> Cynics might point out that any old farmer could distill ethyl alcohol from grain. It couldn't be patented, or its distribution profitably controlled. Tetraethyl lead could.
Were they cynics, though? As the article itself points out, the dangers of tetraethyl lead were already well know. And then there is this:
> And, as Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner point out, "For the next four decades, all studies of the use of tetraethyl lead were conducted by laboratories and scientists funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors".
It doesn't take a cynic to see what was going on here.
And therein they give the reason why ethanol was passed over: a lot of it is required to be effective (~10% of the fuel mixture), seriously dampening the profit margin of fuel sales! It works, but tetraethyl lead is so much cheaper
I thought ethanol was cheaper than gas. And the octane boost means the gas doesn’t need as pricy refining, especially in summer when you can’t load it up with butane.
+ the decreased fuel economy gets people to the stations more often where the high margin stuff is sold.
And if the US can convince the world to include ethanol in fuel, that helps if you’re the biggest corn grower on the planet. Even Canada imports about half of its ethanol (almost entirely from USA), with some of the domestic ethanol production using US corn.
Tetraethyl lead has a lifetime of a year when mixed into fuel. Ethyl alcohol has a lifetime of 3 months when mixed into fuel.
Tetraethyl lead oxidizes and the lead falls out of the solution over time. Ethyl alcohol pulls water from the air and dilutes itself over time.
You also need highly pure and anhydrous Ethyl alcohol for mixture into fuels.
The products simply aren't equivalent when you consider the massive system of fuel delivery and use that exists. The US is a huge country and there aren't refineries everywhere.
I work for the company that was Ethyl and we have old "propaganda posters" touting the benefits of tetraethyllead on the walls of the administration building at the location where TEL was produced. They're curios from another time and hung on the walls as a reminder that acceptable science, norms, and requirements change over time. We're not the company we once were, but the past is worthy of remembrance--if only so the mistakes thereof are not repeated.
> How did the US get this so wrong for so long? [..] For the next four decades, all studies of the use of tetraethyl lead were conducted by laboratories and scientists funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors
The BBC is British - what about the UK? The rest of Europe? China? Japan? Russia? Australia? Did the entire rest of the world also use leaded petrol? And stopped using it at the same time as the US?
> The BBC is British - what about the UK? The rest of Europe? China? Japan? Russia? Australia? Did the entire rest of the world also use leaded petrol? And stopped using it at the same time as the US?
The fact that GA is the quintessential arrogant rich man's hobby makes the environmental and human health externalities of it all the more disgusting. However, looking at it from a glass half full perspective, GA does exist at that sweet avocational intersection of "expensive" and "deadly," often putting a significant dent in the finances of those whom it seduces before killing them.
For context, the EU is a big place. You need every 27 countries to agree to get anything done, or a big push from the parliament. When it comes to environment regulations, EU regulations are pretty much the common denominator. The fact that this is still more stringent than the UK’s regulations says more about the UK than it does about the EU, unfortunately.
Regardless of the refrigerant used today the law generally requires you to use a pump and to recover the charge from installed equipment and store it into a cylinder for recycling or reuse.
Prior to the clean air act the advice was to just open the system and vent the old charge into the atmosphere.
Industry was always going to require us to learn _a lot_ of lessons.
I worked as an Engine Machinist for a time, and I was told that lead in the fuel aided in sealing the valves, kept valves cooler by helping seal the valve, possibly acting as an impact damper, prevented valves from sticking to the seat and slowed corrosion. When lead was removed from fuel, common practice is to use a valve seat insert made from a different material, usually a high nickel alloy.
Lead fuel was during a time when the cylinder heads were mostly cast-iron, and the valve seat was cut directly into the head. Cast iron is an interesting material, it's reasonably durable, but it corrodes/rusts very easily, especially when exposed to moisture. Gasoline and ethanol both have water as combustion byproducts, so when the engine is off and cools, some of that moisture condenses inside the engine.
Running straight ethanol in an engine without corrosion resistant materials causes much more wear over time because it tends to strip the protective/lubricative oil barriers away, causing iron to corrode when the engine isn't running. Modern engines are aluminum heads with valve seat inserts, stainless steel valves, better piston ring materials (high chromium I think? these were cast iron in the past).
