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Normal diesel engines in their standard configuration can not properly work with vegetable oil. You need modified glow plugs (cheap and easy) and fuel injectors (not cheap and easy) to avoid premature engine failure from improper injection and combustion. Standard fuel filters also won't properly deal with straight vegetable oil (maybe easy, maybe a nightmare), especially at cold temperatures or during extended storage when the oil will crystallize. However, if you're willing to go that route, and install a special tank that preheats (definately not cheap or easy) the vegetable oil before the engine is started, you can run SVO. Even if you don't want to pre-heat, you can mix the oil with a bit of gas or dino diesel to reduce the viscosity, and still get a combustible mixture. Regardless, improper configurations or improper mixtures can permanently damage an engine very quickly (a couple hundred miles).

Here's a nice link:

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html

earth friendly, low emissions and brew your own from waste vegetable oil for less than a $1.

http://www.journeytoforever.org/

Holy propaganda batman!

You rang?

The American coalition for ethanol is basically a lobby of Midwest corn farmers who really like their ethanol subsidies.

No. Really? Gee, I guess I've been duped.

Or more likely, I just like how their facts page is organized. :-)

Try these studies if Ethanol.org doesn't float your boat. For example, a 2004 study done by the Department of Energy (the same organization that found Ethanol to be energy negative under Pimentel 20 years earlier) found that Ethanol is at least 35% energy positive. (Report)

Even if these figures are overstated, the use of Ethanol would consolidate our oil dependence on farming equipment. The money then used to maintain the oil industry could then be diverted to replacing farm equipment with new technologies like hydrogen fuel cells or high density batteries.

FYI, even corn is energy positive. Though you are correct, sugarcane is WAY more efficient a plant to use for ethanol. Unfortunately, there are problems with growing it in areas like the frozen tundra (cute nickname for Wisconsin) where the weather is generally quite mild.

No.

It reduces greenhouse gas emissions:

http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol.html

# Ethanol's high oxygen content reduces carbon monoxide levels more than any other oxygenate: by 25-30%, according to the US EPA
# Ethanol blends dramatically reduce emissions of hydrocarbons, a major contributor to the depletion of the ozone layer
# High-level ethanol blends reduce nitrogen oxide emissions by up to 20%
# Ethanol can reduce net carbon dioxide emissions by up to 100% on a full life-cycle basis
# High-level ethanol blends can reduce emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) by 30% or more (VOCs are major sources of ground-level ozone formation)
# As an octane enhancer, ethanol can cut emissions of cancer-causing benzene and butadiene by more than 50%
# Sulphur dioxide and Particulate Matter (PM) emissions are significantly decreased with ethanol.

Question: suppose yours is the president of the most powerful nation in the world, and think of a scenario where oil runs short. Suppose also said president has vested interests in the oil business. Would he:

1- Do everything he can to garantee a renewable source, even though it would threaten his profits in the oil business?
2- Invade another country and colonize it, under whatever cheap excuse he can provide, if said country is oil-rich?
3- Lower trade barriers to countries that already procude the solution.
4- Develop an industry that obviously would change the energy matrix in the long run, e.g., hydrogen-cell, skewing the fact that other countries had already developed and deployed a solution in massive scale.

Answers?

1) Can you produce it without fossil fuels at a competitive rate (within, say 50% of today's gasoline, as seen at the pump)

You can produce biodiesel for 60 cents a gallon material cost at low volume. Your labor is obviously worth something as well.

I've found this site to be a pretty good resource for learning about and how to make biodiesel.

Sure, here's a lot of links for you to read over :) .

Some links are by obviously biased parties (for example, NCGA is the National Corn Growers Association). Others are not. This is just a start, of course - I gathered these in about three minutes of searching. Again, if you can find a single "net negative" study done by anyone - university, corn-industry, government, environmental group, anyone really - that didn't have Pimental and his bad data involved, please let me know, because I've never found such a study.

