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Brew Your Own Auto Fuel For 41 Cents A Gallon
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Damon Toal-Rossi of Iowa City, Iowa had enough of the high price of gasoline, so it didn't take too much for his friend to talk him into switching to biodiesel, an alternative fuel based on soy or vegetable oil. But after a few months of driving 10 miles to a biodiesel fuel station he decided it was time to start brewing his own. It didn't take him long to find a recipe for biodiesel, and with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant, he figures he's now getting 44 miles per gallon out of his diesel powered VW Golf and only paying 41 cents a gallon. According to the National Biodiesel Board the number of biodiesel stations in the US rose by 50% last year (to a whopping 200). The president of the American Soybean Association claims biodiesel has almost the same amount of energy as petroleum-based diesel, but cleans an engine's fuel injectors and cuts down on the number of required oil changes. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why diesel powered cars are making a comeback in the US."
a) Have a diesel car.
b) Have somebody who will give you free used oil.
Not all of us live nearby KFC :)
My next truck is going to have a diesel engine. Gasoline is simply too expensive. Diesel has always been less expensive with or without home-brewing it. My guess is that I'll be makign the purchase in two years or so.
What is your penile percentile?
I've heard it makes your car exhaust smell like french fries ... Not that there's anything wrong with that ...
Just think....
McDonalds could outfit all of their trucks with used French Fry Oil...and then evertime you saw one pass you'd smell that wonderful French Fry Aroma!
Seriously......They COULD do this!
Sounds like a fun project though. The warnings about the various poisons certainly got my attention.
sulli
RTFJ.
What is the amount of emission output on biodiesel?
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
See also the Grassolean folks featuring "Grease Grrrl", Daryl Hannah.
claims biodiesel has almost the same amount of energy as petroleum-based diesel, but cleans an engine's fuel injectors and cuts down on the number of required oil changes.
Have these people seen the crap-for-oil that comes out of most restaurants? That stuff is fully oxidized, saturated with carbon, mixed with salt, and diluted by water! How anyone could expect it to clean anything is beyond me.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Cars running on recycled vegtable oil? Reminds of an old episode of wings, where everybody was driving around with a CarBQ cooking food on the engine.
Don't be too surprised if you find a line on the 2004 state and federal tax return to declare the amount of fuel you brewed so that they can assess back road taxes.
There is not so much waste cooking oil, when compared with the fule consumed by Americas vehicle fleet. Lets not even discuss the enviormental horry that would be the result of trying to raise enough crops to produce vegtable oils for cars and trucks. There is simply nothing harder on the enviorment then the ag_industry.
cache
But it really can't be a solution for everybody, can it? First of all not everyone has access to a restaurant to get used cooking oil, and last I checked, cooking oil is more expensive at the grocery store than gasoline (I guess it depends on where you live).
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Biodiesel is cleaner in every respect except that it generates more NOx. NOx and particulates are the primary pollution problems with diesel engines in general, though the industry is making progress. Also, of course, the "free oil from the restaurant next door" solution won't scale, and will probably only last until some entrepreneur starts buying restaurant oil and reselling it to biodiesel manufacturers. That said, the fact that this closes the carbon loop is a huge win, not to mention the potential for energy independence.
Haven't some people brewing their own biodiesel been harassed by the authorities for not paying fuel tax? Or is that only people selling it?
with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant
Nifty, but if we all went out and did this, the price would skyrocket. Hell, if only all the people who read this story on Slashdot went out and did this, the price would skyrocket.
All this story says is, "If you get free stuff, you can make other cheap stuff out of it." Regrettably, we're not solving any energy problems by starting with "If you get free stuff..."
(It's great the guy did this and I respect the hack that this embodies. But people shouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from this. All the cooking oil I've used so far this year (and I don't order many fried foods from restaurants so that's the majority of "my" share of oil) wouldn't hardly get me out of the city.)
is that biodiesel gels at about 32 degress F. So, if you are parking your car outside in below-freezing temperatures, you have to mix it with petroleum diesel and/or add anti-gelling additives.
The first things that come to mind with this is getting rid of bi products. Initially when I saw this I thought they meant methane. Ala some type of waste, the right bacteria, and viala gobs and gobs of methane. For how onwers who have their own septic pits I dont see why this isn't viable. In addition many existing fleet vehicles are already configured to run on methane.
there are a couple links below.
http://www.viacorp.com/bio-gas.html
As soon as there's a demand, Mc D's or whoever will be selling this, too.
I'd switch, but my truck's almost paid off and I don't want to have to replace it. If our president would give me a $5,000 tax break to switch (instead of my boss a $30,000 tax break for driving an SUV, this is assinine) I'd switch.
Biodisel is a bad solution to the oil problems in america. Why? Because if 50% of cars on the road today had biodeisel, then the price would skyrocket. Why? Although McD's produces a ton of greaseburgers, there simply won't be enough used oil to produce enough fuel for everyone. Wish I had the link to the stats... I'll google around and give the link.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
because hybrids aren't as fuel efficient as people think. Diesels are and have been.
It was all related to the popularity of wrestler Kevin "Diesel" Nash, most recently seen in The Punisher as a gay Russian.
I believe VW is the only car company to sell diesel vehicles in the US for several years now. I've been the proud owner of a TDI (diesel) golf for a few years. I've been laughing lately at SUVs pulling in for their almost-daily $40 fill-up. Diesel, in my area anyway, is currently 10-20 cents cheaper than regular unleaded gas, and I get almost 50MPG!
I've thought about bio-diesel, but there is only one consumer station in the Denver area, and it is about 15 miles (and 30 minutes with rush-hour traffic) out of my way. I'm hoping more stations will open up as gas prices continue to climb. Otherwise, I might start making my own as-well.
Biodiesel has some issues (no wonder) from our current federal government. If you want to use it over the road they insist on getting their taxes. It is however TODAY a great fuel for the marine enviroment. At the top of the boats that find Biodiesel attractive are sail boats. Yes they have small diesel engines... and the diesel makes a mess of the bilge. I have found $.60/gal to be more inline with the production costs if the oil is free.
"However, Murad said that because diesels release higher amounts of nitrogen oxides, or NOxs, than gasoline cars, the E320 CDI cannot be sold in the five states with the most-stringent emissions standards, including the large markets of California and New York."
It might be cheaper for you, but anyone who's taken an econ 101 course can tell you that diesel is "cheaper", not cheaper.
"Not all of us live nearby KFC :)"
What do you mean 'live', buy one of their buckets and pour the gallon grease at the bottom right into your car.
I love the Colonial.
Does it take into account fuel taxes? As far as I know, even if you make your own fuel, you're still liable for paying the road use tax that is normally incorporated into the price at the pump.
Never knew vegetable oil could do that...
...plenty of times in the UK, where "gas" is now (GBP)1 per litre, or $1.83 per litre, or around $7 american for a gallon.
How much is regular gas in the US, and how much for diesel?
Though it seems that biodiesel is cheap compared to current gas prices, one thing to factor in is that making your own biodiesel has hidden costs. First off, not everyone will be able to get free used cooking oil (those who live in the country, for example...the time/biodiesel used to drive into town is something to consider). Beyond that, the preperation time for making biodiesel factors into the cost. Any time you spend making biodiesel is time when you could be working, and thus making money. One reason (and yes, I realize there are many others involved) that gas is expensive is due to the convienience. With a typical gas station, you drive up, pump your gas, pay for it, and leave. The gas has already been processed, transported, etc, which factors into the cost. So, though making your own biodiesel is a good way to save some money, you have to remember to balance convience and time into the equation, and determine if the savings are worthwhile.
with millions of people starving to death in the world, that we use food (soybeans, etc) to make fuel. It's really sad actually.
Nonsense. There is no shortage of food in the world: the reason people are starving is distribution issues. In most cases it's because their corrupt governments are siphoning off money from aid programs...
A neighbor of mine has been working on his biodiesel conversion project for quite a while. According to him, here in the US it's fairly difficult to find a consumer diesel vehicle that's (a) in good operational shape (never mind appearance) and (b) converts easily to using biodiesel. So while conversion projects sound cool, and I'm sure Mother Jones magazine proclaims they're the Second Coming, it may be better to get an auto manufacturer to build a vehicle specifically designed to consume biodiesel.
Of course this is anecdotal evidence, reported without actual knowledge or research on my part, and (wait for it!) YMMV.
I don't know about bio-diesel, but if I can get a car that runs on methane, I could drive for three days on $10 worth of Mexican food. The adapter between my digestive system and the car might be uncomfortable though...
Crushing my karma one post at a time.
Heck, you can drive for $.00 per gallon by buying a conversion kit from Greasecar. These kits allow you your diesel off of straight vegetable oil.
I remember reading about some kids from Vermont converting a bus and going cross country and just stopping at fast food places along the way.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
White Castle and Taco Bell to invest in joint biopower enterprise.
People are not starving because there is not enough food in the world, but because in too many places the distribution system is not very efficient, or is actively perverted by armies, dictators, and other autocrats. If we can find a way to use inexpensive, renewable plant matter to generate energy, it will ultimately improve the lives of people all over the world, especially in those places too poor to buy oil right noww.
A band-aid for your bleeding heart:
The millions of people starving to death in the world are starving as the result of a food distribution failure, not a lack of production.
There's enough food being produced to feed the world several times over. Lots of it rots in the field and in your suburban grocery store.
He better hire someone to start his car everyday. The oil companies won't put up with this.
Uh, yeah. God forbid we deprive the poor starving masses of their USED cooking oil.
the limiting factor of cost is basically the cost of methanol since that is a 20%bv reagent in the biodiesel trans-esterification reaction. non-industrial quantities can be quite expensive. Racing fuel is like $40/5 gal i think.
i am so very tired....
Actually, it is using used food (used vegetable oil) - so it's recycling. Also the $$ saved on oil could probably feed entire countries... and feed them more than just soy beans to boot!
Anyway, my next Golf will be a TDI.
we use food (soybeans, etc) to make fuel
Nonsense. They're free to eat all of the biodiesel they want.
If every gas-powered vehicle - and hell, my diesel burning furnace - ran on diesel tomorrow, would it even be feasible to produce that much biodiesel?
I mean I remember refining some vegetable oil to fire up the science teachers Golf as an expirement in high school. Pretty neat, but we used gallons of vegetable oil to wind up with a couple litres of fuel.
It seems to me we could clearcut every old growth and rainforest on earth, and still not have enough landmass to produce enough of this fuel.
I've also heard it's proponents spewing absolute bullshit. I believe it was Darryl Hannah (or some other washed-up 70s pinup) I saw on TV spouting off about her biodiesel powered car.
