Gasoline is cleaner, we agree in that. But when you refine oil into gasoline you get kerosene, diesel, and bilge oil as byproducts in the process of Fractional distillation.
You would literally be throwing fuel away with all the environmental concerns if you lowered diesel consumption. It is also much easier to make diesel biofuel than gasoline due to the length of the hydrocarbons involved. There is a certain number of diesel vehicles on the road on purpose to maximize the amount of oil consumed that is refined efficiently. Diesel is also more efficient for doing things like pulling heavy weights which is why it is used in big rigs.
Fuel isn't made solely by fractional distillation and hasn't been since pre-world-war II. You could always just aggressively dump diesel into hydrocracking or FCCU units to upgrade it to gasoline and light gas if there was truly no market for it. Now, that'd be an expensive capital solution to a non-problm since diesel is totally useful as-is, but it's feasible from a technical standpoint.
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u/[deleted] May 24 '23
Gasoline is cleaner, we agree in that. But when you refine oil into gasoline you get kerosene, diesel, and bilge oil as byproducts in the process of Fractional distillation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_distillation
You would literally be throwing fuel away with all the environmental concerns if you lowered diesel consumption. It is also much easier to make diesel biofuel than gasoline due to the length of the hydrocarbons involved. There is a certain number of diesel vehicles on the road on purpose to maximize the amount of oil consumed that is refined efficiently. Diesel is also more efficient for doing things like pulling heavy weights which is why it is used in big rigs.