Why did we use leaded petrol for so long? (2017)

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40593353

by simonebrunozzi • 7 months ago

54 54 7 months ago

drweevil2• 7 months ago

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.

amiga386• 7 months ago

Veritasium did a great video on Midgley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV3dnLzthDA

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

somat2• 7 months ago

It's not even that. alcohol destroys engines.

Sure in retrospect lead is a bad idea. but for the sake of argument. If we ignore all the subtlety of the real world choices, research and development required the argument would probably be.

We have this great additive that will let us make more powerful efficient engines that is also stable and lubricating or we could put something in the gas that degrades quickly and eats all the rubber seals out of our customers engines.

In short even ignoring price alcohol was a non starter then, even today with many years of developing rubbers that handle alcohol better E blends are a lot harder on engines than non E blends.

And a fun science experiment "how do you tell how much alcohol is in the gas?" fill a glass mason jar about a third full of gas, mark a line on the jar where the gas is. put another third of water in and color it with food coloring, put lid on and shake well, let separate and settle out. mark new line on glass where gas is. figure out percentage. The alcohol is water soluble and will have formed a solution with the water, the food coloring will only color the water and will let you see the boundery layer easier.

Scoundreller3• 7 months ago

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.

themafia3• 7 months ago

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.

Scoundreller3• 7 months ago

Ethyl alcohol pulls water from the air and dilutes itself over time.

How much of a problem is this for people that don’t store their gasoline in open containers?

Like, I get that many containers aren’t 100% sealed to avoid bursting/collapsing, but I don’t get any whiffs of gas when walking by my plastic Jerry cans.

drweevil2• 7 months ago

And yet, tetraethyl lead is a deadly poison. Surely that is a factor worth considering?

Lio• 7 months ago

I could imagine Acquired doing a podcast on Ethyl Corporation gushing about how wonderful ut is.

“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.

rgmerk2• 7 months ago

Harsh but accurate.

brominebrewer• 7 months ago

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.

HPsquared• 7 months ago

It'd be interesting to compare and contrast this to the pharmaceutical industry.

like_any_other• 7 months ago

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?

jackvalentine• 7 months ago

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...

TylerE• 7 months ago

In cars, yes. In the aviation world the fuel is very much still leaded.

extraduder_ire• 7 months ago

I was pretty surprised to learn the US totally banned it for cars about 5 years before the UK/EU.

kergonath• 7 months ago

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.

1970-01-01• 7 months ago

The 21st century version of this will be "Why did we use petrol for so long?"

saulpw• 7 months ago

I think it will be 'ads'.

jokoon• 7 months ago

Or pfas, plastic...

casey2• 7 months ago

The USSR banned TEL in cities in the 50s

time4tea• 7 months ago

Same guy invented CFCs. What a **!

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

themafia3• 7 months ago

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.

lucideng• 7 months ago

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.

ErroneousBosh3• 7 months ago

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.

airbreather• 7 months ago

we still do for light aviation

KennyBlanken2• 7 months ago

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.)

ultrarunner2• 7 months ago

I don’t think that an unleaded fuel is 100% ready to go, but you’re absolutely right that the FAA is a huge reason why. My plane is certified for 80/87 (a fuel no longer produced) but the paperwork involved means I’ll just keep burning 100LL for the foreseeable future. With all the engine damage that incurs.

garbagewoman2• 7 months ago

Choosing to burn a fuel that poisons everyone around you just to avoid some paperwork is an incredible feat of individualistic thinking

Scoundreller3• 7 months ago

And for some aircraft, the only thing stopping you from legally switching to automotive gas is writing a cheque for a certificate.

AnimalMuppet• 7 months ago

... as demonstrated by the thousands of victims of Boeing crashes from the idiocy of the MAX program...

Uh huh. That's 300-something in crashes. What are the others? Could you enumerate them?

hypercube33• 7 months ago

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?

ErroneousBosh3• 7 months ago

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.

FridayoLeary• 7 months ago

It's odd how few cars run on lpg.

twodave• 7 months ago

Propane also has to be pressurized, which complicates its use. Gasoline being liquid at rest is advantageous.

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.

ErroneousBosh3• 7 months ago

It's not very pressurised. The 95 litre tank in my old Range Rover is around 8 bar, which is about half the pressure in the air suspension tank and only about three times the pressure in the tyres. Although as you say being able to just pour more petrol in from a can is an advantage!

CNG and hydrogen tanks need ridiculously high pressures - 250-300 for CNG and over 700 bar for hydrogen. Even if that was dry nitrogen it would be a potentially lethal bomb!

The nice thing about LPG is you can use plastic pipe and inexpensive compression fittings that are easy to connect and disconnect when you need to work on stuff. If you undo a pipe and it's got line pressure in it, the biggest problem is that it stinks and you might get frostbite if it sprays on your hand. It just kind of hisses out a bit. You want to do this outside though if you're unsure if there's pressure there.

Propane is a lot less explodey than petrol, so you end up using a little more of it but you get a bigger slower bang, which gives you less flat-out power and more torque. Everyone needs more torque, no-one needs to be flat out wide open throttle. The downside is that being less explodey, it means you need the ignition system to be in perfect condition. I get about 10,000 miles from a set of spark plugs before it starts getting hard to start and noticeably groggy acceleration, even allowing for it weighing over two tonnes and and having a 200bhp engine. It's never going to be fast! At least it's lawnmower-grade spark plugs, good old BPR6ES, same as in your boat engine.

RASBR89• 7 months ago

Where are these fields?

jamiek88• 7 months ago

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.

ck2• 7 months ago

we are still using leaded gas

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...

defrost• 7 months ago

It's common across the globe, eg:

  In 2023, 69.8 million litres of avgas were sold in Australia, releasing 39 tonnes of lead into the environment, predominantly around airports.

* https://bfpca.org.au/lead/

With any luck that will be curtailed "soon":

  The LEAD Group proposes the earliest possible date, certainly well before 2030, for leaded AvGas phaseout in Australia and looks to Europe for the mechanism of phasing it out.

  The lead additive for leaded fuel is called tetraethyllead (TEL).

  Leaded AvGas has a phaseout date of 2025 in the European Union because TEL has a 2025 sunset date in European Union countries.

* https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/sites/default/files/docume...

appreciatorBus• 7 months ago

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.

rgmerk2• 7 months ago

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.

Life was cheaper then.

tim-tday• 7 months ago

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.

Why did we use leaded petrol for so long? (2017)

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