Posted by
michael
on from the obligatory-earth-day-post dept.
i22y writes "With Greasel instead of Diesel in your tank, you can pull up to Jack-In-The-Box and fill up both your stomach and your gas tank. Run your car on old fryer grease and vegetable oil! Obligatory pictures and FAQ."
Homer: Marge, if you don't mind, I'm a little busy right now achieving financial independence. Marge: With cans of grease? Homer: [sarcastically] No! Through savings and wise investment. Of course with grease.
Yes, it's legit, bio-diesel even predates petroleum by about 15 years. It is still used in farm machinery, and here in Northern California, it's slowly becoming a fad, I'm seeing lots of bio-mercedes and bio run vw passats. It burns on par with petroleum based diesel, it's not any better for the environment, but it's great for the agri-industry and bad for the oil industry.
It is in fact real and scientifically sound (tried submitting it earlier but got rejected...); widespread deployment of these plants could eliminate the need for landfills, while also making oil dirt cheap. As an added bonus, they can refine previously unusable types of petroleum, and break down inorganic substances into reusable raw minerals as well. Understandably, Japan for one is VERY interested in this... Philadelphia is looking at deploying these plants as well as soon as they see how viable it is on a larger scale.
I can assure you that it is legit. Apparently they're doing a nationwide rolling tour as they stopped by the town I'm currently living in. To get fuel for the next stop they dropped by the local Chinese take-out place and relieved them of some of their waste grease. They pulled out of town leaving an exhaust trail that smelled like shrimp fried rice.:-)
Very cool...
-- G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Jack in the box
by
EvilTwinSkippy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hmmm... which is more deadly now. The car or the fuel...
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
It's already been done
by
chrisseaton
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Haven't they been doing this in Wales or Ireland or something a while ago? I remember a BBC radio news item about police stopping and checking people's cars (it's illegal, you see).
Re:It's already been done
by
chrisseaton
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Here y'all go, it's already been done in Wales (2002) (it wasn't illegal) and Tokyo (1998).
Re:It's already been done
by
Hieronymus+Howard
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's not illegal in the UK if you pay tax on the biodiesel. The problem (as far as the government was concerned) is that people were running their cars on fish'n'chip oil without paying any fuel tax.
Asda (Walmart) in the UK now run their fleet of delivery lorries on recycled donut frying oil.
HH --
Re:It's already been done
by
afidel
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually there was a case where a gentleman in the UK was cited for tax evasion for using homebrew biodiesel because his fuel was not taxed and hence he was not doing his part to maintain the roads.
-- There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A few years late on the news front
by
spiffy_guy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.
-- Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
Re:A few years late on the news front
by
atomicdragon
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I worked for a small company performing research into alterations to diesel engines. One of the things we played with was vegetable oil and biodiesel. Biodiesel is a great fuel since it produces no net carbon dioxide (all of the carbon in it was pulled from the air by the plants) and it lacks the sulfur found in normal diesel.
You can also run an engine on straight vegetable oil, which is different from biodiesel. The only problem is that the oil is really thick, so you have to start and stop the engine with normal fuel to heat it up, then switch to the vegetable oil after a minute or two. I've heard of products that will do this automatically for vehicles, but we just switched fuels manually. Although it doesn't burn to well, and the fuel economy is not a good as diesel (as in volume of fuel/power) but the pollution is not that bad. There is a slight increase in the particulates (smoke) produced, but otherwise its comparable to normal diesel without the sulfur. Also (this being appreciated more when you're standing around the engine all day) the smell of fries is a decent change from normal exhaust.
Simpsons referance..
by
bombkit
·
· Score: 3, Funny
(directed at a Krusty Burger employee) The grease on his forhead alone is worth a bounty!
Cost of Veggie Oil
by
EvilTwinSkippy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't really seeing this idea getting to be uber-big. First off, there are only soooo many fast food joints to raid. It's going to become like the waste hops from beer, marketed trash with a competitive street price.
