Chemistry and misc. stuff concerning it.

Draken wrote:How hard it would be to establish production of acids in big quantities?
From what I know about chemistry it isn't that hard, cus we have something like seven ways to get them.

The large scale production of acid wouldn't be hard for EoC to begin at their current tech level. The problem is that to get the purity of acids or chemicals that you need for many modern uses you need electricity. Without electricity those impurities make large scale production of acids and chemicals very dangerous as they can lead to explosions and/or toxic compounds that will kill your workforce or make the end product useless for the purpose it was make for.

What about keeping long chain part of the oil for later use? We should be able to have electricity in something like 20-30 years and than we will need huge amounts of that stuff.

fallsfromtrees wrote:The problem with distillation without cracking is that you end up with a large amount of very heavy (long chain) gunk that used to be just burned. You don't want tot do that anymore, as that gunk now forms the basis for the entire petrochemical industry.

You're operating under a couple of potentially erroneous assumptions here. Fractional distillation is only about separating the natural composition of your crude oil, and so it is entirely dependent on the quality of the crude oil you are refining. If you are refining Venezuelan crude you are quite correct about the large amount of heavy fractions that you will get (hence why the US is still the largest market for Venezuelan oil because only the gulf coast refineries have built in the needed (expensive) technologies to crack Venezuela's heavy oil into the more useful and valuable lighter fractions). But if you are refining a high quality feed stock, for instance something like Nigerian Bonny (light and sweet), then you will get a much higher percentage of those lighter fractions.

I'm always impressed by how knowledgeable a community this is

I'm waiting for the accidental discovery of a comparable voltaic pile (battery).

MPCatchup wrote:

Draken wrote:How hard it would be to establish production of acids in big quantities?
From what I know about chemistry it isn't that hard, cus we have something like seven ways to get them.

The large scale production of acid wouldn't be hard for EoC to begin at their current tech level. The problem is that to get the purity of acids or chemicals that you need for many modern uses you need electricity. Without electricity those impurities make large scale production of acids and chemicals very dangerous as they can lead to explosions and/or toxic compounds that will kill your workforce or make the end product useless for the purpose it was make for.

You may correct me if I'm wrong but from what I know about chemistry there is a way to get acid without any byproduct, so why don't we use that way to produce them? Only thing which you could get with acid are water or hydrogen and they're not dangerous so getting rid of them shouldn't be that hard?

TN4994 wrote:I'm waiting for the accidental discovery of a comparable voltaic pile (battery).

Might be a while before they recognize the equivalence of the spark from the pile and lightning, but eventually someone will, and then the cat will be well and truly among the pigeons.

Aegis99 wrote:

fallsfromtrees wrote:The problem with distillation without cracking is that you end up with a large amount of very heavy (long chain) gunk that used to be just burned. You don't want tot do that anymore, as that gunk now forms the basis for the entire petrochemical industry.

You're operating under a couple of potentially erroneous assumptions here. Fractional distillation is only about separating the natural composition of your crude oil, and so it is entirely dependent on the quality of the crude oil you are refining. If you are refining Venezuelan crude you are quite correct about the large amount of heavy fractions that you will get (hence why the US is still the largest market for Venezuelan oil because only the gulf coast refineries have built in the needed (expensive) technologies to crack Venezuela's heavy oil into the more useful and valuable lighter fractions). But if you are refining a high quality feed stock, for instance something like Nigerian Bonny (light and sweet), then you will get a much higher percentage of those lighter fractions.

True, fractional distillation is just about separating the factions, but even light and sweet crude is going to have a significant portion of "useless" heavy chain polymers that will have to be disposed of.

fallsfromtrees wrote:True, fractional distillation is just about separating the factions, but even light and sweet crude is going to have a significant portion of "useless" heavy chain polymers that will have to be disposed of.

Given OWL/The inner circle should know of the future utility of the heavier fraction -- not to mention the environmental impact of improper disposal -- I would expect somebody suggesting pumping the sludge back into the underground reservoir for future recovery and use.

fallsfromtrees wrote:

TN4994 wrote:I'm waiting for the accidental discovery of a comparable voltaic pile (battery).

Might be a while before they recognize the equivalence of the spark from the pile and lightning, but eventually someone will, and then the cat will be well and truly among the pigeons.

??? "and then the cat-lizard will be well and truly among the wyverns."