When she claimed it produced "no toxic emissions" I scoffed, when she said it produced no carbon dioxide, I just switched the channel.
You're still burning hydrocarbons, after all. Just not ones that have been in the ground a million years.
I don't pretend to have studied it, I have no idea how much oil an acre of corn/soy yields in a season. It doesn't seem feasible to me, else the farming lobby, who have the political and economic clout to CRUSH OPEC, would have done so by now.
How much does this guys 41 cents/gallon really cost if you dont get the oil for free?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
However, a quick report I found shows that there may even be a slight shift in the US market towards diesel. While it's interesting to say the least, I think it's due to the fact that since the US is in a SUV/Truck frenzy right now, the demand for bigger, more fuel efficient vehicles is very high.
Hmmm.
I read somewhere that growing hemp could cut down on deforestation because it can be used as a paper fibre, and that oil can also be extracted from it, like soy.
So why not hemp-oil for cars?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
You can't expect much if you live in moderate climates, bio-diesel isn't friendly whenever it dips beneath freezing. You can mix it with regular diesel at that point or kerosene, but that defeats the purpose IMO.
Yeah, now that Mercedes has released it's new E Class with a CDI diesel engine you can have your cake and eat it too. Luxury, performance and fuel economy. With 369 lbft. of torque at 1,800 rpm it probably has better than average acceleration for a 4,000 pound car. Even if you don't use biodiesel this is a great fuel saver for luxury car buyers with 37 mpg highway and in the high twenties in the city.
l as s/100359251/roadtestarticle.html?articleId=101837
http://www.edmunds.com/new/2004/mercedesbenz/ec
And you know what they use to control emissions in the US market with higher sulpher content fuels. A urea injection system... That's right... Urea is sprayed into the mix with fuel and air.
It says that there's pending legislation to give users of biodiesel a tax-credit. Is home-made bio-diesel subject to tax over there? Because it is here.
While hunger is a problem that needs to be solved, this comment is like saying it's sad that we use water to shower with because many people don't have clean drinking water.
I'd heard that "gasahol" (as they called it in the 80s), the corn-based (ethanol?) fuel additive, while a nice use for this nation's massive corn surplus, isn't actually very energy efficient as more energy is used to plant, grow, and harvest the corn as is reaped from the corn itself as a fuel source..
Would biodeisel scale up in an energy efficient way? Does it supply more energy than it costs to generate? (I don't mean this in a breaking the third law of thermodynamics way, I mean this in an economic sense)
The state that could arguably use this interesting story the most will be shut out in another year. CARB has effectively outlawed diesel cars here, due to the higher amounts of NOx and particulates emitted from diesels over gas burners. So actually while this story seems green-natured, California would disagree despite obvious benefits. Are emissions the same coming from biodiesel as petroleum? If so, or they're actually worse, this doesn't seem to have long term viability.
Instead of trucking jugs of smelly vegetable oil around town to your biodiesel production facility (which btw is probally in violation of your local zoning ordinances)... start "farming".
Get some low-maintenance animals like sheep or goats, however many your state says you need to become a "farm". Then buy conventional diesel or home heating oil at "farm" rates, which are free of most exise and sales taxes.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I am an alumi of Humboldt State University, the area is known for its hippies and agricultural exports (cough). On campus we had the Campus Center for Appropriate Technology (CCAT). CCAT is completely off the power grid and supports most any form of recycling, and green energy. CCAT gives demonstrations on how to create biodiesel, I believe they even have an old diesel Mercedes running off the stuff.
e l/frames.htm l
CCAT's website includes a recipe for biodiesel:
http://www.humboldt.edu/~ccat/biodies
I've been told that most of the public trasportation in Berkeley, CA runs off of biodiesel (?).
There is a finite number of places one can obtain large amounts of cooking oil. While at the moment, it may be quite easy to talk a manager at a local KFC into letting you cart off for free what they would have to pay to dispose of, the problem arises that there will not be such widespread availability of waste oil as the popularity of home-brewed biodiesel takes off.
I can easily picture fierce competition over whom is allowed to get the oil from KFC this week, etc.
When it comes to growing crops to manufacture biodiesel, you have to ask how much energy will be expended planting, harvesting, commercially refining and transporting the finished product. Will it be viable?
They will be LIVID to not be getting their 50-60+ cents per gallon "cut" ;)
Hell hath no fury like government that sees something it isn't taxing (ie: getting it's "cut").
Corporatism != Free Market
1) I'm pretty sure the reason people don't have enough food isn't that there's not enough to go around and 2)it's not foolish if you use waste oil (from, say, a deep fryer at a fast food restaurant) as your starting point. And it smells better, too.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Support your nation's independence! Every american should eat at McDonald's once a day to guarantee our energy independence through vegetable oil!
Yeah, I have a problem. You may have fat chicks chasing down your car.
I know it's not PC to say that but oh well.
Evolution or ID?
Given your description of restaurant oil, and how nasty it may be on a car's engine, I take it you never eat in those establishments.
Mercedes diesels release higher amounts of nitrogen oxides, or NOxs, than gasoline cars, the E320 CDI cannot be sold in the five states with the most-stringent emissions standards, including the large markets of California and New York.
Urea is injected into the exhaust from the engine... oops.
Isn't there plenty of food, just no distribution?
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
That doesn't count if you are GIVEN the raw materials..
True, biodiesel is potentially a great thing to reduce reliance on overseas oil, but this guy is NOT a good example to use.
In this case it would be no different if I was given potato scraps and made alcohol out of it for my regular fueled vehicle.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You saw Kentucky Fried Movie too, eh?
But Mr Cheney has not severed his links with Halliburton. Last year, he received $178,437 in deferred compensation from the company.
what a shoddy piece of journalism. His deferred compensation was coming no matter what.
Cheney left haliburton's board of directors when tapped for vice president. However, in terminating his contract with the board, he was entitled to severance. he chose to take it over four years instead of all at once for tax reasons. to imply that he 'made' $178,000 last year is incorrect. he had already earned it but took the deferred compensation. He would have got it no matter who got that contact.
ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does, or another company that would take the work. Government work has half the margins of private sector work, its slum and the companies that take it suck. (raytheon is still a bad investment. and no one else makes the exact same missles they do.)
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
These have been around for years. Problem is that for those of us in the US there aren't alot of diesel engines available. I also question whether new high tech diesels, which often require more and more expensive fuel, will run decently on this used frying oil. Only VW currently sells a diesl passenger car in the US. Other than the Golf Rabbit, your choices for a used car aren't very good either. You may be able to find an old Mercedes or Olds Diesel, but there aren't many of those around anymore.
Kicker is it is only 44 cents a gallon if the oil is free (ie waste oil or maybe you grow your own corn or soy beans). Still a great idea, but just wait the Fed will get involved cause this guy isn't paying his per gallon road tax.
in the uk it is illegal to use , make or sell or give away biodiesel. as there is a huge amount of tax levy on fuel in the uk. they accuse you of tax dodging!!!
not paying tax on something you made or got for free!
Be careful with the ingredients as these are dangerous chemicals.
The alchohol and sodium hydroxide needed to crack the hydrocarbon chains creates sodium methoxide that is toxic to your nervous system.
You probably should wear gloves, wear a respirator, and not get the stuff on your skin.
You are also still responsible for ~$.50 per gallon fuel tax (depending on where you live) that you would normally pay at the pump.
Silpon Designs
Scented Paper Products
At least fast food restaurants can now claim that their grease is good for something other then heart attacks.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Uuh. We need this here. To fill up my small European car is about 35-40 Euros. That's around USD 45-50. Diesel is marginally cheaper. Oh and that's Ireland. The other European countries have even higher taxes on gas.
(But the thing is: it gets you do drive less or to use fuels that don't hurt the environment. What about this bio-diesel? Same pollution?)
i wonder what that is ?, then a farmer (or large land owner) could work out their yearly fuel usage and grow sufficient grops to fuel not only the machinery to cultivate it but harvest his usual food crops (or whatever else farmers do)
or is the ratio too high so that you would need 100's of miles of land for a single tractor
I just ate so this sounds really gross, but yea, the highways of tomorrow may well be polluted with the subliminal aroma of fries.
but then again, the oil would normally be used in makeup so maybe this future has already greeted us:-(
Could this explain the theft of over 5,000 pounds of used cooking oil in Oklahoma last month?
Correct me if I'm wrong, and I very possibly could be, but the whole push towards unleaded gas in the US was a function of clean air/water environmentalists wanting a fuel with less (theoretical) environmental impact.
Of course, they didn't just ask nicely, but rather they pushed congress to pretty much force US car manufacturers to stop producing Diesel engines. After the demand fell off, so did the supply, and the number of stations that even offered diesel, hence the high prices.
Of course, should I be wrong, I anticipate the correction already brewing from some slashdotter.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
Rising Fuel Prices: Biodiesel Cars
Pollution: Biodiesel Car
Foreign Aid: Biodiesel Car (Who can make soybeans better then america)
Pollution from Fast food: Recycling oil for Biodiesel
Economy: More people will be stopping at fast food places to get Ingredients for biodiesel.
Obesity: Modify your cars to lipo your gut to make biodiesel while driving. (Plus the extra gut will form from stopping at all the fast food joints)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I can just imagine the Nader-fans heads exploding right about now.
Get cheap enviro-friendly gas, encourage evil corporate McDonalds to sell more fries.
Wow, if that's not a Greenie's nightmare dilemma, I don't know what is.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
First, the amount of land required to grow enough oil for all the cars currently operating has been estimated to be about the same amount of land contained in the continental US, and I believe there are a couple of other uses people had in mind for that land too. I've seen similar estimates for the UK fleet vs. UK landmass.
Second, our current style of agri-business uses large quantities of fossil fuels in the production of crops. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pestidcides are all produced using fossil fuels, and actually require more than a gallon of oil input to generate a gallon of vegetable oil. This isn't really a problem if you're using oil that was already purchased by McDonalds since the oil would have been produced and consumed anyway, but producing biodiesel as the primary aim of the operation is simply counter-productive. Unless you're buying organic biodiesel, and let's face it, there's only so much manure to go around.
Delivering militantly anti-commercial music to all two people who care!
The IRS can kiss my greasy ass if they think I'll declare this.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Some (not all) of the costs to keep the public road system going comes from taxes on fuel at the pump, be it diesel or gas. They get rolled into the general fund to pay for road construction, maintenance, police, fire, EMT, etc.
Those costs do not change, no matter what the power source. Accept the fact that other fees (taxes) will rise elsewhere to compensate.
The ONLY thing saved is purchasing foreign oil. Which is not a bad thing. But don't kid yourself that it will be cheap for all, forever.