If a tone of people start doing this they are going to find the veggie oil costs a HELL of a lot more than diesel. (Anyone ever price out biodiesel?)
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Re:Cost of Veggie Oil
by
Exocet
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I'm on the board of directors for the GoBiodiesel Cooperative in Portland, Oregon.
We have priced out what it costs to produce biodiesel (as a cooperative). It costs us approximately $1/gallon in pure supplies (plus electricity) to produce biodiesel. We're just starting (first test batch last weekend!) but are well aware of the costs. We're using methanol right now but would like to switch to the more expensive but more enviro-friendly ethanol. We'll see what happens on that front. Oh, and once we're done producing test batches with lye we will be switching over to...sodium methoxide (???). I can't recall what it will be, to be honest.
We will need to recoup the costs of the processor, the building it's located in, etc. Plus, we'd like to pay volunteers a small amount for their time.
We plan on selling biodiesel for approximately USD$1.25-$1.50.
If you're interested, visit the GoBiodiesel Cooperative web site and learn more about what we're doing.
Imagine the possibilities
by
Nethergoat
·
· Score: 5, Funny
And in other news today, McDonalds will be shipping its meat in special "pressmobiles" which will use the shipped product as its fuel - scientists predict heart disease in the U.S. will fall by 25% as a side effect of this new transportation method.
University of Victoria, in BC Canada, already had a Veggie Van fully operational. I think the diesel engine itself is unmodified, but they had a special filtering process so that they could use leftover McDonald's vegetable oil...
Switching to grease? Finally, dogs will have a reason to chase your car.
To all those saying this has been done before
by
Crasoum
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Read the Faqs, one of the first questions says..
Did Greasel discover that diesel engines will run on cooking oil?
No. The first diesel engines (invented by Rudolf Diesel in the late 1800's) were actually designed to run on plant oils. Immediately after Rudolf's untimely demise, his colleagues (who were just then tapping the resources of petro-based fuel sources) swept his veggie ideas under the rug and actually converted his design to run on petro-based 'diesel' fuel (which they were nice enough to name after him).
Blarg
PS the puns on the greasel site are pretty lame...
McNugget-powered Volkswagen Rabbi
by
BigBlockMopar
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
That's not even necessary.
I worked at a McDonalds in high school (about 1991), and one of the maintenance guys had an old (even then!) mid-1970s VW Rabbi (someone chiselled off the T for the fun of it) which was running on used shortening.
Actually, the guy was bright and knew a lot about cars, though he had no formal education. He built a system into an old gas can which rested on a "hot plate" heated by engine coolant. McDonalds filters their oil every day, and on those days on the schedule when it was being replaced, he'd just run it through the McDonalds filtration pump and into the gas cans.
The shortening would thicken, but when he was driving, he'd wait until the engine was warm and the oil was liquid, then throw the valve over to run it off the shortening. The fuel line was a copper tube taped against the lengths of copper plumbing pipe carring the hot coolant to the "hot plate" in the cargo area of the hatchback. Running out of fuel was no big deal - when the engine started to sputter, he'd flip the valve back to diesel off his regular tank, then at the next stop, he'd swap the gas can sitting on the hot plate. The pickup tube was hacked into the cap of a gas can, so the car sucked the oil right out of the gas can.
Riding in that car with him from Ottawa to Toronto (for a Ramones concert) in the dead of winter, I found only two small problems. One, the interior of the car was damned hot because of the hot plate. Two... the car - and I mean *the whole car*, from interior to exhaust - smelled like Chicken McNuggets. Sometimes, Filet-O-Fish.
On the other hand, the fuel was free, it was filtered with McDonalds specially-designed oil-filtation equipment and never seemed to cause him a problem with fuel filters, and my 340-4bbl Duster was getting about 8 miles per gallon... so I envied the utility but declined his offer to trade for my Duster.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.