Just be aware that Pimentel releases this "finding" every other summer, Looking at the dates below, he's a month ahead of schedule this year.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/01/8.23.01/P imentel-ethanol.html

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/03/8.14.03/P imentel-ethanol.html

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/July05/ethanol .toocostly.ssl.html

I can't speak to this newest report, but Pimental's work has been repeatedly critiqued, and one of the main compliants it that he uses out of date numbers for yield and conversion efficiency:

http://www.mda.state.mn.us/ethanol/balance.html

http://www.usda.gov/oce/oepnu/aer-814.pdf

http://journeytoforever.org/ethanol_rooster.html

http://www.ncga.com/public_policy/PDF/03_28_05Argo nneNatlLabEthanolStudy.pdf

http://www.ethanol-gec.org/corn_eth.htm

All that having been said, Pimental is right that soy and corn alone cannot replace our petroleum addiction. You can read more about this in the archives at TDIclub.com.

http://forums.tdiclub.com/showflat.php?Cat=0&Board =UBB14&Number=946804&Searchpage=1&Main=941398&Word s=%2Bethanol+%2Bmoney+DrStink&topic=&Search=true#P ost946804

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html

Yep..this is true. When the Diesel engine was first developed in the 1890's, the inventor choose peanut oil as the fuel to run it on. http://www.google.com/search?q=Diesel+Engine%2C+pe anut+oil

Additionally, it is possible to run a modern diesel engine on straight vegetable oil, however, there are a number of factors that could effect performance. http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html

They're probably using the high-oil algaes investigated by the University of New Hampshire here. UNH says some algae are made of over 50% oil. algae are some of the most efficient photosynthesis machines around. once you've got the oil, it's just a matter of standard transesterification, a normal part of biodiesel production (and really, the only step necessary when you have clean oil).

Or you could make your own diesel and never pay another cent of gas tax again! Of course, you still get tagged for using the roads, but hey...

... ethanol is the only easy way to meet their air quality requirements.

(They used to use something else, started with an M, but it pollutes the ground water).

Don't forget to factor in all the subsidies that oil gets. By many counts, oil gets more than ethanol.

You ought to do a little research before you make statements that have not been true since the early 1990s.

one (start here) two Three, just to list a few links that I found.

Now if you go back to the techniques of the 1970s, yes ethanol is an energy sink, but you won't last long in the farming buisness if you try that.

Ethanol is just a tax give away to corn growing states.

Wrong. According to this Minnesota Business Journal article:

"the total economic impact of the Minnesota ethanol industry was estimated at $588 million in 2002. In comparison, the state's ethanol subsidy for the year was $33.7 million that means the economic impact was 17 times the subsidy payment."

And remember, you're talking about ethanol as opposed to gasoline, which we get from terrorist nations, which costs over twice as much as E85 fuels (E85 sells for $0.90/gallon) and pollutes substantially more.

It takes more energy to make ethanol than you get out of it.

Wrong. Even in 1988 energy generated by the ethanol exceeded energy inputs by 16%. Nowadays that number is closer to 34%, according to a USDA study.

Use the power to pump water uphill and store it in a reservoir or heat a large amount of water. There are plenty of ways to store large amounts of electricity.

This is a viable way to store power, but the system efficiency decreases dramatically when you do this. The real issue with wind power is how intermittent it is. My father-in-law currently works as a power engineer at a local electric co-op in Wisconsin and is in charge of researching new power technologies. They gave up on wind power a while ago and are now looking into a technology coming out of Denmark that converts animal waste (cow poop :-) into electricity. One of these "Methane Digesters" can produce a full megaWatt of power on a decently sized farm.

More information on methane digesters can be found at the following link.

http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/Methan eDigesters/MDToC.html

Now there's a statement devoid of context or references! ;-)
The average American farm probably isn't devoted primarily to the production of ethanol, so that could very well be true.

Got any relevant links?

The numbers vary, but current research indicates there is a net energy gain in the production of grown ethanol sources. There are a few related articles of interest up at this site.

This article compares the efficiency of hydrogen production with that of biodiesel. It also proposes algae as a source of biodiesel. Deserts aren't "dead" just because they appear to be dead. It would require study, but desert algae farms could produce all the biodiesel we need without impinging on food production.