Remember that while the addage, "if everyone drove these cars, the price of these cars fuel would skyrocket" is true, it ignorse the fact that by having easily substitable goods, you change the price elasticity of demand. Coke and Pepsi share similar prices because Coke knows that if they double their prices, people will just buy Pepsi.
:)
So while there might be a bit of an increase in the price of diesel or biodiesel, the price of gasoline would be affected as well because we would consume less of it. The more alternatives you have for an activity, the more in touch with reality their pricing is. Take CDs -- their pricing should be dropping because DVDs and video games are (bang for the buck) much more effective. However, because the RIAA is ignorant, they're trying to use price fixing. Naturally, this isn't working as the price elasticity for that good has been increasing in the past few years
Every time there is another way to solve a problem, we all benefit.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I've heard of rice-burners, but now soysauce cars?
(Okay, that was too obvious and probably could have been said in a much funnier way... mod +1 stupid)
This is a good start to reducing U.S. dependence on imported oil and as one poster commented, closing the carbon loop. But I suspect the way this will pan out is as follows.
Somewhere along the way biodiesel will be a money making concern, then bar the door 'cause here comes Big Oil! Those guys aren't stupid, they know there are only a few more decades of petroleum coming out of the middle east, then game over. So I'm sure they're looking for ways to stay in business, biodiesel may be a way.
It'll be easier to get people to convert because it doesn't require them to do anything different other than abandoning gasoline engines for diesel over time. And don't worry, the auto companies want to stay in business too, so they'll play ball. The real concern is what things like this will do to the price and availability of food, but given that biodiesel comes from stuff we'd normally discard, the effect may not be much. And of course we still have emissions to contend with, but at least this is a way to get people to use solar energy, so to speak.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Wouldn't it be great if we could pay our farmers to grow crops (Hemp)
as opposed to paying them not to grow crops. Bio-diesel could revolutionize american agriculture, reduce our dependance on outside oils.
On the down side, will the infrastructure changes be cost effective? With Hydrogen Fuel Cells turning the corner, the possibility of making our energy from water and using it across the boards (Homes, Cars, Shipping, ect.) might level the playing field a little and let the good parts of this whole free market shine through.
[obligitory] "Man you wanna go toke up on that BMW? Thants some goooood fuel"
"It's all just meme meme around here"
Check it out:i esel.h tml
http://transit.metrokc.gov/am/vehicles/hy-d
Usually, gas where I live (Maryland) hovers around $1.75 per gallon, although in the past few weeks (I don't know when it started as I was at school) it has "skyrocketed" to $2/gallon. According to a story I heard on NPR yesterday (American equivalent of BBC radio, sort of), prices in California are as high as $2.35 a gallon. I don't know about diesel as almost no one drives them.
That's only true for the most current engines, starting about 5-10 years ago with Volkswagen. Others might need some modifications
I think the journalist has every right to call Cheney on his salary. This is something he should have considered before he took compensation in the way that he has. Its just a side effect of his tax evasion scheme. A decision he should live with.
He should have cut his ties and acccepted a lump sum considering his new job and all.
Smells like Freedom Fries?
All froggy words are Forbidden by Bush!
How else to explain Groundskeeper Willie's despairing cry when he realises that Homer and Bart have siphoned away the school's frying grease...
Da Blog
I have lost count of the number of people powering that WV engine by fry oil. It so simple as to be a non branner.
Have seen and read this every time the pice of fuel jump enough to grab a head line. Its nothing new.
That's WILLY'S grease!!
No, not really. It has more to do with skyrocketing gasoline costs and the fact that TDI technology is miles above the old diesels. It's quieter, more efficient, more powerful, the blocks are lighter thanks to superior materials, and TDI isn't nearly as sensitive to the cold- it doesn't even need the glowplugs above 40 or so degrees. The glowplug system is tied into the central locking, so when you approach the car and unlock the doors, it figures out if it's cold enough to need the glowplugs and starts warming them; as a result, the car's ready to go before you are, most of the time. Diesel is also much more prevalent now that there are a lot more diesels in pickups, vans, etc used by small businesses and non-fleet operators.
That addresses many of the concerns the public had about diesel- hard to find fuel, noisy, heavy, and a bitch in the cold.
A lot of people get hybrids wrong too, thinking it's all the hippies buying them. Dealers say that was true initially, now it's just regular commuters who want the most efficient car. Biodiesel is a boutique fuel aside from use in fleets in 2% mixes to replace sulfur in low-sulfur fuels.
Please help metamoderate.
Instead of paying farmers to not grow crops due to low prices, we should instead get them to grow soy or other crops which produce biodisel. There will always be a demand or fuel for cars.
I have a VW Jetta Wagon TDI and a F250 Powerstroke
both have run about 50,000 miles on BD
no problems , in a weekend I can pickup and convert
300 gals of oil to BD , I have a 300 gal tank on a trailer and out of that you get about 90-95% of that as fuel and with BD do not not have to change anything on a diesel to use it. I use about 50-70 gal a week , I do not have a problem finding that much oil to convert
You can run a diesel car on home heating oil too, but you are evadeing the fuel tax.
The per gallon Federal Motor Fuel Excise Tax is 18.4 cents on gasoline, 13.6 cents on LPG, 24.4 cents on diesel fuel, 13.0 cents on gasohol, 19.4 cents on aviation gas, and 4.4 cents on jet fuel. These monies go to the Federal Highway Trust Fund.
The by-state fuel tax averages 22 cents a gallon for gasoline, I am too lazy to find a diesel link.
Google for federal fuel tax and state fuel tax for more info.
Here is one of many links for the actual prices of fuels, before the tax.
The biggest savings these people are experiencing is from avoiding road taxes, which are a major part of the price of commercial gasoline or diesel. Right now the "underground" biodiesel movement exists in a gray area. There are too few people for the authorities to bother cracking down on, but if enough people start doing it they will. Right now, untaxed diesel for off-road use in boats and industrial/farm equipment is dyed red. If you're caught with "red" diesel in your car or truck, you'll have to pay huge fines. The dye is stubborn, too -- once it's in there, it stays for many, many tanksful.
Sooner or later there's going to be a crackdown. Making your own biodiesel may soon be illegal, for all practical purposes -- either explicitly, or through red tape that's too hard to deal with. You're either going to have to add red dye, prove that you're paying road taxes, or something.
Personally, I think the best way for the government to spur development of alternative fuel infrastructure is to offer a road tax holiday for alternative fuel users -- say 5 years or so. Let this apply to all biodiesel, CNG, hydrogen, ethanol, and electric vehicles.
1 US gallon = 3.7854118 liter
... Mod me whatever you want.. but this is reality!
Where I come fra we pay like $1,5 pr liter and we don't complain. What is it with you americans and free oil??
No wonder your villige idiot you have selected for president is declaring war against the rest of the world (those who are weak and have some oil)...
Please, US citizens.. wake up and stop killing our lovely planet.. At some point there is no way back and then it will bee too late.. (and US again go to war for clean air/food/water etc)
With the amazing fuel economy of the Golf TDI you could drive really far into the middle of nowhere on one tank of biodiesel and still have enough left to siphon off for the tow truck you'll need to get back to a repair shop.
--- What?
.... with millions of people starving to death in the world, that we use food (soybeans, etc) to make fuel. It's really sad actually.
Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen argues that there has never been a famine in a working democracy. This leads to the conclusion that famines are ultimately political in nature. There's always a warlord blocking food convoys, or a landlord exacting rent right off the dinner table. Or there may be plenty of food, but the sociopolitical environment does not provide the means for a person to acquire the food.
I remember seeing footing of the great depression, in which dairy farmers dumped huge vats of milk on the ground. The problem was that they weren't getting paid enough for their milk to live on, so in protest they just dumped the milk. Perhaps they were trying to raise the price by limiting supply. In either case, if people went without milk, it wasn't because there wasn't enough milk, it was because of political and economic factors that prevented the distribution of milk to those who needed it.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
In other words: People buy grease and oil already. I worked at a fast-food place 15 years ago, and every week, the grease truck cam by. Why isn't this fast-food joint already making money off of their oil, and why do they give it away for free?
I believe that much of the attraction of a plant-based fuel is that we can keep making more of it. Petroleum reserves are a large, but finite, resource. Oil-bearing plants of one type or another can be grown in many parts of the world, so there is less of a geographical monopoly on the resource. I'm not terribly fond of tofu, but perhaps I can trick my car into ingesting it...
Would you rather that your hard earned dollars go to Poor North American Farmers or Wealthy Arab Kings! ...
Ok, so it wouldn't go to farmers either since they have been all bought out by the big Agri-Business companies anyway, but at least it wouldn't go to some Sultan. They've gotten enough of our hard earned money.
Either way Bio-diesel is at least a renewable resource. We can't just grow more crude oil.
Yep! It's like fish heads. Right now you can find fish heads for free if you ask around to various local groceries. As soon as all those outsourced IT workers realize that for the same price as ramen, they could be eating ramen with fish heads, that market will dry up faster than a dead coyote in death valley.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
1) No, the reason why people don't have enough food is because the distrabution system wastes is and the large international agribiz companies don't allow it (there isn't enough profit in feeding the world)
2) Since Monsanto and the others have already legalized massive monoculture genetically modified food-stuffs and are over producing in such mass quantities as to require governmental price regulation (see as proof to reply 1 above), it make sense to just let them use this over abundance to make fuel too. I mean, we're already screwed anyway right.
But anyway. Drive a TDI, they're fun.
True, diesel may be making a comeback in the U.S., but not so in California (unless you count pickup trucks).
I was in the market for a new car a few months ago and (after renting one in Germany) was very interested in a Volkswagen Jetta. I saw the Volkswagen offered a TDI (turbo-diesel injection) model which had more horsepower, better gas-mileage and lower emissions than the standard unleaded gasoline engine. However, for some unknown reason, the TDI model is not approved for sale or import into California,
Upon further research, I've found some BMW and Mercedes-Benz models that offer diesel engines (also with lower emissions and better mileage than their unleaded counterparts) that are available for sale in the U.S., but not in California.
It strikes me as very odd that in a state as liberal and environmentally minded as California, a lower emission engine isn't available in these cars. My guess is that some old-timer remembers the diesels that belched black smoke all day and doesn't realize how many advances have been made in diesel engines.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does
Well, I suppose i can't...but that is largely because when Cheney took over at Haliburton, he cornered the market in certain areas (like Boots and Coots, who are controlled by Kellog and Brown, who is owned by halliburton). He then began lobbying the Clinton administration to go back to Iraq. Strangely enough, that lobbying took a precipitous tumble when he took office. They even note that no one else could implement the fire control plan on time but Halliburton, since it was Halliburton who wrote the plan. So to say that no else does what they do may be true, but it isn't the entire truth.