This is true. Actually, the cost advantage isn't so great, when you figure that your time is worth something. Rather than scouting out restaurant dumpsters (which are pretty unpleasant places), you could be doing something more fun like getting fellatio or posting to Slashdot.
In his case, though, it was win-win since he was already gonna smell like McNuggets at the end of the day.
On the other hand, virgin vegetable oil could be a highly viable fuel. But the problem is that the very same people who jump up and down and scream about how nasty petroleum is, also jump up and down and scream about how nasty genetically modified corn and soy (which is the only way to make this economically viable) is. The best line I've ever heard came from a Greenpeace activist driving a sick little moped (blue clouds of poorly-tuned two-stroke, measurably more noxious than the exhaust from any well-tuned land-yacht SUV that he also complained about) screaming about how we can't feed cars while people are starving in Somalia. (If Somalis don't want to starve, they should have less children. Sorry, but it's not my problem.)
Not enough crops
by
theedge318
·
· Score: 4, Informative
BioDiesel is a great idea, but there is a very good reason why it hasn't taken off. BioDisiel promoters are right about it being great for the environment, but no one is willing to develop it for production (even the very interested VW).
Reason, if BioDiesel were to challenge regular gasoline/petrol, it would require a lot of vegetables. While it is true that the U.S. is actually over-producing crops, and thus having to pay farmers not to grow crops. There still isn't enough plants to produce BioDiesel for everyone, even if all of those fields were fully cultivated.
Facts Canada produces 50 mil. tons of relevant crops, and it would only need 10 mil. tons to power a country of BioDiesel cars. However the rest of the world does not have the same grain surplus as Canada, most other countries are at a deficit, and purchase Canada's surplus. The US. production although higher, has smaller surplus levels, and greater demand for combustible products.
-- Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
Re:Not enough crops
by
gpinzone
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Yeah, and I'm sure we won't be hated even more as a country that burns food rather than eating it. Etheopians will be screaming "Blood for corn!" instead of oil. Either way, the USA loses.
Re:Not enough crops
by
arivanov
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Nope, that is not the reason.
Here is why:
1. In all countries that have reasonable diesel uptake to be interested in BioDiesel the government earns a considerable amount through fuel tax. As a result they are scared shitless of any chance for people to manufacture fuel themselves. A good example is UK where the Customs and Excise department staged ambushes on roads in Wales last year to stop cars that do not smell of abnoxious gasoline fumes and require them to immediately present a document that proves that their fuel has paid fuel duty. Any cars that could not prove this on the spot were impounded. Considering that in the UK you do not even need to carry a driving license with you to drive you can judge by yourself how scared the treasury is. It is the same as with the use of natural gas. The UK government has done anything in their power to make sure that the uptake of that one is only token and very low and is done in a way that cannot use household gas so that it does not hit their revenue stream.
1.1. To add to 1, despite the fact that Biodiesel has a flash point of 300 degrees plus and is as safe to handle as fuel can get government still classes it as car fuel for storage purposes so that people who can buy bulk cannot store it (UK has an ancient wartime law that prohibits the storage of more then 20l of petrol outside a car fuel tank without a license).
2. Biodiesel is manufactured at the moment largely from recycled oil that will have to be disposed of (usually burned) because it is an extreme environmental pollutant. To produce Biodiesel stuff is filtered through HEPA and some of the more obnoxious soluble impurities are removed by running it past an absorbent. It is also usually dried from excess water. In civilised countries the food producers (including the ones that produce bulk rate bakery and supermarket foods) are required to dispose of the oil in a legit manner. AFAIK at the moment less then 0.001% is used.
-- Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Re:Not enough crops
by
noeffred
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In Austria this is not entirely true. "Bio Diesel" (which was in fact created here) is very popular for agricutlutral vehicles, such as harvesting machines and tractors. Many farmers do nothing but grow crops for the bio diesel production. A Friend of mine runs his car off salad oil which works just as good. You have to add some "normal" Diesel though in either case. Your engine greses a bit faster with these. And not every engine is able to run properly on Bio-Diesel (so some say)
By the way, when a car powered by bio diesel passes by, the fumes smell like french fries. I mean how cool is that!