Biodiesel requires no new technology to implement. Many fine diesel vehicles are already on the market. Homebrew biodiesel is simple and inexpensive. "Little people" like you and I can get started today.

When Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine, he designed it to run on peanut oil.

"[Henry]Ford was so convinced that renewable resources were the key to the success of his automobiles that he built a plant to make ethanol in the Midwest and formed a partnership with Standard Oil to sell it in their distributing stations. During the 1920's, this biofuel was 25% of Standard Oil's sales in that area."

plenty of links to read In short, ethanol is getting better. At one time (early 80s) ethanol was energy negative, but currently ethanol is energy positive. One link also claims that gasoline is not energy positive!

None of this account for other uses that can be taken from corn before and after ethanol is made. Biodiesel can be made from corn, without much effect on ethanol production (corn oil doesn't convert to ethanol easily) corn to biodiesel alone has been estimated as high as 4 times as much energy extracted as went into production.

What, and you think that those "controlling interests" wouldn't love to be the ground-breakers in a massive changeover to alternative fuels and have a (temporary) monopoly?

The problem with your theory is that the newer technologies in renewable energy tend to work rather efficiently on a micro producer scale, and thus would serve to reduce the amount of control that any one company or small group of companies can have over the energy market.

Electricity from solar energy can be that are on the market today.

Biodiesel takes very little equipment to produce in your garage from waste vegatable oil (big plastic drum, litmus paper and/or phenolthalene solution, hydrometer, measuring devices, etc) for pennies. No new technology need be implemented for the use of biodiesel

Natural gas can be efficiently produced on farms and by municipalities using biological processes.

Wind can be harnessed for electric production by windmills ranging in size from small ones that will power the lights in your garage (can be home-made without too much difficulty) to giant towers that can power several city blocks.

The truth is that petrochemical and energy corps are interested in maintaining the status quo, and will shun any technological advances that threaten to decentralize the energy markets. OTOH, the same corporations are showing considerable interest in implementing large scale renewable energy projects that allow market control to remain in their hands, such as large scale wind farms and hydrocarbon fuels produced from poultry processing wastes. The problem is that many people think that these companies are somehow attached to the idea of fossil fuels, when the truth is that they do not care where the money and power come from, as long as it remains in thier own hands.

(btw, the "hydrogen energy economy" is a red herring. It takes more energy to seperate the hydrogen from water than can be gained by burning or through fuel cells. The companies know this, and stand to profit from subsidies for building hydrogen plants, and from producing the electricity that will be used to seperate the hydrogen from water.)

The Biodiesel Guy Lots of good info on using SVO(Straight Veggie Oil) and WVO(Waste Veggie Oil) on this page -- those are good terms to search on, BTW if you're looking for more info on this.

If you really want sustainable, low impact transportation, you should go for a bio-diesel motorcycle.

Diesel Motorbikes

My only problem is trying to find an applicable small diesel engine to use as I am not in Europe and can not just go out and easily buy a diesel motorcycle.

Google too difficult for you?

How about this ?

Under Hydrogen they say: To get a 1,000 mile range, a tractor trailer running on diesel needs to store 168 gallons of diesel fuel. When the greater efficiency of the engine running on biodiesel is taken into account, it would need roughly 175 gallons of biodiesel for the same range
Wouldn't needing more biodiesel for the same range be less efficient. I going to email them and ask. So I googled and found that biodiesel is more efficient then fossil diesel, here

I think though that someone should package this and sale it to the amish. Yes, they use electricity but they live off grid using diesel generators. They also have tractors.

The US now uses more than 15 billion gallons of cleaner, ethanol-blended petrol a year, totalling 12% of fuel sales in the US. Most of it is a 10% blend, but 85% and even 95% blends are now being tested.

So far I have only made small experimental batches - the equipment is not yet ready to make a fuel-tank full (should be this weekend once I get my filter equipment up and running).

I am relying on the hundreds of case studies for people using this stuff in unmodified diesel engines for my confidence of success! The best site I have found is:

Journey to forever - biofuels

Uk regulations can be found at:

UK biodiesel production regulations

But a little googling will turn up much more info.