Like they say, its like bikinis, what they reveal is suggestive but what they hide is essential.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
it seems like an improvement, but it contributes in different, sometimes worse ways to degredation of the environment.
in particular, the soot that is ejected from a diesel engine is now known to be far more damaging for the environment (and particularly for people directly). it's actually even worse as the soot particles are reduced in size (and become small enough to enter the blood stream.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I'd say quite a few /.-ers wouldn't mind fat chicks.
The Raven
Since soypower seemed to be a potential source for biased information skimmed the EPA report available at http://www.epa.gov/otaq/models/biodsl.htm and the numbers matched as far as I could tell.
Note that all other emissions were reduced from the levels present in conventional diesel.
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
Now I can buy a hummer!!
www.lonseidman.com
Actually, every time we discuss biofuel I like to remind everyone that in Brazil every gas station sells Hidrated Alcohol (that comes from sugar cane). It was once the Brazilian answer to the oil crisis, but nowadays only about 5% of our fleet runs on alcohol (Ethilic Alcohol, or if you will, the same kind that you will find in our beloved cachaça/caipirinha).
Government work has half the margins of private sector work, its slum and the companies that take it suck.
Riiight, except if you win a no-bid contract like Halliburton did, and then ream the goverment at every chance you get.
AccountKiller
The VWs might be faggy hippie cars. But my pickup ain't. Its what my friends call my 'big dyke truck'.
Besides the deferred salary, he also posesses 433,000 halliburton stock options. Look up the details on google... For the lazy, look here for a somewhat outdated article: http://money.cnn.com/2003/09/25/news/companies/che ney/?cnn=yes
"I put my hands up to the offence and the car was towed away. They said Customs would be notified."
Police target 'cooking oil cars'
Because the cost of even fuel grade vegetable oil is too much.
Take a gallon of oil from the store, add the refining cost (his $0.41) it is more than conventional diesel at the pumps.
Of course if the price of oil goes higher, then this becomes competative, which is exactly why OPEC doesn't want the price to be too high, people will seek out alternatives.
Thanks for spelling that properly.
So many times I see it spelled as "Your an idiot". The irony is thick, but lost on those that can't tell the difference.
What it Means to be a Modern Troll:
You have to believe that wasting other people's time is not a waste of your own time.
You have to believe that if you just click reload fast enough and get first post privilages, you'll somehow do something useful.
eh fuck it.
You just have to be an asshole.
<a href="http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:J7Eilbc _t00J:journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_mike.html+a+r ecipe+for+biodiesel++journeytoforever&hl=en&lr=lan g_en"> Obligatory link</a>
A modern catalytic converter can take care of most chemicals, a good filter can help the soot.
The problem is that todays fuels have too much sulfur, I don't think vegetable oil is a high sulfur fuel. Maybe this will help.
ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does
Schlumberger. I'll take my ten points, please.
This scenario isn't very viable now, is it?
It's 44 cents a gallon because this fellow currently doesn't pay the restaurant for the used cooking grease. There is not a financial incentive to start charging the few people who actually have the motivation to make their own diesel fuel. Long before this really became viable, don't you think people will start charging the the formerly useless goop?
So this kind of invalidates its viability. Sure its neat, and eco-friendly, but use that, don't go on about its cost-efficiency.
I do think that BioDiesel in general is a definate possibility to some of the energy problems of this country if you consider a few points:
1. most public transit already is on a diesel infrastructure.
2. many parts of our arable farmland in the Continental US is NOT growing anything because there is a glut of stuff like feed-corn, soybeans, and other oil producing plants.
3. lots of vegetable crop farmers here in the US are in the poor house.
4. if you look at a previous slashdot article, ethanol aka ethyl alchohol from cellulose is now a possiblity. (neccessary ingredient for making biodiesel) so you can use the whole plant not just the seed in growing fuel.
5. A significant amount of residential home heating here in the Northeast runs on home heating oil which is close enough to diesel, that I don't think the furnace will care
Honestly, I wouldn't mind that SOME of the money going to power our economy would go back to our farmers here in the US.
The pour point of the oils used in donut frying is much higher, and makes it far less suitlble for biodiesel, unless you live somewhere that winter temps are in the 80s-90s...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Obviously, there is a strong economic incentive to ignore those study results and to not fund studies that look at the health problems of diesel.
The local grease frier as a source of fuel is nice, but grease fried food is not a solution.
MAJOR AIR TOXICS STUDY FINDS VEHICLES DOMINATE CANCER RISK
AQMD found that that diesel soot accounted for 71% of the cancer risk, 1,3 butadiene (a byproduct of incomplete combustion in engines) 8% of the risk, benzene (mostly from motor vehicles) 7%, carbonyls (including formaldehyde and acetaldehydes from both mobile and stationary sources) 3%, and other pollutants (primarily from stationary sources) 11%.
The interesting question is how much of the energy in bio-based fuels comes from solar energy and how much from fertilizers which themselves require energy input to produce. And how efficiently are the energy inputs used. If one is considering bio-fuel at an industrial level, these are far more important considerations than how much the local restaurant next door is charging for grease.
I seem to recall the same very thing being an article / feature on the BBC's Top Gear motoring show. Strained through a cloth and 3% turpentine or some such. Still liable for Duty under UK law too.
/ ai r_car/01/
Another I found; MDI's air powered engine! (Obviously another roaring success as the date is 2002)
http://www.topgear.com/content/features/stories
Biodiesel is real big here in germany, but what people forget is that it is also a wicked good solvent. If it's a VW OK, but a mercedes (and probably some other brands) would suffer damage. All hoses and seals have to be made of silicone, rubber is damaged by biodiesel. BTW for those that are interested (and like me didn't rtfa) biodiesel is fatty acid methyl ester. In germany it is sometimes refered to as FSME (FettSäure-MethylEster).
Only 0.41?
I'd gladly pay $1.50/gallon for this stuff!
What a markup for these biodiesel guys!
I read that in order to supply the US with Biodiesel you need an area larger that the US growing Soy (or whatever you use for Biodiesel). So unless new cars have way better mileage, we are still facing the same problem.
(The same BTW is true for Solarcells and Windenergy, with the current energy consumption there is simply not enough room in the western countries to supply all the energy).
It helps, though. Especially because BioDiesel necessarily uses the same amount of CO2 that it sets free when burned, so it wouldn't contribute to the greenhouse effect.
Computer sciences (gov consulting), Schlumberger (oil services different I realize). It all depends on how close you want it to be (Is sun or IBM a good match for MS?-Both make OSs but I doubt most users of Solaris or AIX would be happy swapping with a Windows install or viseversa). Neither of the companies I mentioned are as close a match as IBM and MS, but I still want my 10 points.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Diesel engines don't meet the emissions requirements for automobiles.
This is because the regulations are tailored to modern gas engines not diesel engines.
You get higher mileage out of a diesel engine, so it is still a better proposition. Apart from the particulates, that is.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I want to believe.
Maybe I'm a stickler for such things, but it seems a little weird that this post doesn't make it clear that it is just a paraphrase of this article on Wired News. On the face of it, it would look like Iphtashu Fitz was posting info he drew from several sources, rather than lifting them all from a single work by someone else.
I'll grant, if you follow the links the truth will be obvious, but I imagine the author of the Wired
News piece wouldn't mind getting a bit more explicit credit.
... but maybe algae does...
Simple Unexpected Concrete Credible Emotional Stories
It is free because no one else is competing with you for that resource. As soon as someone else walks into that restaurant and tells the manager that they will pay them one cent per gallon for the used oil let's see how far you get with your "I will pay you nothing because you already used the oil" argument.
Additionally, it is not a renewable resource. When you burn the biodiesel it is gone. There will be no more of it raining down from the sky (where you sent the soot particles and NOx, thanks a lot...) It may come from a plant, but that plant was sown using a large machine, it was grown using water pumped by a machine, it was harvested using a machine, and it was processed into oil using another set of machines. None of those machines runs on sunlight or good intentions. Strangely enough, biodiesel seems to be embraced by the "let's run our cars on hemp-oil" crowd but I have yet to read a story about a farmer running his diesel tractor on biodiesel. Closing the open energy loop in the production process would be the first step towards making this a green fuel, so why are we not reading stories about how biodiesel stations are popping up all over the midwest and plains states where the precursors to this fuel are actually harvested?
E-Mail Revives Calls to Probe Halliburton, Cheney
Severance ? I thought he quit
...I work at a gas station. $2.59/gallon is excellent for me! I ride my bike to work. Suckers!
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Bechtel
Very good point. Here's an example to help people understand this - because of NAFTA, some Mexican farmers may starve. Read this for details. Now if the people who grow the food can starve it really doesn't make the non-nutritive use of food seem like such a waste.
How about looking at it, instead, as allowing subsistance farmers to be able to produce their own fuel to power a pick up truck they can use to power farm implements and transport their produce?
Where in Denver is a bio-diesel station? I live in Denver and don't have a diesel myself (though my car does get pretty good milage), but a friend has a VM and he might consider it if it's closer (Westminster area).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Some used cooking oil does get filtered and shipped abroad for use in food products. But most places I know (including mcd, bk, kfc etc) still have to arrange to have it hauled off and the best they can manage so far is to break even.
Here is a nice little experiment for you: Next time you go to the gas station check the price of gas and then compare it to the price of a bottle of water. I have so far tried this at several gas stations and have concluded that bottled water per galon is ATLEAST twice as expensive as gasoline(87 octane). When are peope going to look for "alternate" hydration methods besides water!
Creative Demolition
If you heat the stuff up to lower its viscosity, you can run your diesel on straight vegetable oil.
I have an '82 benz that I have converted to run on straight vegetable oil - once the engine is heated up (using regular diesel) you can run on pure vegetable oil. Making biodiesel like this guy is requires making "methoxide" (lye and methanol - no thanks!).
There is tons of information about how to do this. Of course, it doesn't scale - no way could this provide power for the nation, but in the meantime, I get free fuel from a local restaurant.
BTW this car is for sale, since I am moving and going back to school - I won't be needing a car. If anyone wants a dual-fuel WVO converted '82 300D Turbo and is willing to pick it up from Ohio, the first $1500 gets it. E-mail me if you want more details. The car is solid.
+++ ATH0 +++
Posted by michael on Tuesday May 25, @06:07PM
m l
from the oilent-green dept.