Unfortunately even plant fuel isn't perfect
by
bluegreenone
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
One thing I discovered in my research about energy sources was that even "renewable" energies may not be as beneficial as they first seem. Using vegetable oil to fuel cars sounds great, right, all that energy coming from environmentally friendly plants?
But looking at how plants are grown, you find out that fertilizers and all those other chemicals needed for modern agriculture are PETRO-chemicals, meaning you still need oil to make them. And wherever I read this (wish I could remember) they had done a study and found that natural fuel economies actually used MORE oil than oil economies. Kind of like how electric cars still need to get their energy from somewhere, you are just pushing the pollutants farther upstream in the process.
Needless to say I found it depressing.
Turkey guts & other offal
by
sbjornda
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
(tried submitting it earlier but got rejected...)
I tried too with similar results. There's also a briefer on-line description here for those who don't want to look at the paper-based article in Discover - though it really is worth reading. It's worth stressing: The Thermal Depolymerization process can convert anything with a carbon atom into petroleum, safely. Even dioxins. This story should blow the heard-it-all-before "Greasel" story right out of the water. There's no justice on/.
.nosig
Re:Turkey guts & other offal
by
kfx
·
· Score: 3, Funny
While I meant computers, the thermal depolymerization process could indeed convert your average commuter into "38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water." Nothing like running your car on Soylent oil!
Re:I'm an asshole, and I'm proud of it.
by
hamanu
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
My friend, I come from a 3rd world country and I am probably 10 years older than you. I responded to you because out of the blue, for no reason you included a stupid, ignorant political statement where it had no reason for being.
The problem of starvation is not a problem of farming, it's a problem of economics. Lots of countries have crappy farmland, but aren't starving, take any mid-east oil producer as an example. The 3rd world economy isn't ruined by too many people; it's ruined by civil wars, and unstable government.
It must be nice to think you're mature and superior because you don't care about the value of human lives lost thousands of miles away, and like to point it out for no reason whatsoever.
BTW Darwinism doesn't apply in this case (since the people born in bad conditions are disadvantaged, not inferior), and you make yourself look like a jerk by bringing it up.
--
every _exit() is the same, but every clone() is different.
Wrong on 2 counts
by
DaveWhite99
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Wrong on 2 counts:
1) Natural gas, not oil, is used in making commercial fertilizer.
This is an important point from the USA's point of view, since the vast majority of our natural gas comes from domestic sources and Canada.
2) Most natural fuel does NOT use more (fossil) fuel than it produces (in natural fuel).
Corn-based ethanol is the evil fuel you're speaking of. It is indeed a huge energy sink. The only reason it exists is because of huge government subsidies. Biodiesel, on the other hand, is 78% solar-powered. That is, only 22% of the energy in virgin soybean oil-derived biodiesel comes from fossil fuels.
Also consider that animal waste (pig crap) based methanol can be used in place of natural gas, thus completely removing fossil fuels from the biodiesel equation. However, this is not going to happen until one or both of the following happen:
1) consumers demand environmentally-friendly fuel by refusing to use fossil fuels
and/or
2) the demand for oil exceeds the easily-extractable supply of oil, thus raising the economic costs of extracting fossil fuel high enough to where bio-fuels can compete
Of these two alternatives, (2) is the most likely. Already, biodiesel can purchased for a little over $2/gallon in bulk, state fuel taxes included. I give it another 10 years before the increasing world energy demand outstrips its soon-to-peak supply.
As for myself, I drive a 2002 VW New Beetle TDI, which is in stock form (no fuel mods) and is powered by biodiesel. While the biodiesel is more expensive than regular diesel, the fuel economy of my vehicle is high enough (50 mpg) that I still enjoy fuel savings when compared to my gasoline-powered brethren.
