How are gasoline and diesel fuel produced and sourced?

How are the two main fuels, gasoline and diesel, produced? Which of the two requires the most sophistication and energy?

Thus, the resulting idea is that it is more profitable for the planet to produce only gasoline, which is less refined and, therefore, less expensive and environmentally friendly to manufacture. But is it really wise to ban the production of diesel fuel? Here again we will see that the diesel is still far from dead, unless, of course, it is arbitrarily condemned by the authorities (which is currently being revealed) ...

Extraction of gasoline and diesel from oil

As you know, at least I hope for you that both of these fuels are made from black gold. They are extracted by so-called distillation, that is, simply by heating crude oil in order to evaporate and separate its constituent substances.

It's a bit like if you wanted to collect water in a cooked pot, you just need to heat it up to evaporate the water, which can then be collected under the lid that covers your pot (condensation). Thus, the same principle applies here: we set fire to the oil and then collect the gases to cool them: condensation, which then allows the oil to return to a liquid state.

For this, distillation columns are used, which make it possible to separate the various components of oil vapors. Everything is heated to 400 °, after which the column allows the separation of the vapor components due to the temperature, which differs depending on the compartments. Different substances will condense in each compartment, as each of them condenses at very specific temperatures.

Differences between production and extraction of gasoline and diesel

But what makes the extraction of diesel fuel from petroleum different from gasoline?

This is again quite simple as depending on the distillation temperature you will be extracting one or the other: gasoline evaporates/condenses between 20 and 70° and for diesel between 250 and 350° (depends on the exact composition and air pressure). Thus, we can conclude that we need the same energies, since in industrial practice we start by heating the oil to 400 degrees so that it is "exhaled" by all these substances. And so we either choose to recover the diesel fuel or throw it in the trash can…

But in theory, we can still admit that it takes more energy to extract diesel fuel than gasoline, because we could limit ourselves to heating the oil at a low temperature to extract only gasoline vapors. We'll be butter up anyway, and it doesn't make any sense.

Also note that diesel must then undergo a "sulfur treatment" in order to function properly in our engines: hydrodesulfurization.

See also: technical differences between gasoline and diesel cars

Isn't diesel mining just about adding oil?

Yes… You read that right, in a block of crude oil, one part is gasoline and the other part is diesel fuel (I simplify because there is also gas, kerosene, or even fuel oil and bitumen).

If we switched all engines to gasoline, we would end up with some of the unused crude oil, although the boilers might take over (but we're talking about banning them in France in the coming years ...).

Once again, I can only note that the desire for the disappearance of diesel fuel is an intellectual delusion.

In terms of pollutant emissions, I say it again and again, diesel produces about the same as gasoline from the moment we compare two engines (gasoline and diesel) that use the same technology. : direct injection or indirect injection. The harmfulness of exhaust gases is influenced by the type of injection, not the type of fuel used! Diesel emits more black smoke, but here it does not play a decisive role for health, it is primarily something that is not visible, which greatly harms our lungs (toxic gas and invisible small particles). But our species does not yet seem developed enough to distinguish between this kind of grace (I am talking here about journalists and the general public, experts know very well what they are talking about. I do not pretend to be one of the experts, besides but I don't hesitate to check what I'm told to be sure of the data).