I will be updating my site as soon as I have more to tell on my own little greasy odyssey ;o)

do remember that cars that have used fossil-based diesel that suddenly switch over to biodiesel can get clogged fuel filters at first so you might wanna have a spare one in advance. Or did you think about getting it converted to using veggie oil instead? I find converting the oil to biodiesel a niftier thing as then your car does not require modifications. I believe you can buy filtered waste vegetable oil at a relatively low price or get unfiltered at restaurants for free.

Just incase you don't know, here's a nifty link on making biodiesel and suchlike.

Also, it would take very little to no modification to get a petrol car to run on grain alcohol.

More promising is using alcohol in fuel cells rather than gaseous hydrogen. Alcohol is not as good at combustion as gasoline, but it has more hydrogen and less carbon. If you use a Direct Methano Fuel Cell like the one that powered Daimler Chrysler's NECAR 5 on it's recent cross-country trek, you get roughly the same mileage on alcohol that you get on gasoline, but with a liquid fuel from a renewable source. Add it to the mileage improvements suggested by the mechanical changes from General Motor's AUTOnomy project, and automotive fuel cells become a viable option.

Be careful, cynics. Just because something sounds too good to be true does not mean it can't be true. Also, being cynical, especially on Slashdot, is far too easy. Wouldn't it be more mature to do a little research before bashing a positive idea ?

the vehicles do get better gas mileage than standard automobiles

Not true. Direct injection diesels commonly do 60-70MPG without any foolishness like regenerative braking or automatic freewheeling. The Audi A2 for example can do 78MPG, and the VW Lupo 3L (special eco-car) does well over 100MPG. That's about what hybrids claim but never actually manage, plus direct injection diesels are quiet, more rapid and have greater torque than petrols. It's a win win! Take a look at this list of diesels and their MPGs, or this series of articles about why diesels aren't taken seriously in the US.

Only in the US where diesels aren't taken seriously (less than 1% of new cars are diesels in the US compared to about 40% in the EU) could hybrids ever be considered with a serious face.

I think our main divergence is in the efficiency of conversion of sucrose to ethanol, in terms of net energy. I guessed 50%, meaning 2.5% photosynthesis results in 1.25% of insolation available to the fuelcell, you say 0.1%. That's 12.5-fold difference between our models. All the numbers I find say my 50% efficiency is, if anything, low. So your numbers turn into 780m^2, 28m on a side, for that week of gas. That also means about $90:Km^2:week, $400:month, $4800:year. Farm profit per acre of even livestock farms is about $7400:Km^2:year, about 1.5x the profit on this seacane. But seacane farms could be much larger, so the profit would be higher, even if the profitability is 33% lower.

As for costs of litigation, we have to consider that the oil industry is willing to spend billions of dollars, and to get the government to spend billions of dollars, and (some would say) thousands of lives, every year to maintain an unsustainable status quo. The money invested in the switchover from imported fuel would pay off very well in turning a scarce imported resource into a plentiful homegrown one. And remember, we're just talking about sugarcane, not an aquatic species with a >8% photosynthetic efficiency, which is worth looking for. If we found one with even 12%, we'd have per-acre profitability equivalent to average farm profitability, which is very lucrative in large scale agribusiness. If we found or bred one with >20%, we'd be directly competitive with PV solar cells, and really be on top of the world in both the energy and farming businesses once again.

That heat comes from natural gas, usually.

unless one was to use a solar still

It is likely that most large-scale monocultural industires can (economically) convert their waste products into something useful. Such innovation is occuring in the poultry industry now [see citations below]. However, I have deep seated doubt that any of these technologies will be implemented on a national scale until the majority of the populace reckognizes the need to use available resources more efficently.

Jouney to Fuel | Chicken Manure Fuel

Anything into Oil | Discover

The best website for info on this and other alternative fuels is Journey to Forever

That would be biodiesel, or "soy Diesel".

You can have the farming's equipment Diesels burn BioDiesel. Or try this link. Or this one. There are choices.