Ravalox writes "With alternate fuel becoming a fairly hot trend in recent months, some academics may have applied their theoretical know-how to give us a practical solution. They offer up the idea that certain types of algae are well-suited to biodiesel production as they are nearly 50 percent oil. The article speculates that large pools could be created to farm out biodiesel from algae in areas near waste streams and salt water. They postulate that to replace our fossil fuel usage it would take only a total of a little over ten thousand square miles, which could fit in an area like [less than 10% of] the Sonora Desert."
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.ht
http://ww2.green-trust.org:8383/biodiesel.htm
A few weeks ago, a service station in Chelsea was 1.09 per litre.
At the moment there's one in Blackpool that's even more than that, and people are paying so he won't lower his prices.
It's getting really, really silly. My daily commute costs me 5 in petrol alone!
Bechtel.
Less snarkily:
Washington Group International
Transportation and Logistics Directory
Commercial Contractors Directory
There are hundreds of such companies in the U.S. alone. The government didn't bid these contracts - they awarded them without competition. Normally, government bids are extremely competitive because of large numbers of companies. Raytheon is a false analogy - missiles are not the same as civil engineering and logistics. Far more companies are available to provide the latter.
Au contraire. In many, many fields private sector margins have been cut to the bone since 1990 as competition resulted in efficiency, process redesign, downsizing, and mergers.
What government contracts offer is steady guarantees, with reasonable margins, which is why they are so desperately competed for by many companies.
However, the deals Halliburton and Bechtel have in Iraq are nearly unprecedented. They are cost-plus deals. Meaning, Halliburton tells the army how much they spent
The private sector figured out a hundred years the obvious reasons why this doesn't work: your contractor now has incentive to screw you. They get rewarded for sloppy performance and procrastination, or even outright conscious delay. And human nature is what it is.
This is why private sector contracts - and better goverment contracts - bid for a set price and deadline. Now it becomes the contractor's job to figure out how to make a profit by getting the work done under the cost cap.
The cost-plus no-bid deals handed out for Iraq are unheard of in the business world, because it's a stupid, stupid way to do business, from a purely economic perspective. But, the nature of politics today seems to make it impossible to even discuss these things without getting called a "commie librul". You know the world's screwed up when smart business sense = communist liberalism.
Another suggestion of a "company that would take the work"... try the Army. Until a few years ago, they provided almost all of their own logistics. It's not at all clear that it's cheaper to do it with private companies.
It also means the military now depends on civilian companies that can and will cut and run if the security situation gets too bad
Imagine how fast Halliburton would be gone if some terrorist DID set off a stolen nuke in Iraq, killing 1000 of their employees. But nuke or no nuke, someone's got to feed our troops. This is why Army logistics should stay in the Army.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
It strikes me as very odd that in a state as liberal and environmentally minded as California, a lower emission engine isn't available in these cars. My guess is that some old-timer remembers the diesels that belched black smoke all day and doesn't realize how many advances have been made in diesel engines.
What happened was, certain automakers played to these black smoke prejudices, and got diesels banned so their competitors couldn't get a toehold. Using pollution issues as an excuse, the CARB took a radical stance against diesel cars at the behest of Toyota, Honda, Ford, etc., in order to keep out Volkswagen and Daimler/Chrysler (Mercedes). As if a few more relatively clean diesel cars on the road would make a difference, considering the number of diesel trucks, locomotives, industrial equipment, and jet aircraft!
With just a little help, soy production could be enhanced (along with mileage) to make it a sustainable fuel.
With the right fertilizers and perhaps some genetic engineering, soy if more feasible than fuel-cells or fusion at this point.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Once low-sulfur and biodiesel production really starts ramping up in a few years, I'd really like to see a diesel engine options for mainstream SUVs. The low-end torque makes the heavy vehicles feel peppy, especially in the American 0-30 stoplight situation. Add in the great fuel economy and good towing characteristics and you have a win-win situation.
Huh? We've had a few biodiesel experiments in Australia, and farmers making their own biodiesel said, if I remember the TV segment correctly, are limiting use of their biodiesel to older farm equipment (not the $250K headers and prime-movers), since it seems to damage the injectors... But then who knows. I don't.
1. Find a funnel, a bucket, a breath mint and a tube.
2. Stick tube in neighbors gas tank (jimmying maybe required)
3. Suck.
4. place funnel on top of bucket, pour gas into funnel.
5. take breath mint.
6. rejoice!
Of course this system only works for every other house on your block...
I ask for a car and I get a computer. How's about that for being born under a bad
> ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does, or another company that would take the work.
That's why it's no stretch of the imagination to suppose that is part of the reason why Cheny was so keen on blowing everything in Iraq to smithereens...he didn't even need to do anything sneaky to make sure his friends got a multi-billion dollar contract out of the deal.
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
It's a damned sight cheaper than the $6.12 per gallon we're paying for Diesel here in the UK at the moment. You can also mix Diesel with turps substitute (but not real turpentine), white spirits, kerosene, paraffin. Kerosene is the easiest to get hold of in bulk.
On a related note, you can mix petrol with meythylated spirits or other alcohols to quite a large degree.
Though, for all of these, if Customs and Excise find out you're not paying the duty you're fucked.
Deleted
We've been working on a BioDiesel project for the past 6 months and it is really exciting to see all this news coverage just as we are about to make our presentation to the community of San Diego.
Methoxide is some crazy stuff
Shut up you fucking moran.
What are you talking about? Haliburton bid for its work in Iraq and won the bid. Now, when Clinton needed a civilian contractor for work in Kosovo, Haliburton got the job without a bid. Oh, wait, but you like Clinton, so it's okay when he gives truckloads of cash to Haliburton without a bid process, but you don't like Cheny, so it's not okay when Haliburton wins a bid process when conservatives are in charge. Right.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Is it even possible to build a stick shift hybrid car? Doesn't the onboard computer have to constantly adjust the amount of power coming from the gasoline engine and the electric batteries?
Maybe I don't understand how the drivetrain of a hybrid car works. Can anybody explain or give me some links?
My bicyles
It doesn't have to be a complete replacement for traditional fuels.
If it reduces consumption at all, that is 100% unadultorated goodness!
If we can replace 5% of our fossil fuel dependance with waste vegatable oil, 5% with solar, 5% with reducing energy consumption, 5% with wind... That is the way to energy independance, not to mention that it is better for the environment...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Now I know why 5000 pounds of grease was stolen in Edmond, Oklahoma.
I can just imagine 2 or 3 geeks with a pickup truck cackling gleefully at their heist.
Heil Bush!
Well, I suppose i can't...but that is largely because when Cheney took over at Haliburton, he cornered the market in certain areas (like Boots and Coots, who are controlled by Kellog and Brown, who is owned by halliburton). He then began lobbying the Clinton administration to go back to Iraq.
Is that why the Clinton administration chose to go with Halliburton in Kosovo, even though they hadn't won the LOGCAP competitive bidding process?
Why did they do that anyway? Hmmm. And now Halliburton HAS won and holds the current bid for LOGCAP, is the de facto choice to use in Iraq and Afghanistan, and people try to pin this on Cheney.
If you don't know what LOGCAP is, and you think Cheney has somehow gotten this deal for Halliburton, then do some fucking research.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
The VW fuel pumps run upward of 1100 dollars, so be careful. They are the most advanced things in the car!
I know, I get 43MPG in my Passat.
Guipo
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
Gasoline is only $2/gallon if your planet is worth nothing.
There are some problems with F-T, and those problems (mostly having to do with environmentally hazardous emissions) are difficult to solve. But that's an engineering problem, and it is within our techno-savvy to come up with the solutions. We need to be doing so! If we keep putting it off, we're going to find ourselves in a helluva fix. It's about time the government funded some serious research instead of handing out "don't worry" panaceas.
The world is my oyster. That's why it's always in a stew.
I was in a college group that studied the biodiesel option, and we came to another conclusion, methane would be better. We can get it from our own societal waste products, it is much easier to store than hydrogen, and most vehicles can be converted to methane at a far lower price than any other conversion (hybrid/fuel cell/electric). There is an infrastructure in place that can be converted to dispense the product, and vehicles generally get a 3-8mpg improvement running on methane.
I have no idea why this idea has never been persued by a few corporations. All the technology is already in place, the program could be started today, and creating methane reactors for our bio-waste would actually be a simple prospect.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Paper comes from fast growing trees planted specifically for that purpose, so using hemp as a fiber would not cut down on deforestation (you are better off claiming you want to use hemp as a replacement for cotton, which uses a lot of water.)
As far as using hemp oil as a biodiesel source, it is possible but there are better oil producing plants out there so why choose an inferior source of vegetable oil?
Dude, if you want to light up a blunt just say so. Do not try to wrap your argument around some BS economic justification about how "the man" wants to hide all of the great secondary hemp products that would somehow be superior to what we are now using. Once petroleum-based products like nylon replaced hemp as a rope fiber the only real economic niche that hemp occupied disappeared. The problem with trying to make an economic case here is that when cheaper alternatives are brought up as counter-claims your main argument becomes weaker and the longer you cling to it the more it looks to others like you are just being deceptive. Say that you want to indulge in recreational cannabis use and that the parts of the plant that you do not want have a minor economic value. No one is fooled for a second when you try to reverse your argument.
To test out your arguments, try this one. If industrial hemp (which has an almost non-existent level of THC) was legalized in the US, but _only_ a variety which carried a terminator gene that would kill any other related plants that were unlucky enough to have a speck of the GMO plant's pollen land on them, would you still support industrial hemp? In other words, if the side-effect of allowing this "economic panacea" was that all non-industrial hemp would be destroyed by cross-polination and other factors, would you still be promoting industrial hemp? Didn't think so...
This is like an ad in huge print.
/fine print
Refine your own gas for $0.25/gallon*.
*You must own your own oil well and be good at avoiding revenuers to succeed.
The costs of gasoline are not in the making of it (refining and distribution account for 10%-20% of the cost, it's mostly taxes and oil costs. Oil is expensive, but still cheaper than grown oils.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
If you want to go into alternative fuels, just buy a crapload of corn or potatoes, and learn homebrewing/stillery operation.
Modify your car to run purely off of ethanol, and the $400 in basic supplies can keep you running for at least half a year.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
A diesel engine will run on unmodified used cooking oil. The problem is that it gunks up the engine, but only when it is cool. There is a kit sold by a group in New Jersey (can't find it now) that allows you to start the engine using standard diesel, flip a switch to run on cooking oil, then flip a switch to run diesel through the engine for a few moments before you turn the engine off. no processing, just pour the cooking oil through a stainless steel filter and put directly into tank.
Not McDonalds - that is where you get your steaming pile of shit-food Super Sized.