Slashdot Mirror
... but that was my retirement grease!
you could turn turkey guts and plastics into oil and oil products!
Does this look legit? I am always wary of this kind of stuff, but there's no obvious reasons to doubt it - it isn't making fantastic claims...
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Hmmm... which is more deadly now. The car or the fuel...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Haven't they been doing this in Wales or Ireland or something a while ago? I remember a BBC radio news item about police stopping and checking people's cars (it's illegal, you see).
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.
(directed at a Krusty Burger employee)
The grease on his forhead alone is worth a bounty!
If a tone of people start doing this they are going to find the veggie oil costs a HELL of a lot more than diesel. (Anyone ever price out biodiesel?)
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
And in other news today, McDonalds will be shipping its meat in special "pressmobiles" which will use the shipped product as its fuel - scientists predict heart disease in the U.S. will fall by 25% as a side effect of this new transportation method.
University of Victoria, in BC Canada, already had a Veggie Van fully operational. I think the diesel engine itself is unmodified, but they had a special filtering process so that they could use leftover McDonald's vegetable oil ...
.
Switching to grease? Finally, dogs will have a reason to chase your car.
Read the Faqs, one of the first questions says..
Did Greasel discover that diesel engines will run on cooking oil?
No. The first diesel engines (invented by Rudolf Diesel in the late 1800's) were actually designed to run on plant oils. Immediately after Rudolf's untimely demise, his colleagues (who were just then tapping the resources of petro-based fuel sources) swept his veggie ideas under the rug and actually converted his design to run on petro-based 'diesel' fuel (which they were nice enough to name after him).
Blarg
PS the puns on the greasel site are pretty lame...
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
That's not even necessary.
I worked at a McDonalds in high school (about 1991), and one of the maintenance guys had an old (even then!) mid-1970s VW Rabbi (someone chiselled off the T for the fun of it) which was running on used shortening.
Actually, the guy was bright and knew a lot about cars, though he had no formal education. He built a system into an old gas can which rested on a "hot plate" heated by engine coolant. McDonalds filters their oil every day, and on those days on the schedule when it was being replaced, he'd just run it through the McDonalds filtration pump and into the gas cans.
The shortening would thicken, but when he was driving, he'd wait until the engine was warm and the oil was liquid, then throw the valve over to run it off the shortening. The fuel line was a copper tube taped against the lengths of copper plumbing pipe carring the hot coolant to the "hot plate" in the cargo area of the hatchback. Running out of fuel was no big deal - when the engine started to sputter, he'd flip the valve back to diesel off his regular tank, then at the next stop, he'd swap the gas can sitting on the hot plate. The pickup tube was hacked into the cap of a gas can, so the car sucked the oil right out of the gas can.
Riding in that car with him from Ottawa to Toronto (for a Ramones concert) in the dead of winter, I found only two small problems. One, the interior of the car was damned hot because of the hot plate. Two... the car - and I mean *the whole car*, from interior to exhaust - smelled like Chicken McNuggets. Sometimes, Filet-O-Fish.
On the other hand, the fuel was free, it was filtered with McDonalds specially-designed oil-filtation equipment and never seemed to cause him a problem with fuel filters, and my 340-4bbl Duster was getting about 8 miles per gallon... so I envied the utility but declined his offer to trade for my Duster.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.This is true. Actually, the cost advantage isn't so great, when you figure that your time is worth something. Rather than scouting out restaurant dumpsters (which are pretty unpleasant places), you could be doing something more fun like getting fellatio or posting to Slashdot.
In his case, though, it was win-win since he was already gonna smell like McNuggets at the end of the day.
