tubes running here and there, you need an engineering degree to work on a car, because all that is to keep pollution down. (and they work SOOO much more efficiently now, a big V8 getting 8mpg hardly had 280 horse power, now you have family sedans pumping out 300 and getting 30mpg)
some of those big container ships with engines bigger than a house can run on ‘bunker’ oil but nobody seems to care what kind of pollution they do on the ocean.
think of gasoline as whisky, it starts out as soup that gets filtered, then distilled…and modern distilleries borrowed the invention of a collum with separation plates that lets various chemicals collect and siphon away at specific temptures for a very pure product.
Undistilled crude oil is not very combustible since it contains asphalt. Lighter distillates like acetone are too flammable and prone to accidental explosion. Gasoline is stable enough not to explode without an open flame, but volatile enough to combust near an open flame.
Some very large industrial fuel engines could run on straight up crude, but they would seize after prolonged use due to the present asphalt. Engines dont like asphalt.
Originally it’s because gasoline was cheap.
The first uses for oil was kerosene as a replacement for whale oil in lamps, tar to replace that made from trees, and paraffin wax. Those are the heavier things in the oil and all the lighter stuff like methane, propane, and gasoline was mostly either burned off or just dumped.
Gasoline is easier to vaporize and burn than heavy fuels like kerosene. That means it was a natural choice to fuel the small engines in early cars, and the oil companies were happy to collect and sell something they used to throw away.
At the end of the 19th century, catalytic cracking was developed which let us split the tars and waxes into liquid fuels and production of gasoline and diesel fuel really took off.
For an internal combustion engine to run effectively, the fuel needs to be a few things. It needs to be energy-dense, reliably combustible, but not too easily combustible for handling reasons, free-flowing, and clean-burning.
Gasoline checks all those boxes, despite it needing to go through the refining process. Some of the lighter distillates tend to be too volatile, and the heavier ones are too viscous or burn dirty and leave engine deposits. Crude is a mix of all of them, so it can burn too fast AND too slow for an engine, burn dirty, be too viscous to handle/pump easily. It’s kinda the worst of all worlds when it comes to fuels.
Engines (at least internal combustion engines) work with explosions, not fire. They mix gasoline and air, compress it, and then add a spark, which creates an explosion that drives the piston. Crude oil simply isn’t explosive in the way that gasoline fumes are. Early engines used kerosene, which was OK, and some people experimented with an engine that used gunpowder. (You can imagine how well that worked out when the engine got hot.) Eventually, gasoline became the standard fuel, because it works.
You can, technically, use crude oil in a diesel engine, but it’s going to make a lot of really black smoke, and it will gum up the engine much faster than cleaner diesel fuel.
A common early internal combustion engine was the *hot bulb engine* which burnt (amongst other things) fuel oil – still not undistilled crude, but a heavier fraction than either petrol or diesel.
The problem with pure crude oil is that it is such a wide mix of fluids that no one burner can easily burn everything. The lightest fractions will explode, and the heaviest will just get burnt onto your combustion chamber. This had been worked out before the dawn of internal combustion engines by operators of steam engines.
There were several types of cars being manufactured in the early days, so the internal combustion engine was only one type. Oil is flammable and helped lubricate the moving parts, but the engines required “small” explosions (it is ELI5) in the piston chambers to drive the cars drive train, etc. oil did not provide that crucial capacity. The oil companies were already producing kerosine for home lighting so it was not arduous to further refine into gasoline, especially as electricity became the dominant source for home illumination
At the time of the invention of the automobile, gasoline was a mostly unused byproduct of producing kerosene which was used for heating and lamps.
Crude oil is not flammable enough. People made torches by dipping wood in crude, it barely burns better than wood.
The first engines use kerosene, which was available in the lab at low cost because it was used in lanterns. Then they found that a more volatile substance, gasoline, produced more power in the engine.
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