With the end of the semester upon us, I, just like many of you, began anxiously thinking about my future. What kind of job will I be able to get? Will I have to move away? What will I do for money? These concerns led me down a rabbit hole of financial articles and wealth management strategies that everyone should be taking advantage of. I won’t go into the specifics here, but everyone should read up on 401Ks, IRA accounts, mutual funds, stocks, and bonds. While looking at a Vanguard market-matching mutual fund, I stumbled across an oil company in Qatar that is doing something very interesting with diesel.
It’s called the Fischer Tropsch process, and it was designed back in the 1920s to turn natural gas into diesel fuel. The science behind it is boring and complicated, even by my standards, so I will skip ahead to what this means you, and what this means for diesel fuel.
Thanks to the recent boom in fracking, America is the world leader in natural gas production. If gas-to-liquid conversion took off, it could mean diesel as cheap as $2/gallon. This would benefit our economy, as people would be spending less at the pump and more on retail, consumer goods, family outings, and groceries. It would also make diesel a very attractive option for consumers. Even with fuel prices as low as they have been recently, they are still not as low as $2/gallon. Combine the low price with diesel fuel’s high energy density, and weekend road trips can experience a surge in popularity. This recipe of diesel fuel would be cleaner burning than conventional diesel fuel, with less greenhouse gas emissions and no sulfur.
toughstream 