Petroleum demand, reducing

Excise taxes placed on specific energy sources tend to reduce the demand for these energy sources in both the short and the long run. The federal government imposes excise taxes on almost all petroleum products and coal (see Table I). The federal government also imposes excise taxes on many transportation uses of methanol, ethanol, natural gas, and propane and imposes a fee on electricity produced from nuclear power plants. 

Each of these excise taxes raises the price of the fuel for uses subject to the tax and might be expected to reduce the demand for petroleum and coal. However, to some extent the excise tax receipts col-... 

The quality of gasoline is also improved by the addition of ethanol, which has an octane rating of 120. The use of ethanol helps to reduce the demand for petroleum. Unlike petroleum, ethanol is a renewable fuel that can be regenerated every year (see Box 6.2). 

Filtration through granular materials to achieve removal of suspended matter and associated materials such as oil is an old concept. It is, however, receiving new attention in many areas in the petroleum industry where there is a concern for improving the quality of injection waters in secondary recovery operations and reducing the biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), oil, and suspended solids levels in refinery waste waters. 

Evaluation techniques and equipment are as varied as the individual catalytic processes themselves. The long term goal of catalyst evaluation is to reduce the size of the testing equipment consistent with reliable and accurate data as it relates to the commercial process. Invariably, the farther removed in physical size the process simulation attains, the more likely that errors will be introduced which can affect data accuracy, accuracy being defined as commercial observations. In addition, smaller equipment size also places less demand on the physical integrity of a catalyst particle therefore, additional test methods have been developed to simulate these performance characteristics. Despite these very important limitations, laboratory reactors fully eight orders of magnitude (100 million times) smaller are routinely used in research laboratories by both catalyst manufacturers and petroleum refiners. 

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