Posted on 05/10/2008 6:08:05 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Every few weeks Gordon Elliott drives 22 miles to the Hare and Hounds pub in Marple, Cheshire, collects a barrel of waste cooking oil from his stepdaughter and takes it back to his personal oil refinery in his garage in Leigh, near Bolton. The retired construction site manager then decants the liquid into a machine and adds a few chemicals.
Twenty-four hours later the waste oil has been purified, filtered and refined and is ready to be used in one of his family's two diesel cars. Instead of paying £1.25p a litre at the local supermarket, he has paid 15p to make his own biodiesel. He says he is saving nearly £100 a month - as well as 90% of the greenhouse gases he would normally emit from driving. The cars perform perfectly, the equipment will be paid for within a year and the pleasure of making his own fuel is intense. "It's the principle. I do it for the environment and to spite the exchequer," he said.
Elliott, 79, is part of a cottage industry of people who have turned to making their own recycled "biodiesel" in response to the doubling of fuel prices in just over a year. Companies making biodiesel "reactors" report booming sales and demand for cheaper diesel is outstripping anything they can produce.
"Our business has doubled in size in just the last six months," said David Taylor of Ecotec Resources, the Lancashire company which sold Elliott his machine and which also makes 100,000 litres a year of recycled fuel.
"If you can collect your own oil it works out at about 15p a litre.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Expect heavy regulation and taxes on the resource and tools of this technology shortly.
I drink beer, and it comes out to about a litre a p.
But only if you don’t have prostrate problems! ;)
Does the biodiesel smell of fish and chips?
Took me a few seconds
I'm positively prostate with prostrate problems!
The answer is yes.
Often smells like french fries
LOL!
The garbage trucks here use it and they smell like fries.
If I had a diesel I would do it. With all the Mexican food places within a 5 mile radius of my house I could probably get an endless supply. Now if I could just drive.
Pure BS. That would require that he get on the order of 10x better mileage with cleaned up cooking oil than with diesel. First order, carbon-based fuel = carbon-based fuel, and since the vegetable-based cooking oil includes oxygen in its molecules it will deliver less energy per unit mass when combusted compared with a plain hydrocarbon like diesel. He is very likely emitting more greenhouse gas.
But, since the whole anthropogenic CO2 greenhouse gas business is even purer BS, it doesn't practically matter. He should get educated though on the fact that something "natural" like cooking oil is no cleaner burning and no more (and very likely less) efficient than what comes out of good ol' Big Oil's pumps.
Thus his only benefit is financial, which is good enough for me.
Vegetable oil fuels cars -- and tax bills
Keep your mouth shut in the States - or the revenooers will show up thicker'n ticks on a hound...
1) Buys machine
2) Drives 44 miles
3) Collects oil from pub
4) Pours 44 gallons of grease into machine
5) Adds chemicals
6) Waits 24 hours
7) Extracts from machine/filters
8) Pours "free" fuel into storage containers
The guys who sell these machines remind me of the men who sold pick axes, shovels gold pans to the '49ers.
Wait until the Revenoo’ers find out about it .....
But only if you don’t have prostrate problems! ;)
Sorry, but the word is “prostate”.
ping
Modern day bootlegging!
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