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What I like about this site is the potential to talk about all means to increase vehicle fuel economy.
The limitations of diesel technology aren't limited by engine design they are limited by the realities of the refining process. As I understand it you can get more gallons of diesel from a barrel of sweet crude than other grades of crude. Sweet crude is the crude that will be the soonest to be in short supply.
In other words what would you do with the surplus gasoline if cars were predominantly powered by diesel engines?
I would strongly recommend the new book A THOUSAND BARRELS A SECOND to anyone that wants a realistic understanding of the realities of what fuels we have to work with in our quest to reduce the energy expended for vehicle transportation.

So you are saying diesel would be better because we could strech oil further and a reason we don't do that is because we have to steal a lot of the sweet crude to make gasoline?

Is that correct?

Hi CleverLever:

___Interesting point … As of last summer and probably continuing on through today, Europe was in this very predicament given almost 50% of their new car sales are actually diesel. A BBl of crude can only be refined to give so much diesel vs. gasoline and the Europeans were shipping over their excess refined gasoline to us because they had no place else to sell it!

___Here is a link to the author’s site that you have graciously told us about as well as a small bio and other related information in regards to the book …

A Thousand Barrels a Second (http://www.1000barrels.com/)

___Good Luck

___Wayne

So you are saying diesel would be better because we could strech oil further and a reason we don't do that is because we have to steal a lot of the sweet crude to make gasoline?

Is that correct?

I would like to make a respectfull response to your question but I don't understand what you mean by "steal a lot of the sweet crude"

Could you please explain where we would be stealing the sweet crude from?

I'm saying that by making gasoline out of sweet crude you can't make as much diesel out of it. Therefore the gasoline is stealing sweet crude from diesel.

You are making an assumption that you can convert the entire barrel of crude to diesel. It doesn't work that way. You can make minor variations to the ratios of gasoline and diesel that can be extracted from a barrel of crude and if my reference data is correct you can get more diesel from sweet crude than other crudes so what works in Europe isn't necessarily whats best for the USA

Okay. Thats kind of what I was was trying to understand. I get what you are saying now.