Gasoline Tractors are they coming Back ?

[Paystar]

So, go buy the clear and dump/pump it in the heat oil tank.

SR

I do. All the same.

 

[Paystar]

I’ve been burning road diesel in my equipment all summer because it’s been cheaper than red. There’s only one supplier in town for red is the only reason I see for it. But I’ve never seen red diesel at $1.50 cheaper than road fuel. It’s usually 50-60 cents cheaper. If you had a farm card the difference might be a little more. But us construction guys still have to pay sales tax on red fuel.

Colored off road fuel has gone up a dollar per litre here since covid price gouging and the Ukraine war began.

Used to be 98 cents to a dollar per litre, now it's over $2.00

Hard to believe it's more than on road fuel considering there is no road tax on it.

 

[Cougsfan]

The current crop of electric CUTS are pretty lame but I expect that to change.

You are probably right, Eric, Electric CUTS will likely be the long term direction we go, but it isn't going to be in the near future because of numerous technical limitations that currently exist.

I don't think the preferred use of diesel engines in industrial and agricultural settings (tractors, ships, generators, overland trucks, locomotives, etc.) is based at all on what people mindlessly associate where a diesel engine should be used. It is far more pragmatic than a marketing perception. It is based on a century's worth of experience, of trying different things and settling on the best available engine design for a specific application. If gasoline engines were better in tractors than diesels, you would see more of them now.

 

[jjeff]

Remember reading something awhile back on the first automobiles and the three methods battling it out to power them, one company in the US devised a way to exchange dead batteries with freshly charged ones, for vehicles used for local in town / city deliveries, well over 100 yrs ago. Wonder if something like that can again be devised for farm equipment making it economically viable and practical for the owners doing the exchange themselves on there property.

 

[MossRoad]

Remember reading something awhile back on the first automobiles and the three methods battling it out to power them, one company in the US devised a way to exchange dead batteries with freshly charged ones, for vehicles used for local in town / city deliveries, well over 100 yrs ago. Wonder if something like that can again be devised for farm equipment making it economically viable and practical for the owners doing the exchange themselves on there property.

At my last job, we had electric forklifts, electric skid movers, pallet wrappers, load lifters, etc. The batteries were incredibly heavy and very expensive. We had a special lift to remove them for servicing. I cannot imagine how expensive a 2nd battery would be for a farm tractor, nor having to drive all the way back from an interrupted day of plowing, seeding, harvesting, etc. just to change out a battery pack, then back out to the fields.

To bring a battery pack out to a field for exchange would require a really capable off-road truck/crane-type of arrangement that could cope with the weight of the battery, soft soils, cantilevered weights, outriggers, etc..

They have a similar type of servicing vehicle today. They call it a fuel truck.

I think a lot if not most home owners could get by well with an electric machine. But production farming with hundreds/thousands of acres would be pretty expensive I'd suspect.

 

[Agvg]

Don't think anybody is believing that a tractor running 24/7 is a suitable candidate to run on batteries, but a lot of tractors are used in the farmyard etc where they run a few hours a day and plenty time to charge.

 

[Agvg]

Ore some believe the future is not big tractors but swarms of very light and autonomous units do the farmework.

 

[Paystar]

Where I am, I only have one radio station I can get, so against my better judgement I sometimes turn off the Sirius XM (The Rural Channel/RFD is my favorite) and I turn on the CBC (Communist Broadcasting Channel...or wait....maybe one of the C's is Canada?) to see what is going on in local news.

There was a program on with all the new brainwaves talking about how they are going to lower the carbon footprint of freighters and cargo ships out on the lakes and oceans. Obviously I couldn't listen but had to wonder......what is their dream there? Electric ships or are we just going to go back to sail boats?

 

[eagle628]

There was a program on with all the new brainwaves talking about how they are going to lower the carbon footprint of freighters and cargo ships out on the lakes and oceans. Obviously I couldn't listen but had to wonder......what is their dream there? Electric ships or are we just going to go back to sail boats?

No, it's LNG and methanol instead of bunker fuel.

 

[Hay Dude]

No, it's LNG and methanol instead of bunker fuel.

That means fracking, right?

 

[finn1]

A very smart woman does a lot of research and reporting on many things relating to energy, including the future of diesel fuel. She is not coming from a political viewpoint, using a just the facts approach. It would be difficult to call her a conspiracy theorist.

There are many articles on her web site, energyskeptik, where you will find a lot of information.

For her take on diesel fuel, start here: Index of best energyskeptic posts | Peak Everything, Overshoot, & Collapse
and navigate to When Trucks Stop running: Why diesel fuel can’t be replaced, about 1/3 of the way down the page.

A conspiracy theory website.

When will you guys get hour heads out of….

 

[rontaki]

A conspiracy theory website.

When will you guys get hour heads out of….

Did you read her posts? She's educated and does a lot of research. Makes sense in a technical way to me anyway. I've been following her works for s while.

p.s. - she lives in Berkeley, I doubt she's a raving neocon.

 

[Hay Dude]

When is enough, enough?
We have now been producing diesel engines with DEF or DPF systems since 2012. That must have lowered emissions tremendously. Gasoline engine cars got cleaned-up long before that.
EV’s now have more than a toe hold and are coming on more and more each year.

