Posted on 04/30/2005 6:10:42 AM PDT by grania
Diesel engines can run on just about anything, including used cooking oil. An entire industry is emerging to provide brave 'biodiesel' pioneers with the ingredients for petroleum-free motoring.
One day last March, my musician friend Jonathan drove up in a Mercedes. This was odd, since Jonathan is so resolutely counterculture that he once tried recording an album in the woods, without electricity.
His car's exhaust smelled faintly of french fries, and therein lay the explanation: The new Jonathan Richman tour vehicle -- an '84 300D Turbo -- was running on vegetable oil-derived biodiesel fuel as he and his drummer crisscrossed the nation in it, a deep fryer on wheels.
I was intrigued: Biodiesel comes from renewable resources. It's made from soybeans, corn or other oil crops, saving America's farmers. Or it comes from recycled kitchen grease, saving America's sewers. It pollutes remarkably less than petroleum fuel, and could potentially make the U.S. energy self-sufficient, freed from bargaining with dictators and terror-sponsor states.
And did I mention it smells like french fries?
But I was also suspicious. If it works so well, why isn't everyone already using it? I've fallen prey to New Age wishful thinking before, and that pyramid never did sharpen my razor. Even after cruising the Pacific Coast Highway in Jonathan's car, something about it didn't seem real. If a car runs on vegetable oil, does that mean I can run my TV on sauerkraut? Don't let retirement sneak up on you. Create a perfect plan.
Endorsed by Rudolf Diesel himself It turns out biodiesel is not a new idea. When Rudolf Diesel introduced his signature engine at the 1900 Paris Exposition, he said two words as he started it: "Peanut oil." He'd designed his engine so farmers could grow their own fuel. Most diesel engines were indeed run on vegetable oil until the 1920s, when the petroleum industry promoted a gasoline byproduct as diesel fuel.
Environmental concerns, the Iraq war and rising gas prices have spurred a renewed interest in biodiesel, and people have discovered that a diesel automobile can run on it with little or no alteration. (Cars more than a decade old should have fuel lines checked, because the highly solvent fuel eats some rubber compounds. It cleans engines so effectively that fuel filters also bear watching.) It can be used interchangeably with standard diesel fuel, and it's had well over a million miles of road-testing.
I started seriously thinking about joining the biodiesel generation when a butterscotch Mercedes 240D turned up for sale around the corner for $3,500. Saving the environment is nice, but I really like butterscotch. Test-driving the car, however, I found that friends' concerns about the model's 67-horsepower engine proved true. The 240D has a reputation for running forever, but that's also apparently how long it takes to get anywhere in it.
The biggest hurdle: where to tank up Even if this wasn't the diesel steed for our experiment in vehicular unction, I was now set on getting one. My wife expressed doubts about the biodiesel lifestyle, though, when I suggested we could store the 55-gallon drum in the bushes near the garage.
Dunno, maybe they used soy diesel to run the tractor to plant the soy beans to make the soy diesel to..........(etc,etc,etc)
You need petroleum to make the fertilizer to grow the soy. Unless you go organic and rotate crops. Which means you grow soy prolly every 2nd year to replenish the soil.
Really???
About 250,000,000 yrs old, give or take a few million.
All gas stations in the south would be instantly out of business.
Yes it is but a big part of the cost is making it clean enough for human consumption and packaging it in those little (relatively) bottles.
LOL
I just had a severe brain storm. Crude oil in it's natural state as it comes from the ground, is pretty much nothing more than a stinking, messy and disgusting sludge.
All cooking oils-peanut, soy bean, canola, safflower, pig fat, etc, etc, are much less disgusting and worthless looking in their natural state. Has anyone tried running these oils through the refining proccess and seeing what boils out?
If not-why not ????
"the deserts of Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt could be turned into gigantic algae ponds to produce enough biomass..."
Doesn't that mean we'd be basically kissing the same Jihadi butts for biomass that we're now kissing for oil ?
