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Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by WheelsAtLarge on Saturday February 13, 2021 @07:39PM (#26128533)
Thx, I should have known. For a minute there I thought that it was short for a special type of fuel for machines.
Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by samatman on Sunday February 14, 2021 @01:10AM (#26130099)
I assumed "cat fuel" was some shorthand for "catalytically cracked fuel" which I simply hadn't heard before.

Which actually works, because that's exactly what you'd have to do!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_catalytic_cracking

Re:50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to B... by fuzzfactor on Sunday February 14, 2021 @05:52PM (#26137053)
"Cat feed" is raw material for the cat cracker unit.

Where heavy petroleum fractions and other applicable refinery streams are broken down into lower molecular weight hydrocarbons

The cat feedstock is some nasty material that looks worse than most crude oil.

It would seem feasible to introduce a small percentage of waste hydrocarbon plastics to the cat feed as it was being processed, in order to at least recover a bit of the fuel value from the plastic.

I can only imagine it is simply cheaper to continue to purchase the equal number of barrels of regular cat feed than it is to attempt to displace some of it using waste polyethylene & polypropylene which may even be possible to deliver at no material cost.

OTOH, for all I know people may be doing this already.