Running Vehicles on Vegetable Oil?

the green giant asks: "There has been a lot of info on alternative energy powered vehicles lately, and this is good. However, most of us still drive the old-fashioned petroleum burning kind of cars. How hard will it be for us (the hackers) to take the lead in switching to innovative, replenishable energy sources? Well now it looks like there is a diesel/veggyoil HOWTO at The VeggyVan Website in the form of a book: From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank. I am ordering it now, so I haven't gotten the chance to read more than is on the website. Apparently you cannot merely pour vegetable oil in every diesel engine without problems, but you can (and there are instructions in the book) make your own biodiesel at home, and they claim to have gotten the price down to $.50 / gallon. Also, the book is supposed to contain instructions on how to modify any diesel engine to run off straight vegetable oil. I wonder how difficult this is to do. Has anyone read this book and care to comment on it?" Wow! I'm stoked that people are actually getting alternative fuel and energy sources into practical and everyday devices.

Fossil fuels will not last forever, we all know this, so it's great to see a breakthru like this one. While this probably won't yet take the world by storm, what do you think the automotive industry will look like in 10 years if technologies like this become commonplace in another 2-5 years?

Comments

Re:I think air is cheaper...

[Tony Shepps]

The fast food oil car is reality. A pair of gents drove one across the country recently, "refilling" it at fast food places (who apparently would give him the used stuff just for the asking).

Ethanol

[bluGill]

For the majority of (US/north america) based people who have cars running on Gasoline: ethanol is fairly easy to make at home (you need a special goverment license to make enough for your car, but that isn't a big deal). All modern cars have to run fine on 10% ethanol, but often gas you buy already has that. Ford sells vechicals designed to run on e-85, which is 85% ethanol, and I know where several E-85 pumps are.

Old carbrated cars were easy to modify to run on ethanol, just replace the carb with a 4 barrel, adjust half for gas and half for ethanol. Computer cars are more difficult, because you have to programgram the computer and you don't get source. (There are efforts to re-write car computers as open source, but so far they have not worked better then OEM)

The best things you can do today is refuse to buy a car that isn't design to run on E-85 or other renewable fuel. Ford sells them, so when you look at GM, tell the salesmen you like it, but your gonna buy the Ford due to E-85. Remember, one person demanding e85 isn't worth bothering with. a few thousand lost sales due to e-85 hits the bottom line.

Re:Proper engineering is about appropriate use.

[unitron]

"1. How much petroleum (fertiliser and fuel) and land use does it take to make a gallon of used french-fry oil?"

No more than it takes if you pour it out of the fryer into the garbage can or drain or whatever. This way you take something that already exists and, instead of just throwing it away, get more use out of it and keep it from clogging up municipal sewage systems as well, which is a real problem anywhere you have a restaurant or three.

Not to mention that the exhaust smells like french fries :-) (Really)

Mercedez Benz & Hemp oil.

[rasjani]

Some time ago, cant remember was it year or two ago, there was this tiny article in finnish science magazine Tieteenkuvalehti that Mercedez Benz is making a prototype on car using as a source of energy. Allthou i cant verify this from the web.
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The Problem with Food-Based Engines

[Smitty825]

I like the idea of engines that burn alternative fuels, but I don't like the ones that burn food items. I agree that they are renewable, but it comes down to the idea that we are burning our food! If a major crop bug strikes, what will become more important, feeding the population or allowing the rich to drive their SUVs?

Vegetarian VW

[bmasel]

Here's a guy who's running an old diesel VW Rabbit on filtered vegetable oil with just scrapped parts.

The Vegetarian VW

Well here in Ireland...

[psicic]

...you can get your diesel engine converted to run on Veggie oil for about £200 - that's about $250. About 15 years ago only one or two people were able to do it, but now many garages are able to do the conversion for you or refer you to someone who can. Plus, a company in the UK has come up with a simple 5 or 6 part engine upgrade which you can install yourself, but it's very expensive, weighing in at about Stg£800/IR£1,000. The fuel economy is good for European countries where the environment is really on the political agenda and petrol and diesel are taxed highly. Europeans also have the added benefit of increased engine economy - cars made for the American market are notoriously inefficient, usually just for the sake of pushing up the specs on paper.

About 50 years ago, my Uncle converted all his farm machinery to run on methane gas, which he could easily collect from a pig sty he built especially for the task. He also ran a motorcycle off the stuff. Other alternatives include everything from ethanol to water cells.
It does look like hydrogen is the wave of the future, however. Despite the dangers, drawbacks and difficulties, many car manufacturers, oil companies etc... have already begun talks on how best to minimise damage to profits while phasing in hydrogen pumps around Europe - I don't know about America. Recent reports have estimated that oil production in the West has already peaked - the US government figures you read are based on massaged figures; they assume a constant and steady growth in production from too many sites to be realistic, as well as factoring in as-of-yet unconfirmed sites. So the motives aren't anything near selfless.
Regardless, it is likely that renewable fuel sources are destined to become common-place in the next few decades - at a tidy profit for the current moguls of the oil-based industry.

8)

Re:Ethanol == Corporate Welfare

[Golias]

Ethanol is more expensive to produce than gasoline.

10% Ethanol gas, required by the Federal EPA in many major cities, is only cheap because of huge subsidies from the Federal Government.

This is one of the best examples available of corporate welfare in American politics. Nearly all of the Ethanol in America is produced by one company, the Archer Daniels Midland Corporation. (The same "ADM: Supermarket to the world!" that sponsors NBC's "Meet the Press").