I listened to a debate on this on the radio a few weeks back. Bio-diesel use is growing but it does have one issue, it gets thick in cold weather. In that debate there are some fleet truck that have been using bio-diesel but in the winter they run a mix of bio-diesel and regualr diesel.
It's a good solution. In Brasil we have an interesting system called BiFuel. You can use gasoline or alcohol in any proportion. And the TriFuel may be comming next year. This one will allow you to use Vehicular Natural Gas also.
In the US, it is illegal to drive on the state and federal roads unless you have paid the gas taxes. Even if you make your own fuel. This will make it a lot more expensive.
These taxes help build and repair the roads.
Rather than buy expensive diesel oil at your local pump - why not just use heating oil? They're pretty much the same, and heating oil is a lot cheaper
You have yet to read a story about biodiesel tractors... Well then, try googling, biodiesel tractor story. (Or better yet try broadening your media sources.)
heh
Yeah, harvesting and transporting and all that good stuff uses machines, while petrodiesel doesn't. Petrofuels just appear without any transport or extraction machines...
and ya know. Basically sunlight is our energy source. The petrodiesel stuff just came a long time ago, with biodiesel we can store up next season's sunlight.
So yeah, all your machines are running on sunlight.
Grow hemp instead.
Also... invade Canada and Mexico and grow more hemp; they probably won't notice.
Hey, not only does it make great biodiesel, but the more people smoke it, the less they drive...
If the number of turbodiesel stations increased 50% to 200, doesn't that mean that there were 133 1/3 stations before the increase? I've always found 1/3 of a station to be a bitch to use, regardless of the convenience.
Biodiesel...
Helping America lose weight by burning all the bad cholesterol.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
How about home fuel diesel? Can we replace it?
Can biodiesal be used to heat a home where natural gas isn't available?
Of course this situation is instructive, it shows why it is traditionally considered very important for political figures to avoid both "impropriety and the appearance of impropriety" in their affairs - see recent Supreme Court deliberations re: campaign finance reform for more on this. The appearance of impropriety can be very damaging to the process of democratic government.
Whether there's any actual wrongdoing is only half the equation. Cheney undermined the public's trust in his office by maintaining this association with Halliburton. (and didn't help Halliburton any) Mistrust is the inevitable result of a public figure getting a large check from a company, whether there is tangible wrongdoing involved or not - again, see campaign finance reform.
I suspect if he had it to do over again he would just take the tax hit: all this mistrust has got to hurt personally, in addition to casting doubts on the integrity of himself, his former company and his work. It can't have been worth it.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
My retirement grease! No! You thievin' grease bandits! I'll kill ya!
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
Biodiesel
Low Sulphur Diesel
Compressed NaturalGas (CNG)
Liquefied Propane Gas (LPG)
Ethanol (E-85)
Electricity
Gasoline
The RTC is at the intersection of Interstate 15 and El Cajon Blvd. You may also buy electric, CNG or LPG vehicles at the dealership within the RTC.
I don't know how much more "efficient" we can make plants through genetic twisting. You have a very valid point. Of course, if we can increase bean yield per acre by 40%, it could also be considered energy efficency so long as the individual beans still yield the same amount of oil per bean.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
You're half-right.
The environmental laws were to curb the production of leaded gasoline, rather than specifically diesel.
Lead is interesting. It's a very nice fuel additive as far as octane ratings go. If you look at engines produced in the 1960s and 1970s (ie, the 426 HEMI) you'll find 10:1 compression or higher common in production engines that run on then-pump gas. When the late '70s rolled around and fuel changed to unleaded, the octane ratings dropped from 110 to the eighties, and engines compression ratings dropped. My car's 360ci engine built for the '78 model year has 8.4:1 compression. What is used as racing unleaded or as additives is about as good as old-school leaded gas.
Leaded gasoline also doesn't work very well with catalytic converters, so when they mandated cats on all new cars in the late seventies they had to deal with that too.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Project page here.
FAQs:
here here here here here and here.
there's an outfit in Missouri called Greasel that makes conversion kits so you can run your vehicle on straight vegetable oil without converting it to biodiesel [no methylation step].
One of the cool things they sell is the the fuel line heater kit, known as the Triple Bypass.
Sorry to hear that. I for one am sexy enough to get them for free.
I'm pretty sure you'll be in a lot of trouble if you do this and don't keep meticulous records *and* pay the taxes on any fuel you use.
This would be like using the agriculture grade fuel on the road-- the only difference between agricultural fuel and regurlar fuel is the color and the road tax.
Why do you need it to be free? Didn't you read even the headline, where it says $0.41 per gallon? What's so "Insightful" about a spinal reflex that sees "new" and says "no"?
--
make install -not war
I do 24,000 miles per year on a motorbike in the UK and I can tell you right now that a GSXR-600 will not reduce your fuel bill significantly, unless you drive a RangeRover at the moment. How do you think they get to 60mph in less than 3 seconds? By burning a fuck load of fuel.
You'll get 35-40mpg if you're _really_ careful with the throttle.
Add on the insurance, new rider, on a gixer of all things will cost you 1,200-2,500 per year in insurance, *if they'll insure you at all*. Then add the *4,000* mile service intervals which cost 150 for a minor and 250 for a major service and the fact that you'll be going through a rear tyre in 4,000 miles and a front tyre in 8,000 miles. Tyres which cost 180 for a rear and 130 for a front. A new chain and sprockets every 12,000 miles.
A sportsbike, especially a Gixer is not the way to try to save money.
Take some advice. If you want to save money by riding a motorcycle there are a few things you should look out for.
1: Fewer cylinders. Fewer sparkplugs are replaced at service, fewer sets of valves to check.
2: No chain. That means belt or shaft drive. A chain has to be oiled every few hundred miles.
3: Low revving. The engine will last longer, I've worn one bike engine out already.
4: High torque, relatively low power. The more powerful it is, the more fuel it burns.
5: Light weight and low centre of gravity. Makes traffic easier.
6: Long service intervals, 6000 miles.
7: Narrow. You're using it for commuting right? To filter through traffic that means narrow and upright.
BTW, when I was looking for a new bike for commuting using these criteria a year ago, the only one which ticked *all* of the boxes was the BMW F650CS. It gets 72mpg on the motorway, 650cc single cylinder, belt drive which lasts 24,000 miles, 6000 mile service interval. SV650, GS500, CB500, Pegaso, F650GS all came close.
Deleted
bio-diesel not your thing? Too much time to make it?
Run it straight
www.greasecar.com
Seeing as there are farmers paid to NOT farm land so that they aren't flooding the market, yes, there's still room to grow soy.
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
Should Hali-B go bankrupt, that deferred comp would be permanently deferred. Thus he still has incentive make sure that they do well. At first you might laugh that they could hardly go bankrupt, but all it takes is a major case of mismanagement, the like of which has been pretty common in large corps recently.
Seriousl Academics are proposing fueling the entire US using biodiesal from algae. Folks like
Harry Braun are proposing wind-based power production. Both would appear cheaper than spending hundreds of Billions in the Middle East on wars and foreign aid.
That $0.41, for each of the gallons he drives on, goes right into his local economy. Sure, some of it shortly goes to pay for the fertilizer, insecticide and other petro inputs to his energy cycle. But at least it provides some economic stimulation. And to farmers, no less. That local benefit will inspire other locals to cut more of the outsiders out of the transaction eventually, especially since there's 3x more money available for alternatives, before the price becomes less competitive with gasoline. Coming soon: organic diesel!
Then there's the other benefits of this bio process, over the old petro model. All that biodiesel is grown from biomass, which sequesters CO2 from the atmosphere. Rather than pumping ancient CO2 back into the atmosphere, girding the Greenhouse, he's pulling it back down. And, with any foresight, putting it back into the ground, and keeping it recycled out of the atmosphere. Double the sustainable benefits. And the independence from not only foreign oil pumpers, but also domestic petro corporations, means the price is more predictable, while the distributed system is less vulnerable to manipulation.
I sure wish we'd invest hundreds of billions of dollars a year in this kind of strategic defense from armed and atmospheric threats. It seems more reliable than the current strategy.
--
make install -not war
Here you go:
5 /2 5/1838201&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=134
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/0
That is why we need Diversity of fuel sources. Not
just biodiesel but every possible kind of source of
fuel. We also need Diversity of electric generation
sources. Small wind farm, small solar arrays, small
this and that. Many many of them. There is where
strength lies. Strength does not lie in a few large
coal fired plants. Strength lies in everyone having
a hand in our energy production.
Cheney left haliburton's board of directors when tapped for vice president. However, in terminating his contract with the board, he was entitled to severance. he chose to take it over four years instead of all at once for tax reasons. to imply that he 'made' $178,000 last year is incorrect. he had already earned it but took the deferred compensation. He would have got it no matter who got that contact.
So the two choices are:
He was paid $178,000 last year by Haliburton, or
He was paid $890,000 before leaving to take office, but is taking money from the very government he is claiming to be serving by his tax evasion scheme.
And it is quite convenient that he is taking it over 4 years. When he leaves office next January, he can start right back up with them without having missed a year of compensation.
Learn to love Alaska
In particular, this link offers a pretty good breakdown of the amount of biodiesel needed to replace gasoline - and the amount of algae needed to get there. It also looks at a couple of other alternative fuels.
he had already earned it but took the deferred compensation. He would have got it no matter who got that contact.
That's absolutely correct.
But it's also correct that picking deferred compensation when taxes are going to go down on future income is a wise business decision on Cheney's part.
Especially so if he has an influential hand in affecting tax policy. And he does.
Some people might call that a classic conflict of interest. That's for the old-fashioned, though.
Others might call it the invisible hand of the marketplace where Cheney's acting in "enlightened self-interest."
Therefore, it's just up to the rest of us gullible participants in this "marketplace of government policy" to figure out our own self interests and to act accordingly. Dick Cheney is our teacher.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
and even in "eutopian societies" where a despot instigates a govenmetal/economic system which is destined to fail, forcing collectivism on an ethnic minority.
(Stalin's artificial famine / genocide, Ukraine 1932-33)
gewg_
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.htm l
Indicate we could replace almost all our transportation oil needs with about 11,000 square miles of the Senora Desert, which is about 240,000 square miles.
This store was previously published on /. here:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/05 /25/1838201&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=13 4
We couldn't really grow enough soy but if it means cutting our dependence on foreign oil then the desert rattlesnakes will just have to learn to get along on the 229,000 other acres of the Senora Desert.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
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.
Not only that, but as people who live in the midwest can attest, large amounts of grain that is grown goes to waste in storage because there are still often huge surpluses in many years that exceed the demand. I've seen massive uncovered piles of corn and soybeans left on the ground to rot next to grain elevators in bumper crop years because there was nowhere else to put it. It would be better to use that for making biodiesel and/or ethanol than to let it go to waste.
