It's like people have forgotten that ICEVs started without any of that infrastructure in place. Even if we can't buy petrol from pharmacies, methanol and ethanol engines are a mature technology and the fuel is both cheap and easy to get. The practical reality is that lack of fuel stations is a pain in the ass, but the strength of ICEs is that they can be modified to run on different fuels. And fueling them is easy.
I live in Edinburgh, and there's regular complaints about flaring from the Mossmorran refinery, which lights up the night sky, produces smoke, and is incredibly loud.
People live on the other side of that highway, so I guess it's possible, but I used to drive through that area on a regular basis and the smell hard to forget.
Apart from that such facilities need to be large to be cost-effective.
It makes orders of magnitude more sense to have one centralized large refinery and then many dispersed holding tanks to distribute fuel. This model may sound familiar.
This gets thrown out quite a bit but I don't really buy it. If it is not designed for alcohol, it probably isn't going to work. Alcohol has too many weird interactions with stuff like aluminum.
Which was why I didn't say "all" or anything like that. But basically a lot of engines from Ford and Volvo can run on ethanol. Any old iron block can if you replace pipes and hoses. And so on.
Which is why I said converted. The wrong kind of rubber will get brittle from ethanol. But for an iron block, it's not rocket science. Any shade tree mechanic could do it.
most gasoline available in the eastern USA is E10. I go out of my way to get E0 for a vintage high-performance vehicle I drive on occasion, it's noticeably happier without the ethanol, even if it can drive on E10 without damage.
Close enough. E10 is enough to see most of the issues you will see with pure Ethanol. Most engines just need to run is different fuel maps. ideally you would make other changes (increase the compression ratio), but they are expensive.
I think at some point, the cost of operating gas stations will fall below a threshold that it doesn't justify keeping them open, even if there is still _some_ demand.
E.g. imagine if demand were cut in half -- I think more than half of the gas stations would shut down.
It will happen, but I reckon it'll be more like 2045 than 2035 (and even then they'll still be some gas stations, just far fewer and you might have to start keeping emergency supplies with you).
Here in the UK, we call them petrol stations. But "gas" is still appropriate, because 15 years ago LPG conversions were all the rage, and every petrol station had gas too.
Nowadays I can only think offhand of a single local retail fuel establishment that will sell you both US and UK "gas".
How much more generation do we actually need. For one, charging typically does not happen when the grid is at peak load, so a lot of spare capacity is available. Second, it takes approximately the same amount of energy to refine a tank of gasoline as it does to completely charge an EV, so it'll be a wash.
