Comment by ErroneousBosh
1 month ago
We're still burning massive amounts of fossil fuels as waste products from refining oil to make plastics and chemical feedstocks. A huge amount of that is propane that just gets flared off.
We could have been running cars on that for decades, but getting people to make their dirty polluting inefficient old petrol cars run on fuel that emits carbon dioxide and water with no HC, CO, SOx, NOx, or particulates was nowhere near as profitable as selling them lots of debt to buy cleaner greener diesels.
And we're burning the fuel they'd run on anyway.
Compressed propane is explosive, more so than liquid gasoline or batteries. Though batteries do burn hot and are hard to extinguish.
Actually it's considerably less explosive than petrol and far safer in a crash.
If a petrol-fuelled car goes on fire, the fuel tank will explode. The tanks are usually thin plastic and will split open in an accident, spilling fuel everywhere.
By contrast, the LPG tanks are pretty much indestructible and if you remove a tank from a car that's been on fire (a lot of taxis are LPG-powered and seem to go on fire late at night for some reason, especially if they're parked in the wrong part of town) you'll find the tank is still about as full as it was before the car got burnt.
Is that really true? Liquid gasoline does evaporate pretty quickly, yet doesn't need special metal tanks. Isn't propane sold and kept in pressurized tanks?
As I understand it, gasoline tanks on cars are unlikely to explode unless they are nearly empty.
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