Remeber that efficincy is (power output)/(power input) so reducing the weight also reduces power requirments proportional to the inverse of the efficency
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Trolled! sucker. It's good to see that all his effort was not waisted.
Growing plants like Rapeseed and soybeans isn't the answer. While making your own biodiesel is cool and all, its, a) illegal, and b) not a large scale solution.
.50 a gallon, and that's taking into account a 10 year recovery of the initial investment. Sold at ~.70 a gallon, and taxed at .30-.50 a gallon you've got a very cheap fuel.
Traditional crops take a lot of land and a lot of energy to produce oils. Once you've figured in the cost to harvest transport and then create biodiesel on a lage scale its cost efficeincy goes down, especially when you add in subsidies for farmers. And when you look at the amount of land we would need for rapeseed, and the energy it would take to harvest and process it, it becomes more of an impossibility.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the use of Bio-diesel, in fact it's quite possibly the best medium range replacement for gasoline. But you need to look at other sources of oil. There are species of algea which are very efficient in the production of oil. Figures suggest 50,000 gallons per hectare. Even at half that number, it's still very feasable, because no arable is needed. Just giant shallow ponds. And they can be saltwater ponds.
These algeas also create methane, which can be reclaimed and used in creating the bio-diesel fuel from the raw oil.
Deserts, waste water systems, agricultural runoff areas all could be used to farm algeas. On a large scale, Bio-diesel could be produced for well under
> It is free because no one else is competing with you for that resource.
r y.cfm/newsid /14907/story.htmm /p/articles/mi_m12 04/is_4_100/ai_83805984o m/community/biodiesel/147 18.html
l e_alge.htmle sel.htm- Number-27 32274.html
True. I gladly pay more for my B100 (currently ~$3.00/gal) than I would for Dino Diesel but I feel a lot better about it because we didn't go to war for soybeans, at least not since 1812 or so.
> Additionally, it is not a renewable resource
BS, falling from the sky isn't a requirement for renewable fuel. I would love to have a solar car. Find me one that will make my SF to Silicon Valley commute.
Farmers are using biodiesel:
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewssto
http://articles.findarticles.co
http://www.livejournal.c
I agree soy biodiesel and hemp biodiesel alone are not a solution.
Algae has great potential:
http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/artic
(BTW...I wish you could get a NB convertible TDI...)
http://www.national-hero.com/algae_biodi
http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat
Maybe SOMEDAY we will have clean, cheap hydrogen power cells or even fusion power. TODAY I have burned nothing but B100, straight biodiesel, for a year and a half and 25K miles and I'm a newbe! There are people with 100-200K on biodiesel or even straight veg oil. Soooo:
A. Get your facts straight
B. come up with a BETTER solution
or C. Shut the fsck up
Yes I am pationate about this.
NO ONE DIED TO BRING ME MY BIODIESEL!!! It comes from the Midwest NOT the Mideast.
-PaulK
PS My 2003 New Beetle TDI w/5sp manual is more fun to drive than any Hybrid and gets about the same MPG (real world MPG not EPA BS)
over here in Germany, Biodiesel is getting very popular already, as the prices for a liter of gas have risen well over a dollar. If im correctly informed, than taxes on gasoline are generally higher in Europe than in the US, and with our green party being part of the government, biodiesel is even sort of subsidized.
The use is getting quite widespread, with probably one gasstation per 50,000 habitants having biodiesel. And they make it from rape-oil (at least thats what my dictionary says what its called).
Think about it, first they outsource every IT job to India. Former IT personnel will get jobs at Mc'Donalds. This will make biodiesel incredibly cheap, because half of the country will be flipping hamburgers and making "freedom fries".
There you frikkin' go! The problem with high gas prices is solved in a typical smart Dubya way!
>b) Restaurants normally have to pay someone to have their used oil hauled away.
Actually, thats untrue nowadays, restaurants get money back for their oil.
Ignoring that, lets pretend a biodeisel industry based on restaurant fats flourished as we all converted our cars to biodeisel. How much will it be per gallon? I don't know, but it sure ain't gonna stay at 40 cents. Then again, if its under two dollars most people would do it.
Just cruise through Hollywood or LA and see if the lipo-doctors had any left over fat for you to use in your car.
Word Spy Definition
Solving America's Energy Crisis, One Super-Size at a Time.
Can you use vegetable oil to lube the car now?
According to this poll most slash dotters are actually on the skinny side.
Thats good, because fat is ugly. Yes, I know, there are fat people out there who would like to convince the rest of the world that fat is sexy. Especially in America, where fat is all the rage.
In fact, once upon a time, fat people generally were considered desireable, but not because of their physical sexiness...it was because of their money. Rich people didn't have to work, so they got fat.
In America, the poor can be fat too! Aint America great! Of course there is another problem...with VERY few exceptions, all American women think they are fat. They don't realize that there is a HUGE midrange between supermodel and blimp, and women in the midrange are both non-fat and sexy.
It is good that there are still mid-rangers in America, because I find fat to be so repulsive that I would rather stay single than date a fat woman.
Am I a pig? I don't think so. We all have our sexual preferences, most of which are genetically determined anyway. To avoid hypocracy, I exercize regularly and eat a reasonable diet. Its not really so hard to do. Just takes an ounce of discipline. If you are pissed off at me because my distaste for your fat makes you feel badly about yourself, then why not lay off the twinkies and start swimming laps? Your body will thank you, and so will your significant other!
I have a 1996 VW Passat TDI. It's a turbo direct-inject diesel. It's clean, quiet, gets 50 miles per gallon, and runs on B100 biodiesel.
Browse on over to www.tdiclub.com and have a look at the biodiesel forum. People have been homebrewing biodiesel for years.
Also, folks have been using WVO (waste vegetable oil) for years. WVO requires some modifications to your car, but normal B100 biodiesel does not.
Cleaner, more powerful, and more efficient than gas-electric hybrids. And no 600 lbs of nasty lead-acid batteries. clean diesel technology is the future...
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
I drive 16 miles each way at lunch to get my B100 in San Jose. Between the tank and the 4x5gal jerry cans that will last me 3 weeks of 90 mi/day commute. It was worth it when I had my m-b (could only carry 2 cans & 1/2 the mpg) and had to fill up every week. With my bug it is sooo much nicer to fill up 1 every 3 weeks!
:-)
A lot more fun too
-PaulK
17K mi on B100 1982 M-B 240d (new owner running SVO, Straight Veg. Oil)
8K mi B100 and counting 2003 VW Bug
They toured the US and Canada about 4 years using hemp oil. Theure exhaust must have a great smell.
Of course, back then,it wasnt considered newsworthy for Slashdot.....touring country as opposed to some backward hole isnt as imppresive I guess.
There is this guy here in town who has been running cars on biodiesel for the past 14 years and when I talked to him for an interview about 1997, he said it wasnt a big deal...he just copied what many others had done.
todd
(OK, the title's overstated...) I worked in a pizza/fish&chips place a long time ago. We never completely drained the old oil out and replaced it with new, because the new oil is tasteless. A big part of what we like about the fries or whatever is the flavor of the cooker's recent history. IIRC we never replaced more than about 75%,and even then the first few batches came out bland. (We also never did fish in the french fry unit.) We added oil as needed each morning, and did the partial oil change once a week IIRC. So in some sense the oil was always recycled.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Gas is $2 per gallon plus the $200 billion to fight a war in Iraq + 800 dead young Americans + 20,000 dead Iraqis + countless injured + destroyed building and infrastructure + contaminated soil with depleted uranium + future terrorisits inspired by all of the above.
I don't think Americans realize how much they are paying for gas!
Could you cite one instance? Perhaps I might take your post a bit more seriously if you could.
Note the discoloration in used vegetable oil? That is not all due to suspended food particles. Unlike lubricating oil in your car, you are observing a chemical change that is not easily filtered out. You are adding oxygen over the unsaturated portions of the fatty acid chains. Remember oils at room temperature are fluids because of that type of chemical bonds.
Just because you do not like the topic do not be like the current political heads that make things up to support their <i><b>arguments</b></i> regardless of the truth of their statements.
There were a couple of guys from Wales got done a couple of years ago, after it was discovered that they were using oil from a local chip shop in their car (the smell gave it away, I think). Their crime? Tax evasion.
biodiesel sucks off the most price-sensitive consumers. residual consumers are less-price sensitive (average elasticity decreases). hence, market power increases & price for gas goes up. see eg the article by Ward, Shimshack, Perloff, & Harris in American Journal of Agricultural Economics.
Here's an idea I got from my college days: live near your work/school, and walk/bicycle everywhere. You never have to buy fuel AT ALL. Aside from the fact that you save about $4000/year in gas, insurance, repairs, car payments, etc (imagine getting a $4000/year raise...), you'll also be healthier, and you'll get to laugh almost daily at stupid jerks who bitch about their cars and about gas prices. It's awesome!
If we *really* are serious about the "War on Terror" we should be investigating these technologies now and not when fossil fuels are inevitably exhausted. They're getting rich off our huge demand for oil. What if we could decrease our reliance on foriegn oils by 5 - 25%? The US could decide how much gas/oil would cost instead of OPEC because we wouldn't need to buy from them. By retooling our farm systems to produce more soy, *we* could become the next OPEC. Texas alone could be converted to a vast soy field instead of the vast nothingness it is now. We could turn those oil pumps into soy diesel pumps. There are acres and acres of unused land in the US that, properly irrigated could provide for the demands of biodiesel. There is no choice. Eventually fossil fuels will be a distant memory and we'll need the substitute to run the electricty that powers our pornoboxes. Imagine the furor if we couldn't provide boobage because there was no way to power the Internet!!!
A few years ago a few towns in France started equipping public transportation vehicles with engines running on 'bio' fuels, based on beets, soy, cane sugar or other stuff. It turned out this scheme poluted more than classical fossil fuel because the demand for these vegetables involved an agriculture extremely intensive on fertilizers, which, at such dosage, create a considerable pollution.
{Science sans conscience n'est que ruine de l'âme}
our glorious governement has already started barking Big Oil's tune, by creating significant cost barriers to the creation of Bio Diesel, even for your own use, even in your own back yard.
