DME & Propane cost about 1/2 as much or less than diesel & gasoline fuels respectively. Given that operating costs of a vehicle largely comprises of fuel cost / expenses - any meaningful decrease in fuel prices will reducing ongoing operating costs of vehicles, saving the owner operator lessor or person paying for the fuel, lots of money every day, week, month, year, decade etc over the life of the vehicle.
In Germany, many car owners convert their gasoline car to Propane power. In 1994 I met a gentleman with a Ford Ranger enhanced with a propane conversion. He showed me the propane tanks, 2 of them located transversely in the front part of the bed, leaving utility room behind. He was a home inspector & my dad was a realtor & asked him to come show me the converted unit. Later I saw an early 2000's documentary film about people converting their cars to run on propane in Germany, where gasoline prices are typically higher than in the USA, when you convert the Euro cost per liter to USD per US gallon for comparison.
DME to Fuel Diesel Trucks & Busses & Commercial Vehicles
In South Korea today many commercial trucks have been retrofitted with a propane tank like setup so that the Diesel engine can burn DME or dimethyl either, which is similar to butane in term of gas pressures & stored as an evaporating liquid in pressurized metal or composite tanks & vaporized before introduction to the engine intake system or sprayed with direct injection into the cylinders as a fluid that vaporizes easily before compression ignition, giving rise to very clean emissions & much longer engine oil life from reduced oil fouling due to the cleaner combustion.
Liquid Hydrocarbons Convenient
No doubt that liquid hydrocarbon fuels as fluids are easier to move around, pump & distribute than compressed gasses like butane & propane. Though, as you can tell from many refillable lighters that butane does not require a heavy metal canister like propane. Butane is much cheaper than propane or gasoline too, which purchased in bulk quantities similar to filling up a gasoline powered car with 12-40 gallons of regular unleaded liquid gasoline mix (I say mix because gasoline has at least 18 isomers)(different carbon chain configurations, as not all the molecules are linear alkane chains with exactly 8 carbons (octane) look up "18 isomers of octane" in Chemistry if you want to see what I am talking about!
Light Petroleum Gases
Butane & propane are actually gas byproducts of the crude oil refining processes that convert crude oil to gasoline & diesel & kerosine & jet fuels & fuel oils & lubricating oils & other petrochemicals, of which their are tens of thousands of examples & thousands of applications & many hundreds of common products that normal people encounter daily, required for agricultural food production (fertilizer & pesticides) & part of paint, adhesive, fabrics, plastics, furniture, vehicle interiors, wire insulators, dye, explosives, medicines, pharmaceuticals, aerospace materials, carbon fiber, graphene, aramid, nylon, higher performance polymers approaching the strength properties of aluminum & other cool products & materials.
Black Gold / Petroleum / Crude Oil
This is why Crude Oil or Petroleum known as Black Gold, though some of it actually reddish or brown shades. The really dark black oil has more bitumen & pitch & tar content, thicker longer carbon chains with higher molecular weights. Oil actually amazing chemically! If you study petrochemical chemistry a bit you will gain my appreciation for how valuable crude oil is to so many industries, well beyond the scope of transportation fuels. It would be widely foolish & stupid to burn up all the petrochemical oil for fuel use, especially given all the other more profitable higher value added applications of petrochemicals used to make things other than fuel.
Capturing Trash Dump Gases for Use
We can recover & condense trash dump methane emissions & turn them into nature gas & compressed natural gas & liquified natural gas for use in furnaces & water heaters & boilers & for industrial processes & manufacturing heat & for vehicle fuel in CNG busses & trucks & ships & aircraft & LNG used in rocket engines & other aerospace applications where high thrust performance needed with a low cost fuel thats abundant.
Biofuels from Waste
We can convert agriculture & yard & food scrap wastes into biofuels, liquids & gases with improved clean combustion that reduce air pollutant emissions when they are burned as fuels in engines or to heat heat-exchangers in air & water heat systems. Most RV's use propane for hot water & air heating because the energy storage batteries, typically a couple of 31AGM marine deep cycle units hooked up in parallel for greater AH capacity, only store a few kWh of usable electrical energy, that can be & is increasingly charged with photovoltaic solar panels mounted to the roof of the RV, deck of the recreational boat or barge & offered solar powered cabin.
Methane Recovery Wise
Methane capture from these sources important to address Climate Change because methane released into the atmosphere 25x more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas that traps more of the Sun's energy, making storm systems more powerful & the weather more chaotic with more extreme changes & swings from super cold to super hot, longer droughts & more intense flooding & wreaking havoc on agriculture & farms that produce food, driving up food prices, a trend that will continue because of climate change.
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