Ah, good old MTBE = methyl tertiary butyl ether. Back in the early 1980s, when crude oil had doubled and doubled again and then once more, from $2 a barrel in 1970 to $40 a barrel by 1980, we [BP Oil International and everyone else] were trying to get gasoline or similar in all sorts of ways. Meanwhile lead was no longer acceptable to avoid knock, or pinking, in engines, so methanol, ethanol, MTBE and whatnot were considered and included to get economical octane number increase. If memory serves me still, MMT was another option. Hey presto, Google confirms in an instant.
en.wikipedia.org MMT = not Magic Money Theory but similar in that I don't think [despite being now decades out of date] that it was good, just as Magic Money Theory is a terrible idea as we are seeing now with financial systems in disaster mode. Maybe it's still being used. I guess that modern engines and electronic systems can much better use plain hydrocarbons without the pollution of engine and exhaust from such stuff.
What's needed [especially if we believe the climate panic over the Greenhouse Effect], are swarms of nuclear reactors, billions of photovoltaic panels, billions of 7 Second Swap Stop Service Station batteries for an instant small battery recharge of cars and to provide a vast sink for photovoltaic, wind and other intermittent electricity supplies, while slowly charging batteries for longer life, and to do it when the electricity is cheap, and to enable cars to have little batteries and to weigh half as much [instead of being 2 ton brutes] and to save vast hours waiting around at charging stations when there are things to do and places to go. Also so that very little space is needed for charging cars [hundreds of them parked in rows recharging is absurd].
MTBE, MMT, lead, are so last century.
My fantasy was a gas [methane] to gasoline single step using zeolite catalyst but I never got that done and I don't know whether anyone has done. Methane is cheap. MMT and MTBE are not. Gas to gasoline was done in New Plymouth using a Mobil process via an intermediate methanol step, but that made it too wasteful of energy though it did give really good octane number in some process streams [our BP laboratory did the octane number testing for the Syngas plant in the 1980s before it was shut down as being too costly and wasteful of methanol which became more valuable than the synthetic petrol by the late 1980s].
I have no idea how the economics and technology have changed over the last 30 years. Apparently not much if MTBE is still an issue.
Mqurice |