Then you got to figure out what to do with the glycerin.
Start a soap business, add a little extra income :)
Misinformation alert. First, you're confusing bio-diesel with ethanol, the gasoline additive that is extracted from corn.
Second, while it is technically true that it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than that gallon will deliver, that doesn't tell the whole story. Because ethanol is actually a by-product of a larger process to produce animal feed and only a fraction of the energy consumed by the entire process should be charged to ethanol.
Go to the Futures board and look up sugar. Figure how much a gallon would cost at the aproximate rate of 10 gallons per 100 lbs of sugar.(Depends on the proof you want, a car will run on 180 proof easily). That's just the sugar we have on hand that we pay the farmers subsidy's for. That doesn't count the product we would have if we set our energy policy on. Jurusalem artichokes put out the most sugar for ethanol and we could have 3 crops a years on the same acres. That doesn't count sugar cane, beets, and other products that we could get from other countries other than the middle east. Africa, Central America, Asia, Mexico, etc, would all be putting into the energy pot, not just a select few countries.
Alcohol is the energy answer, but we need the government to mandate a pump at every station like they did in '75 with unleaded. They will never do it unless they can figure a foolproof way to poison it so we won't drink it.
BTTT!!!!!!!!
I'm ignorant of the details of gasoline alternatives. BUT I am very much for the environment.
Pro Environment get's a bad name because the radical environmentalists have hyjacked the cause.
I recycle, I don't throw my trash on the ground EVER, and I understand the environment is about us. Save the humans.
Very interesting. I hadn't thought to question the cost arguments against ethanol until reading your post. I certainly would not put it past the BATFags to screw up that market.
And don't all cars these days have fuel systems compatible with gasoline/ethanol blends?
So the question is, as a gasoline ditributor, at what price could I buy bulk enthanol today?
I don't understand the gas distributor question, as they don't have a tax stamp to sell ethanol unless they become a distributor. Then they would have to adhere to the BATF's regs to collect about $20 per 100 proof gallon.(probably higher because I haven't checked in a few years and it goes up with "sin" taxes) Like I said, almost all of the cost of alcohol is tax. Bulk ethanol could easily be made for less than 20 cents a gallon(195 proof) plus 30-40 cents road use tax. If it were commercially available, I would rebuild my engine in a heartbeat and use it. To see them in action, most funny cars(unless they say "fuel"which is nitro-methane)and indy cars run on ethanol. Remember the old days with the 4 cyl, Offenhouser engines? They were all ethanol. I'm not sure about today.
A couple of drawbacks are, you can't see ethanol burn very well, so you could be on fire and nobody know, unless an additive made it blue or orange. And it Needs the higher compression ratio's to start when it's cold. Just putting it into a gas engine with 8:1 compression may not work well. But anything over 12:1 is good.
Ethanol is made from almost any carbohydrate today. Booze is made from the sugars realeased by the yeast, but today, there are more efficient ways to get the reactions. We can now use the corn stalks and trash left in the fields to get ethanol without competing for the food supply. I haven't been able to independantly verify this, but I've heard that a new enzyme can make ethanol from oil and another changes methanol to ethanol. If our energy policy swiched from gasolene to ethanol, then we could have competing sources of feedstocks. If oil got to high, then the crop refuse could augment the feedstock to force the oil back down. If methanol could also be used, then you have garbage, grass clippings, pine needles, etc to add to the mix. There is no competion to oil as long as we can't get gasolene from any other source. Methanol isn't good because it has less BTU's per gallon and it's exhaust is poison. Not to mention spilling it on yourself while fueling.
I've been looking at ethanol fuel for years, and the arguments against it just don't hold up. It has to be the probability that you might put some in your Coke and skip the tax that stops it cold. Even if we agreed to pay $2 a gallon tax, the gubmint figures they would loose money.
I'm willing to listen to why we can't use ethanol, but costing to much to produce is just a LIE!
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