A push to diesel?

So there has been a deluge of new commercials highlighting the use of diesel in vehicles, particularily new BMW 3 Series diesels. See a Youtube listing of BMW commercials.

Massive adoption of diesel has pretty large ramifications on the oil industry in America, and certainly on the amount of work available to chemical engineers, and engineers in general.

My family had a diesel station wagon when I was young. It was loud... noisy... broke down a lot... smokey as all balls... and took 2 minutes to start in cold weather (go go glow plugs) and I certainly would not have recommended a diesel to anyone. A lot of americans share this perception.

However, some companies, particularily Volkswagen, with their TDI diesel engines have done a lot to dispel these old perceptions. You don't need to wait to start, they are quiet, they are not smokey, they don't smell as bad, and, a Jetta TDI get's 55 MPG during the summer.

Europe has a much larger portion of diesel engines, and a move to the same would require huge capital expenditure in America. Pulling say 5% more diesel off of a VDF column costs anywhere from 50-150 million, and, assuming favorable diesel prices, can have substantial ROI.

A move to much larger diesel use would require revamp of pretty much every refinery in the country. Hydrocrackers installed for huge money... hydrocracker catalysts and fractionators changed to generate and separate even larger diesel cuts... FCC catalysts radically changed to pull larger diesel cuts, along with associated fractionators in the unit. All of it isn't cheap, all of it doesn't happen overnight, and all of it has to be done amongst current capex required to keep refineries running.

The public always hears "diesel requires less refining than gasoline" which while true in that diesel doesn't require as much blending (of which the blends require much processing) as modern gasoline, your refinery still has to be set up to process crude to it, and this costs a lot of money. Such a move by this country would mean solid job prospects for a long time to come!