Featured chevron road trip demonstrates renewable gasoline blend

"Chevron U.S.A. Inc., a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX), kicked off a road trip today across the U.S. Gulf Coast to showcase an innovative new gasoline blend with more than 50 percent renewable content. People from Chevron and Toyota will be driving Toyota’s Tundra, RAV4 and Camry on this road trip with the objective of demonstrating the fuel, which is more than 40 percent less carbon intensive than traditional gasoline on a lifecycle basis."
Chevron road trip demonstrates renewable gasoline blend — Chevron

Very little details out about what this fuel actually is or its cost. Might change by this evening. From a line in a Bloomberg article, I'm guessing it might be from hydrotreated vegetable oil(HVO). This oil goes through process similar to petroleum refining. Some places use HVO as a biodiesel without the drawbacks of traditional biodiesel.

What's going into the gasoline could just be by products from the diesel production, or Chevron is doing more dedicated gasoline production from the vegetable oils.

 

Alt-fuel news?

 

If that is so in the US, it will be because of the ethanol lobby.

 

The impact of making the ethanol can be quite negative. Brazil is cutting down rain forest just for it. In cars not designed for it, the issue is in long term wear to the fuel system. Flex fuel cars don't use stainless steel parts because it's cool. It isn't just cars we have to worry about either. Trucking ethanol around for E10 works for now. Start using larger volumes, and that gets to costly. The existing petroleum pipelines won't hold up to it. In addition to the incompatibility with the seals and gaskets, the ethanol will cause galvanic corrosion to the steel of those pipes. Same sort of issues exist with methanol.

This Chevron biofuel and the Porsche efuel are chemically gasoline. So no need to upgrade existing infrastructure, and it works with cars on the road without worry in it causing damage. The ethanol producers just don't want any government funds going to a competitor.

 

Nearly any engine can be adapted to E85, and doing so at the production stage is fairly cheap. Just needs materials compatible with the high ethanol content long term, higher flowing injectors, and an alcohol sensor. Then the ECU programmed to not throw fault codes for the fuel mix. The cost goes up doing that to a car after it has been assembled.

The same is true for running higher blends of methanol or ammonia in gasoline. Inexpensive to build an engine for it, but costly to retrofit the existing fleet. There were rumblings about going to E15 from E10 for years, yet Subaru says E10 only in my 2022.

The number of currently available flex fuel vehicles in the US has been dropping. Actual cars were once available. CAFE closed the loophole that let manufacturers claim the vehicles were running on E85 a lot more than they actually were. The program ignored aid for building E85 stations. The flex fuel engines should have also been high compression.