On the other hand, virgin vegetable oil could be a highly viable fuel. But the problem is that the very same people who jump up and down and scream about how nasty petroleum is, also jump up and down and scream about how nasty genetically modified corn and soy (which is the only way to make this economically viable) is. The best line I've ever heard came from a Greenpeace activist driving a sick little moped (blue clouds of poorly-tuned two-stroke, measurably more noxious than the exhaust from any well-tuned land-yacht SUV that he also complained about) screaming about how we can't feed cars while people are starving in Somalia. (If Somalis don't want to starve, they should have less children. Sorry, but it's not my problem.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
BioDiesel is a great idea, but there is a very good reason why it hasn't taken off. BioDisiel promoters are right about it being great for the environment, but no one is willing to develop it for production (even the very interested VW).
Reason, if BioDiesel were to challenge regular gasoline/petrol, it would require a lot of vegetables. While it is true that the U.S. is actually over-producing crops, and thus having to pay farmers not to grow crops. There still isn't enough plants to produce BioDiesel for everyone, even if all of those fields were fully cultivated.
Facts Canada produces 50 mil. tons of relevant crops, and it would only need 10 mil. tons to power a country of BioDiesel cars. However the rest of the world does not have the same grain surplus as Canada, most other countries are at a deficit, and purchase Canada's surplus. The US. production although higher, has smaller surplus levels, and greater demand for combustible products.
Sig Nazi- "No Sig for you, come back 1 year."
But looking at how plants are grown, you find out that fertilizers and all those other chemicals needed for modern agriculture are PETRO-chemicals, meaning you still need oil to make them. And wherever I read this (wish I could remember) they had done a study and found that natural fuel economies actually used MORE oil than oil economies. Kind of like how electric cars still need to get their energy from somewhere, you are just pushing the pollutants farther upstream in the process.
Needless to say I found it depressing.
.nosig
My friend, I come from a 3rd world country and I am probably 10 years older than you. I responded to you because out of the blue, for no reason you included a stupid, ignorant political statement where it had no reason for being.
The problem of starvation is not a problem of farming, it's a problem of economics. Lots of countries have crappy farmland, but aren't starving, take any mid-east oil producer as an example. The 3rd world economy isn't ruined by too many people; it's ruined by civil wars, and unstable government.
It must be nice to think you're mature and superior because you don't care about the value of human lives lost thousands of miles away, and like to point it out for no reason whatsoever.
BTW Darwinism doesn't apply in this case (since the people born in bad conditions are disadvantaged, not inferior), and you make yourself look like a jerk by bringing it up.
every _exit() is the same, but every clone() is different.
1) Natural gas, not oil, is used in making commercial fertilizer.
This is an important point from the USA's point of view, since the vast majority of our natural gas comes from domestic sources and Canada.
2) Most natural fuel does NOT use more (fossil) fuel than it produces (in natural fuel).
Corn-based ethanol is the evil fuel you're speaking of. It is indeed a huge energy sink. The only reason it exists is because of huge government subsidies. Biodiesel, on the other hand, is 78% solar-powered. That is, only 22% of the energy in virgin soybean oil-derived biodiesel comes from fossil fuels.
Also consider that animal waste (pig crap) based methanol can be used in place of natural gas, thus completely removing fossil fuels from the biodiesel equation. However, this is not going to happen until one or both of the following happen:
1) consumers demand environmentally-friendly fuel by refusing to use fossil fuels
and/or
2) the demand for oil exceeds the easily-extractable supply of oil, thus raising the economic costs of extracting fossil fuel high enough to where bio-fuels can compete
Of these two alternatives, (2) is the most likely. Already, biodiesel can purchased for a little over $2/gallon in bulk, state fuel taxes included. I give it another 10 years before the increasing world energy demand outstrips its soon-to-peak supply.
As for myself, I drive a 2002 VW New Beetle TDI, which is in stock form (no fuel mods) and is powered by biodiesel. While the biodiesel is more expensive than regular diesel, the fuel economy of my vehicle is high enough (50 mpg) that I still enjoy fuel savings when compared to my gasoline-powered brethren.
Here are some interesting links:
Biodiesel Now
Biodiesel
TDI Club
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI