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I have a question for you petrochemists: Diesel liquid has a density of 0.85kg/l, while C02 gas has a density of 0.001836kg/l. Now a standard US gallon of diesel weighs roughly 7lbs, so what kind of alchemical witchcraft takes place in the engines to turn that dense-as-fuck liquid into 22.38lbs of CO2 gas, which is roughly 483x less dense?
Seriously, what the hell? The closing argument is logically sound, but the math, chemistry, and physics of those numbers feel like bullshit!
carbon 12.0107 g/mol oxygen 15.9994 g/mol
Lets just do a gut check here without getting into the full math of the problem. CO2 will have one atom of carbon and 2 atoms of oxygen.
Oxygen is slightly heavier than carbon CO would be a slightly more than doubling of the weight of carbon put in. CO2 a bit more than trippling.
You said you had 1 gallon of diesel at 7lb. Diesel = C12H23 H = 1.00794 g/mol
We see that the weight of the diesel is primarily made of carbon because the Hydrogen is so light H23 not even equal to the weight of 2 carbon atoms. If we assume it burns completely and turns entirely into CO2 you are looking at a little under 7lbs tripled because every carbon atom will combine with two oxygen atoms from the atmosphere that's roughly equal to 21 lbs so I feel like their answer is reasonable. The other by product is water H20 and it will have weight made of mostly of Oxygen it binds from the atmosphere. Not a chemical engineer but i figured this is a good example of a gut check using ratios and an understanding of molecular weights.
Reminds me of the old chemistry experiment where you burn steel wool. You first measure the mass of a piece of steel wool, then after you burn it and it is just ashes, you weight it again, the mass is higher. It’s the same concept because the reaction combines with oxygen to form a new molecule.
Even with perfect combustion to 100% CO2 from every carbon atom in the entire fuel mass, there is no way the trip could emit 27.67 million tons of CO2. I looked up the largest oil tanker to take to the waters (Seawise Giant) and it has a deadweight tonnage of 564,763, a gross tonnage of 260,851 and when fully laden, it had a displacement of 657,019 tonnes. That means the entire ship, its fuel and its cargo all weigh less than 1 million tons. There is no way to get 27 million tons of CO2 out of a total mass that is 27 times less and not even entirely fuel mass. I think this whole thing is grossly inaccurate, inflated and just plain lying.
I agree we should do our own oil production at home, but this whole post is just bad math and data.
Yeah that part is wrong even if you using their own number of 23lb per 7lb of diesel. Don't know why they bother to inflate it shipping the stuff doesn't make sense even without the exaggeration. Only thing id add is maybe the fucked up ships use bunker c which is not diesel. Also co2 is good for the planet.
As part of the combustion process air is brought in and combined with fuel. The mass of the combustion product is fuel + O2. That's how you get 22.4 lbs of CO2 from 8 lbs of fuel.
I had to check because I thought the same thing you did.
Chemistry and biology used to be required in high school. Now they have no standards.
When I was in school you had the choice of physics and calculus or advanced biology and chemistry. I went the physics route. I've repeatedly admitted here I suck at chemistry.
Thanks! I'm no chemist and was going on just a fundamental understanding of the Conservation of Mass.
I just asked the black guy who works at Chevron about this and he said banana muh dik.
I’m not a scientist. No idea if that’s correct.
From a slightly different angle, they're releasing energy by burning it. Burning isn't a reaction of the diesel with itself, it's combining with something else (air). So you'll have some extra mass coming from the environment.
Reminds me of when I learned that most of a tree's dry mass is from the air. Wood is literally made from air. Blows my mind.
Full marks to you both. Great stuff.
While I don't have the numbers on hand, I do know that several things will throw your calculations off by some amount.
- Diesel fuel is not pure C12 H23 . There are lots of chemicals added for various purposes.
- No engine will perfectly burn the fuel even if the fuel is perfectly pure and feed pure oxygen.
Combustion is a messy process and when you throw in the fact that diesel naturally has impurities, and that additives are mixed in, and then that it is burned in air which is composed of many elements and chemicals you get a veritable soup that only gets even more complicated when the actual combustion starts.
These factors may throw off the real world numbers by a significant amount.
Oh yes it can get much more complicated. This was a gut check and just to check if their number of 23lb per gallon of diesel is in the right ball park.
There's more to it. You're skipping all the intermediate steps in combustion, and are ignoring changes in temperature and how they affect fluid density and viscosity. Don't forget the NOx, CO, particulates, with their own densities, along with transient radicals that make up the combustion process. Finally some mass is converted to energy and lost as entropy.
Some extra mass could come from the oxygen in the air, not sure if that adds up though. A 3x increase does sound fishy.
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