Pollution Guilt
People love to beat themselves up about pollution, oil spills especially, but the first oil spills were done by nature.
Oil in different places around the world seeped or flowed to the surface, making the land and water poisoned. nearly impossible to get rid of. If you could set it on fire it made huge black oily smoke clouds and just spread pollution wider.
Now, all the oil sources that spilled out on their own have been used up, and we have to look for ever tinier pockets in the earth. If nature had not spilled it, we never would have started burning it. No reason to drill mile deep wells for stuff you have no reason to look for in the first place.
So early engines focused on power, size, engine cost, everything except fuel economy. Oil was a dangerous, poisonous nuisance of nature. There was no such concept as burning it "too fast" 100 year ago.
|
Finite Resources
The internal combustion engine is the end result of a long series of logical choices, which have led to an extremely inefficient, wasteful, polluting, heat engine. If you started with what we know about thermodynamics and energy today, you would never make such a complicated, inefficient engine.
A lot of this web site is devoted to explaining all heat engines operate the same, only to discuss here an extremely wasteful engine.
Consider a bucket with a hole in it. Pour a gallon of gas in it and in a good bucket, both buckets end up with a gallon of gas somewhere, the good bucket keeps it contained in a useful place.
Car engines are water cooled. That's the hole in the energy bucket. Every surface of a car engine radiates its fuel, heat, to the air.
The "waterwheel" model of heat engines says that a cold body is actually REQUIRED to make an engine. That fit hand in hand with the need to protect the engine materials from heat, even from melting.
But the conservation of energy model says every bit of heat lost (radiated, dissipated by convection or conduction) is waste. And they knew this back in 1824. But unfortunately, the lesson's remembered from Carnot and others were the wrong lessons, and some just miss-copied.
So, a lot of talk is out there about will we run out of gas in 10 years or 100. That does not matter. We will run out. Wasting 9 tenths of each gallon of gas is a reckless waste. In 100 years we have burned 100 million years of the Earth's "oil manufacturing". We are burning a limited resource a million times faster than its made.
|