Since ADM is one of the single largest corporate campaign supporters (mostly for Democrats, but also for a lot of Republicans, including former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton, as well as former presidential hopefuls Al Gore AND Bob Dole, and dozens of prominent Senators), it should come as a surprise to nobody that ADM is enjoying the benifits of these subsidies, and that these sam politicians (and some members of the press) cheerlead for the advancement of Ethanol over the eeeevil oil companies.

The truth about Ethanol is that while it does slightly reduce CO and CO2 emissions (yay!), it also emits higher levels of other toxins, such as O3.

For the moment, electric cars are also a poor alternative to gasoline. For several reasons:

1. Battery technology has a long way to go before I can use an electric pickup truck to tow my boat 400 miles to the lake.
2. Most of America's electricity (the source for charging these battery cars) is still generated by burning coal, which is far dirtier than burning gasoline.
3. The batteries themselves are difficult to dispose of safely
4. $35,000 gets you a car that is smaller than most $13,000 cars, with limited range, a very light (re; dangerous) frame, and expensive maintenence.

Hydrogen induction is another popular choice to root for. The problem is, where are you going to get enough hydrogen? You can mine for methane deposits, but the process to convert methane to H2 also produces a shitload of CO2, which is one of the things we are trying to avoid. You can also seperate hydrogen from H2O using electricity... but then you are spending power to get hydrogen to get power, meaning you need another power source or you are talking about a good-old-fashioned perpetual motion scam.

There's solar... if you only want to drive in southern states on sunny days.

Obviously, as oil reserves start to run out (making it prohibitively expensive to get at the oil), probably sometime late in this Century, we will need to switch to another transportation power source. I suspect that if none of these alternate technologies are ready for prime time by then (and it looks like they won't be), we will burn propane and/or natural gas.

Meanwhile, I am off to fire up the V6 3.3L engine of my truck to go fishing up north for Memorial Day weekend. It will cost me at least a good sixty bucks for gas to get to the lake and back... and it will be worth it. Later, all!

I think air is cheaper...

[RhetoricalQuestion]

I'm still waiting for the compressed-air car to come North America.

IMO, the air-powered car is one of the best ideas in a long time.

Proper engineering is about appropriate use.

[human bean]

Taking used vegetable oil, methylating it to crack the bonds, and then burning it for motor fuel is the most energy inefficient thing I have seen in a long time. Consider:

1. How much petroleum (fertiliser and fuel) and land use does it take to make a gallon of used french-fry oil?
2. What does it cost in terms of energy to produce methyl alcohol and lye?
3. By-products of this process (dilute gycerin and water contaminated with metallic stearates) are also considered toxic waste, and form a goodly percentage (roughly one third) of the volume converted.

Simple economics should tell you that this is an emergency measure only, for extreme shortage conditions. Five dollars a gallon for fuel is not extreme enough to make this economic.

A better plan might be to take the used fry oil, mix it with old wheat flour (thrown away at mills) and corn or rice cuttings (also thrown away) and flavorings, some water and salt, apply gentle heat to bake, and crumble up for dogfood. Sell the premium dogfood (don't think so? check how commercial dogfood is made...) for cash, say seventy-five cents a pound in hundred pound lots. Use cash to buy regular fuel, or anything else.

Burning edible hydrocarbons for fuel. Who ever thought this up...

It's all over, you just don't see it.

[Spamalamadingdong]

This vegetable oil vehicle is not the answer as it requires massive energy expenditure to just get the oil to market.

Maybe not "the" answer, but there's a lot of vegetable oil already being processed and running through restaurant fryers here and now. The used oil is a bit rancid, but still makes good fuel. Taking the restaurant's waste product and turning it into fuel (easily done locally) requires very little in the way of transport or other costs, just NaOH and methanol.
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How about food-waste-based engines?

[Spamalamadingdong]

You use the spent vegetable oil after it's spent a few days in the fryer tank; it becomes diesel fuel and glycerine (good for soap). You take the stuff that's spent a day or so in the people, and digest that in a big tank; it yields methane, which can be burned in most kinds of engines.

The point is, we're growing, transporting and using this stuff anyway. We might as well squeeze a bit more benefit out of it, because it's effectively free.
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A few more words about diesels

[Spamalamadingdong]

The problem being that modern refined gasoline is too explosive for them (this is a similar problem to using weapons-grade plutonium in a nuclear reactor).

Sorry, not even close. Gasoline (fuel for Otto-cycle engines) and diesel fuel (fuel for Diesel-cycle engines) have conflicting requirements; diesel fuel MUST ignite in a compressed air charge, but gasoline must NOT ignite when compressed in an air charge. If you put gasoline in a diesel engine, it may not even start. There are also little quirks such as the typical diesel injector pump using the fuel as lubricant and it would die rather quickly if it was fed only gasoline, but those are secondary issues.

Diesel gas is cheaper per mile in a diesel engine, but also is less pure, and that translates into nastier pollution.

Diesel fuel is cheaper per mile because the diesel engine has a higher thermal efficiency and better part-throttle efficiency. The "purity" is a red herring, except as it relates to things like sulfur content (some of the sulfur compounds help lubricate the injector pump).

The $.50 / gallon is somewhat hard to swallow unless they mean cost of seeds to oil.

They probably mean the cost of NaOH, methanol and processing, because they assume that the vegetable oil is a waste product from a cooking process and is free (or even negative cost, if the user would have to pay to dispose of it).
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