It’s time for some sanity. Not everything has to be electric. And a reminder that the vast majority of electricity is produced with fossil fuels.

 

[Agvg]

When battery cost drops it will be very cheap to power things, ICE with the complex engine, transmissions axles etc will be to costly to produce if it not 100 % needed.

 

[Paystar]

No, it's LNG and methanol instead of bunker fuel.

No, the mentalists on this program are against the LNG the ship builders want to use. Apparently what used to be the clean fuel is now also evil, LOL Same as propane.

A friend sent me a video yesterday of the president of Toyota announcing electric cars are not going to work therefore they are going to continue building internal combustion engines.

I also saw another news release from VW who is fully committed to going all electric now saying that can't afford to produce all the batteries that are going to be required to do such.

 

[mo1]

The issues I can see revolve around getting the same power out of the same size/weight engine reliably and inexpensively with a gasser as with a modern common-rail turbodiesel.

A modern EFI gasoline engine is pretty close to the same efficiency in HP-hr/lb as a current Tier 4 diesel. Gasoline engines can be built just as heavy as diesel engines and have a similar lifespan. Off-road gasoline engines have minimal emissions requirements, and even if they had to meet on-road emissions, those are still much simpler and less expensive than those of a Tier 4 diesel. At least regular 87 octane gasoline is also noticeably less expensive than diesel so your costs per HP-hr would be lower with regular gasoline if it could be done.

A naturally-aspirated gasoline engine running on 87 octane makes only a little more power (about 15% or so) at the same RPM than a naturally-aspirated diesel of the same displacement. The issue is that a highly-tuned four-valve multiple-turbocharged and intercooled/aftercooled diesel can make twice the HP/displacement as it would naturally-aspirated, so you would either need a much larger naturally-aspirated gasoline engine to make the same power or add forced aspiration to the gasser. Adding forced aspiration would either bring direct injection into the mix (which brings extra cost and some reliability issues) in order to continue to run 87 octane gasoline or you would need to run a much higher octane fuel to avoid needing direct injection. The limited market for turbocharged heavy duty non-diesel engines with similar power densities as the highly tuned turbodiesels is solidly in the "higher octane fuel" camp as they run on 106 octane propane or 120 octane methane. All of the industrial engines I've come across that run on gasoline are naturally-aspirated.

 

[groundcover]

Friend of mine recently replaced his older Brush Bandit diesel chipper with a new gas powered one. 6.2 Ford engine.
he loves it but wishes it had a larger fuel tank ! Went gas to avoid the new emission issues and crazy diesel prices.
Still wonder what the emission ratio is from my 52hp Kubota compared to the rockets Elon and Jeff lob up every few days !

 

[4570Man]

When battery cost drops it will be very cheap to power things, ICE with the complex engine, transmissions axles etc will be to costly to produce if it not 100 % needed.

Battery vehicles only sort of work because it doesn’t take much energy to push a car down the road. Battery equipment that actually does real work is a pipe dream.

 

[MossRoad]

Battery vehicles only sort of work because it doesn’t take much energy to push a car down the road. Battery equipment that actually does real work is a pipe dream.

We had battery operated forklifts with clamps in our paper warehouses that did actual real work unloading rail cars and lifting double stacked rolls of paper that weighed 2.5 tons 20' in the air for hours and hours every day for over 40 years. Seemed like real work to me.

 

[Hay Dude]

The issues I can see revolve around getting the same power out of the same size/weight engine reliably and inexpensively with a gasser as with a modern common-rail turbodiesel.

A modern EFI gasoline engine is pretty close to the same efficiency in HP-hr/lb as a current Tier 4 diesel. Gasoline engines can be built just as heavy as diesel engines and have a similar lifespan. Off-road gasoline engines have minimal emissions requirements, and even if they had to meet on-road emissions, those are still much simpler and less expensive than those of a Tier 4 diesel. At least regular 87 octane gasoline is also noticeably less expensive than diesel so your costs per HP-hr would be lower with regular gasoline if it could be done.

A naturally-aspirated gasoline engine running on 87 octane makes only a little more power (about 15% or so) at the same RPM than a naturally-aspirated diesel of the same displacement. The issue is that a highly-tuned four-valve multiple-turbocharged and intercooled/aftercooled diesel can make twice the HP/displacement as it would naturally-aspirated, so you would either need a much larger naturally-aspirated gasoline engine to make the same power or add forced aspiration to the gasser. Adding forced aspiration would either bring direct injection into the mix (which brings extra cost and some reliability issues) in order to continue to run 87 octane gasoline or you would need to run a much higher octane fuel to avoid needing direct injection. The limited market for turbocharged heavy duty non-diesel engines with similar power densities as the highly tuned turbodiesels is solidly in the "higher octane fuel" camp as they run on 106 octane propane or 120 octane methane. All of the industrial engines I've come across that run on gasoline are naturally-aspirated.

They already tried the big displacement gas engines. They didnt work.
How do you make a (gas) engine that has to rev much higher have a similar life span as a diesel engine? What about low RPM torque in gas v. diesel?

Off road machinery needs to make max power at low RPM to minimize fuel consumption.

What I would like to know is just how polluting is todays diesel engine, with a DPF/DEF system? When I see technicians repairing them in an enclosed shop, they must be pretty clean.