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.
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.
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.
Switching to grease? Finally, dogs will have a reason to chase your car.
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 --
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...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Slashdot Mirror
... but that was my retirement grease!
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.
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.
.
Switching to grease? Finally, dogs will have a reason to chase your car.
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
--
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...
I'm on the board of directors for the GoBiodiesel Cooperative in Portland, Oregon.
...sodium methoxide (???). I can't recall what it will be, to be honest.
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
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.
Exocet Industries - Taking over the world, one computer at a
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.
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.
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.