Ethanol has a significant detergent/cleaning effect, even when at 5-10% concentration in gasoline. The valve stems also get some of their lubrication from the fuel, and gasoline is basically a thin oil, and provides protection to mechanical components, better yet with additives. Ethanol is also a difficult fuel in a cold start situation and requires good compression and a strong ignition system to kick it off.
I suspect the whole reason to want to keep lead was motivated by the bean counters involved. They saw a cost savings with lead in the fuel. Cheaper materials and no tooling changes. This means more profits.
> Modern engines are aluminum heads with valve seat inserts, stainless steel valves, better piston ring materials (high chromium I think? these were cast iron in the past).
You say "modern", but that's a fairly typical 1980s car engine.
We still do for piston aircraft, thanks to intense lobbying by the aviation piston engine industry.
There's even a 100LL alternative that has sailed through most tests the FAA requires but the FAA has been stonewalling them for something like a decade. The FAA is full of paper-pushing corrupt beaurocrats who are firmly in the pocket of industry, as demonstrated by the thousands of victims of Boeing crashes from the idiocy of the MAX program (wherein Boeing did not want to spend the money to redesign an aircraft for bigger passenger and cargo loads, so they just stretched the plane, which put the Cg out of whack, which meant they needed to have a computer help fly the plane...and then skimped on redundancy.)
Didn't Toyota (note I'm not an expert) build a diesel that they hoped to certify for smaller planes since it can run on standard jet fuel but couldn't get it approved and abandoned it?
We could have had incredibly clean cities 30 years ago, if the UK government hadn't effectively killed off LPG in favour of "scrappage schemes" to get people to buy "cleaner greener diesel" cars.
Until about the early 2000s you could get a grant to cover the cost of converting your petrol car to run on propane. There's masses of it that has to be burnt because it's a waste product from cracking heavier fractions to make plastics feedstocks, and it burns producing only carbon dioxide and water - no HC, no CO, no particulates.
They run warehouse forklifts on it, because unlike diesel or petrol you don't die if you breathe the exhaust fumes.
But, there was more profit to be had in buying everyone's cars for a couple of hundred quid and "scrapping" them - in reality, even 30 years later there are still millions lying in fields that haven't been touched - and then selling people very expensive finance packages so they can buy a diesel car instead.
So now we have stinky diesels everywhere and everyone is in debt. Working as intended.
Yeah there absolutely are not fields of 30 year old cars in the uk lol. Our agricultural land is efficiently exploited and would never waste the space, public lands would be in uproar and the government did not buy acres and acres to stash ford fiestas.
Like many other aspects of how cars took over our cities, I'd argue the reason we used lead so long is because the conveniences of people inside a vehicle have long been collectively judged to be more important than the lives of people outside the vehicle.
It’s worth noting here that premature deaths were routine back when these decisions were made, in a way that we would find almost unimaginable.
While smallpox was no longer a major threat, influenza, polio, whooping cough and a bunch of other infectious diseases killed kids in huge numbers. People died from infections from routine cuts. Millions of young men (mostly) had been thrown in the meat grinder of WWI.
Because the science was suppressed.
If people don’t have the facts they can’t make wise decisions about managing risk and governments from can’t make wise decisions about regulation.
That infamous tv spot where the inventor washed his hands in leaded gas was immediately followed by him having a psychiatric break and being committed. If they’d shown what really happened we’d have restricted it far earlier.
33 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 75.3 ms ] threadWere they cynics, though? As the article itself points out, the dangers of tetraethyl lead were already well know. And then there is this:
> And, as Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner point out, "For the next four decades, all studies of the use of tetraethyl lead were conducted by laboratories and scientists funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors".
It doesn't take a cynic to see what was going on here.
And therein they give the reason why ethanol was passed over: a lot of it is required to be effective (~10% of the fuel mixture), seriously dampening the profit margin of fuel sales! It works, but tetraethyl lead is so much cheaper
+ the decreased fuel economy gets people to the stations more often where the high margin stuff is sold.
And if the US can convince the world to include ethanol in fuel, that helps if you’re the biggest corn grower on the planet. Even Canada imports about half of its ethanol (almost entirely from USA), with some of the domestic ethanol production using US corn.
Tetraethyl lead oxidizes and the lead falls out of the solution over time. Ethyl alcohol pulls water from the air and dilutes itself over time.
You also need highly pure and anhydrous Ethyl alcohol for mixture into fuels.
The products simply aren't equivalent when you consider the massive system of fuel delivery and use that exists. The US is a huge country and there aren't refineries everywhere.
“Yeah lead is a great business to be in. Let’s do a bull and bear analysis going forward.”
My cynicism is burnt in at this point. You only have to look at how willingly people are to keep pushing fossil fuels.
The BBC is British - what about the UK? The rest of Europe? China? Japan? Russia? Australia? Did the entire rest of the world also use leaded petrol? And stopped using it at the same time as the US?
More or less.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/every-country-has-n...
In the general aviation world, to be precise: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
The fact that GA is the quintessential arrogant rich man's hobby makes the environmental and human health externalities of it all the more disgusting. However, looking at it from a glass half full perspective, GA does exist at that sweet avocational intersection of "expensive" and "deadly," often putting a significant dent in the finances of those whom it seduces before killing them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0m89fqk?partner=uk.co.bbc...
Cautionary Tales: The Inventor who almost ended the world. BBC Sounds Podcasts
Edit: add title Edit: typo
Prior to the clean air act the advice was to just open the system and vent the old charge into the atmosphere.
Industry was always going to require us to learn _a lot_ of lessons.
Lead fuel was during a time when the cylinder heads were mostly cast-iron, and the valve seat was cut directly into the head. Cast iron is an interesting material, it's reasonably durable, but it corrodes/rusts very easily, especially when exposed to moisture. Gasoline and ethanol both have water as combustion byproducts, so when the engine is off and cools, some of that moisture condenses inside the engine.
Running straight ethanol in an engine without corrosion resistant materials causes much more wear over time because it tends to strip the protective/lubricative oil barriers away, causing iron to corrode when the engine isn't running. Modern engines are aluminum heads with valve seat inserts, stainless steel valves, better piston ring materials (high chromium I think? these were cast iron in the past).
Ethanol has a significant detergent/cleaning effect, even when at 5-10% concentration in gasoline. The valve stems also get some of their lubrication from the fuel, and gasoline is basically a thin oil, and provides protection to mechanical components, better yet with additives. Ethanol is also a difficult fuel in a cold start situation and requires good compression and a strong ignition system to kick it off.
I suspect the whole reason to want to keep lead was motivated by the bean counters involved. They saw a cost savings with lead in the fuel. Cheaper materials and no tooling changes. This means more profits.
You say "modern", but that's a fairly typical 1980s car engine.
There's even a 100LL alternative that has sailed through most tests the FAA requires but the FAA has been stonewalling them for something like a decade. The FAA is full of paper-pushing corrupt beaurocrats who are firmly in the pocket of industry, as demonstrated by the thousands of victims of Boeing crashes from the idiocy of the MAX program (wherein Boeing did not want to spend the money to redesign an aircraft for bigger passenger and cargo loads, so they just stretched the plane, which put the Cg out of whack, which meant they needed to have a computer help fly the plane...and then skimped on redundancy.)
Until about the early 2000s you could get a grant to cover the cost of converting your petrol car to run on propane. There's masses of it that has to be burnt because it's a waste product from cracking heavier fractions to make plastics feedstocks, and it burns producing only carbon dioxide and water - no HC, no CO, no particulates.
They run warehouse forklifts on it, because unlike diesel or petrol you don't die if you breathe the exhaust fumes.
But, there was more profit to be had in buying everyone's cars for a couple of hundred quid and "scrapping" them - in reality, even 30 years later there are still millions lying in fields that haven't been touched - and then selling people very expensive finance packages so they can buy a diesel car instead.
So now we have stinky diesels everywhere and everyone is in debt. Working as intended.
That said, when I was in Rio in 2007 I saw plenty of cars running on pressurized natural gas. They were considered pretty crappy, though.
it's been spraying down from prop plane exhaust and engines flying overhead
anyone living around airports is being poisoned
extra TWENTY-FIVE YEARS NOW since cars (as long as the TSA has existed)
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/leaded-gas-wa...
While smallpox was no longer a major threat, influenza, polio, whooping cough and a bunch of other infectious diseases killed kids in huge numbers. People died from infections from routine cuts. Millions of young men (mostly) had been thrown in the meat grinder of WWI.
Life was cheaper then.
That infamous tv spot where the inventor washed his hands in leaded gas was immediately followed by him having a psychiatric break and being committed. If they’d shown what really happened we’d have restricted it far earlier.