While I strongly agree that this would be the best solution, you have to realise that without industrial farming, there simply won't be enough food for everyone. Whether or not humans are a parasite on this planet is another matter, but you need to be realistic as well. Check out this for some more realistic ideas, like urban farming and biofuels.

Yes, this is would be a good argument if it was based on fact.

Here is a detailed discussion regarding TDI emissions: here

We don't have anyone to blame for these emissions except ourselves and our elected government. The fact is most of these emissions are due to the exceedingly crappy refining standards for diesel fuels in the US. Fuel quality is far higher in Europe where impurities are all far lower since they've been removed from the fuel before they arrive at the pump. Sure, this may not change your mind and you may be tempted to dismiss the thought but we all breathe in the emissions from heavy trucks that use diesel. What kind of diesel emissions do you want to breathe in?

If that doesn't turn your crank, how about using biodiesel in your TDI: requires no conversion, just the challenge of finding a pump. But that's worth it right? Or is saving the environment only interesting if its also easy? Biodiesel is now commercially available in major metro areas, you just have to find it.

Mechanical Engineering's Take on Diesel
Note where VW has to import Euro Diesel to showcase its cars in the US
VW's take
A whole whack of info on the future of [bio]diesel

What I find alarming is the attitude of a lot of people posting here, something to the effect of "Yadda yadda, heard it before. Didn't happen then, won't happen now!". I don't think the Earth will die by 2050, but don't people realize that WWF are trying to raise consciousness here? They are trying to get people to think. Apparently that didn't work with the majority of posting slashdotters (who seem to think the acronym is funny). It's clearly not John Doe's credit that some people take alerts like this seriously and actually do something about it. We live in a generation where kids eat beef, but cry when they see a cow getting slaughtered. People need to be educated about how things work and how to live more efficiently. I'd suggest reading a bit about the projects on journeytoforever.org for a different view.

www.nytimes.com/2001/05/27/business/27DIES.html
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle / rchive/2001/05/23/MN110637.DTL
journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html
www.greasecar.com
www.lupo80days.com/route_en.html
www.a-car.com/index.html
www.biodiesel.org/
lowtech.bigstep.com/
www.veggievan.com
www.americanbiodiesel.com/
www.icta.org/projects/trans/rlprexsm.htm
news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1309000/ 1309201.stm
www.wired.com/news/technology/1,1282,31920,00.html

With all this talk about technologically risky fuel sources, nobody seems to pay attention to a replenishable, efficient and very low polluting fuel that doesn't require an entirely new infrastructure.
Biodiesel

Yes, you can run a diesel engine on basically same the oil that MacDonalds uses to make french fries. The diesel engine was originally designed to work with vegetable oil, but the oil companies scuttled that.
Modern diesel engines have less carbon monoxide than gas engines, but more particulate matter (soot). Put biodiesel in the diesel engine and the carbon monoxide goes down even more, and the particulate matter virtually goes away. And it is not 5, 10, 20 years away. It works today, on current technology. And you can get 50 miles to the gallon on a diesel engine, while blowing off OPEC.
How cool is that?!

Diesel engines are already all over the place, so we don't need to create a new infrastructure, and biodiesel is actually easier and safer to store than petrodiesel. Check it out!
VeggieVan
BioDiesel.Org
Biodiesel Mike
Pacific Biodiesel

I have been looking into alternative fuels lately. Most modern gasoline internal combustion engines can be modified to run off of alcohol. They can be made to possibly run even more efficiently. It would require rejetting the carb and possibly adjusting the timing. Another thing to do would be to replace the fuel filters when switching and after running on alcohol for a time as alcohol is a great cleanser and you wouldn't want a bunch of gunk getting into your engine. With a few modifications any gasoline engine can be made to burn alcohol.

As for biodiesel, the only change one would have to make is a new filter when changing and after a bit of running as with the gasoline/alcohol switch for similar reasons. Other than that, a diesel engine should run off of biodiesel with no modification.

Kuro5hin had this article on hemp biodiesel a while ago. Another great site is Journey to Forever