:)
Basically only a well funded business can afford to make Bio Diesel in Australia... such a bloody shame.
thats it, no point, just a bitch
err!
jak.
whatever happened to that project that used de-polymerazation (sp?) to basically turn trash (mostly organic, and anything carbon based, such as plastics, or biological wastes) into oil and gasoline? and would filter out any other biproducts?
now if they could do the process with biodiesel and make biogasoline out of it, that would be better, that would mean me and my friend would have a good source of our own gasoline for our bikes.
i don't think restaurants use recycled cooking oil. it iusually ends up as feedfat (animal feed), soap, or industrial lubricant.
fear is the mind killer
something that can convert from a single seater commuter car to the family SUV/van to a work truck. Say you buy a basic platform, then have add ons to convert it. Combine that with a basic engine that has variable valves (like the old cadillac solenoid actuated valves), that could adjust as the power needs increased. Most of the time it might be in as little as a two cylinder mode, for the daily single person commute, not carrying much weight. 'Weekends, pop off the small, lighter, more streamlined single person body, bolt on the heavier/bigger suv styled body for the family picnic or whatever, or the pickup body for hauling shrubs home from the garden center, etc. The engine can be adjusted to 4 or 6 or 8 cylinders then, whatever. That and one of the better modern transmissions you might have a possible solution.
The other thing is we have really chaotic and dismally designed cities/societies/workplaces. There could be a lot more work done to develop communities based around employment sources, not just this ad hoc ad lib chaotic anarchy we have now. Example, you can see subdivisions going up all over, but all they are is someone had some cheap land, they get a permit to carve it up, slop some homes in there. Nuts.
Say you take some big company plans on a new combo manufacturing/development whatever place. they design and build it, and incorporate housing into the scheme of things, right on the property, along with some stores, supermarkets, and so on, at least the basics. Employees get a cut rate discount on a home there,plus a much shorter commute, happier employees, makes a happier company, more profits, etc. Simplistic, but along those lines. Planning, not hap hazard.
What we do is just got a job where we live. I only drive to town once a week, and could easily drop that to twice a month or once a month, and I WILL if gas gets too much higher. The cost tradeoffs for getting a new fuel miserly vehilcle just to drive more aren't worth it to us, it would take years to justify the cost. We are running ten dollars a week now, driving an old (but nice) gas hog with gas hovering at 2$, but that's only 520$ a year, and you really can't get much of a vehicle for 520$ any more, and even then, if we cut our mileage in half, we'd still have to pay for the additional car, probably higher insurance, probably higher parts replacement costs, and the gas and oil. So we would actually now LOSE on getting a more fuel efficient car, which sucks. Our best bet is just to drive even less often. People who have to commute real far and daily, all I can say is, "carpool", make the effort, and do combined trips for all the other driving you do.
I LIKE the idea of making my own fuel though, and we got the space to probably do it. Ethanol is a possibility with gas engines, and we don't own a diesel. The tractors we use are almost all diesel though.
Gonna have to think on this some more.
The Army does its own in-field transportation logistics.
Here in the US, they probably figured out that they didn't need to do their own logistics between bases as much, and let UPS, FedEx, Con-Way, et al. do a lot of it could save them money, especially if they tie their contracts to teach the Army how they do things the way they do, also.
The US Army contracts out vehicle transportation across country, for example. The Army might own the tank transport rail cars, but they get hooked up to a BNSF, UPSF or CSX train to get cross-country (once saw a bunch of M113s, M2s, etc loaded up on a train near Tacoma, either prior to going to Yakima, NTC or, since it was when the US started deploying forces to Saudi Arabia in Gulf War I...).
The whole setup of a division is that it is self-contained: it is organized to have its own logistics resources as well as tactical and other support resources.
Do you have a source for your claim that making your own biodiesel is illegal? I don't believe it, at least not in the US.
Now if you make biodiesel put it in your car, but don't pay road (~$.30/gallon) taxes on it I'm sure it is illegal. However use it off-road and it is legal. Or just pay the taxes and you are legal.
So...
Two Big Mac....
Two Large Fry's...
One Large Vanila Milkshake....
One Medium Rootbeer...
One Samll Coke...
One Happy Meal....
One full tank of Desel....
Pricless....
There are several forms of energy needed to move a car. First is acceleration, f=ma, which is linear, change the force and you change the acceleration. Except we are not working in a frictionless vacuume. So add in friction, which first comes from rolling resistance, and is the biggest factor at low speed. I don't recall the equations anymore, but this too is liniar. Toss in losses from the drivetrain, and essentially you get better milage the faster you go. (some of those losses are constant, things like the alternator) As you gain speed wind resistance becomes the biggest factor, and this is a squared relation.
Gas milage is an optimization problem. You get the worst at 0MPH, over comming engine loss without doing any work. (work not in the physics sense) As you go faster you get better milage, until wind resistance becomes the biggest factor at which time it goes down. For heavy cars this speed is increased, for big cars it is decreased. (Note, the two go togather) Small cars the speed is higher because of less wind resistance, while lower because of less mass. (again, wind resistance is the bigger factor) Older cars tend to have more wind resistance. A big engine has more internal losses, so this speed is faster, a small engine with less internal resistance lowers the speed. (unless you have a tiny engine this isn't a factor)
Unless you keep a log and are willing to expiriment it is hard to say more. In general though a new truck will max out at 60 mph, a compact car at about 75mph. However load changes things, truckers have found the max to be 68mph (the company can set the cruise control for the driver) when fully loaded. My geo metro appears to max out at 60 mph (because the engine has to go to less efficant but more powerful modes to maintain faster speeds). My S10 does best at 65-70, in part because of the large engine.
"My retirement grease!!!"
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I must've counted this word about a thousand times in these threads!
Since I have been reasearching biodiesel heavily for a while I'll put in my 2 cents worth.
Putting anything but B20 (1 part biodiesel to 4 parts petroleum diesel) in your car will probably violate the warranty. The advantage of biodiesel isn't just that it's renewable, it also adds lubricity and reduces pollution. See http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/biodiesel_basic s/ for more info.
Anyone that makes biodiesel in their backyard is going to violate their car warranty for sure. Making something that works and making something that isn't going to have long-term negative effects on your car are two different things. One of the by-products of making biodiesel is glycerin. If you don't make the biodiesel just right, the glycerin wont be usable for much and needs to be disposed of. See this excellent article for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel
Biodiesel is a niche product that helps reduce pollution and dependence on foreign oil. It also can be used in the remediation of petroleum spills and probably has other, undiscovered uses. It is not going to eliminate our dependence on petroleum.
"5 minutes of pain will instruct you better than a week of lectures" - Anonymous"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
What ever happened to depolymerization?
Gees. Some people really just aren't educated ;)
You have a skewed view of what really happens in the private sector. First, cost plus work is still done. There are some jobs that are just too risky to take on a hard bid basis.
"Dig me a hole in the ground."
"What is the soil like?
"Don't know."
"What is down there?"
"Don't know."
"Is the soil contaminated?"
"Don't know. How about a hard bid?"
"Drop dead, I'll do it T&M (Time and Material) if at all."
And yes, this kind of thing happens all of the time.
As for incentive under a cost plus vs. hard bid, you are correct that an unscrupulous contractor will drag the job out. That same unscrupulous contractor will also commit fraud under a fixed price bid: inferior materials, bogus change requests, shoddy workmanship.
Also, the US gov't is moving AWAY from strictly hard bid contracts and toward a combination of negotiated and bidding, at least in construction. This is to geta away from the situation that exists now: a contractor will bid the job at a loss, and then immediately start placing claims on the project to recoup profit via change order work. This almost always ends in court, with the Gov't. being worse off than if they had gone with the higher, but more reputable bid.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Yea -- I heard a couple of yuppies complaining about the price of gas the other day as they both enjoyed the $1.50 bottles of (you guessed it) water.
How is it that we can pay $1.50 for a liter of the worlds most abundent resource (water) yet bitch about $2 a gallon for gas?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Well, the fact that he gets oil for free probably has a big effect on the price. I mean, if your local gas station could get crude oil for free, I'm sure prices would be lower.
That said, even buying vegetable oil at the store and brewing it into biodiesel is cheaper then buying petrol-based stuff in the UK, due to high gas taxes which are not applied to cooking oil. But, people who do it are actually arrested, presumably for tax evasion.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
want to increase the yield of your biofuel? here's a good goal for the genetic engineers -- a research cornucopia waiting to happen.
Either that or more political power for Monsanto to bully governments into granting even broader side-monopolies for its Roundup Ready(tm) products.
You mean pot?
It's also illegal to copy a work first published on January 1, 1923, or to watch a DVD Video title in GNU/Linux, but does that make it wrong in the moral perception? Citizens elect representatives to represent them and move the legal code toward the moral perception.
The war on drugs is a failure, and everybody in DC knows it but clings to a perception that ethanol is somehow "safer" than THC.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know how much fertilizer goes onto producing enough soy/corn for a gallon of fuel? Since much (most?) fertilizer production involves natural gas, would biodiesel simply shift consumption from one fossil fuel to another?
The reasons that Automatic transmissions have a higher towing capacity are several: (oversimplification warning here... 8-)
1) it is "easy" to snap an axle or damage an engine by dropping the clutch, the "torque converter" acts as a buffering agent to keep unwanted forces in balance.
2) the "torque converter" has what gear-heads mis-label "torque multiplying". (yea, I know, bull, but that is what they call it.) Simply put, you can rev the engine to its optimal power output range and as long as you don't break traction on your drive wheels that energy is useful to pull the load. A good bit of that is also disapated as waste-heat in the converter, but that heat would be a burnt clutch in a standard transmission.
The thing to remember is that the "rated towing capacity" is what an idiot can tow without exposing the car manufacturer to complaints and lawsuits. So the rating is mutch lower in the standard transmission configuration so that Ford (et al) don't get complaints from people who blew their clutch or suffered "excessive stalling". 8-)
On the aside, the reason that tractor-trailer rigs are still standard transmissions is (typically) because you can not build an effective automatic transmission with that many low gears and still get up to high speeds. Planetary gears only gang so well or so deep before becoming impractical. Which is why truck-driving is a skilled position no mater *what* some people may think.
So a skilled person could probably tow as much with a standard transmission as an normal person can tow with an automatic, but I wouldn't bet on that skill too much. At the high end you will wear the hell out of your clutch, engine mounts, thruster bearing, and all sorts of unhappy-to-replace parts.
It's not a matter of pure torque, it is a matter of effective delivery vs component wear.
When I bought my last truck, rather than have an opinion, I researched a position...
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
As I understand it, there is some grade of heating oil that's close enough to diesel that you can modify your diesel car to use it.
It might not be $0.41 a gallon, but I think it's way under $2.00 a gallon.
btw: diesel fuel used to cost about half that of regular. I'm not sure what changed.
So, if you get your raw materials for free and you do not factor in the cost of your labor, you can make biodiesel for $0.41/gal. I think I will keep my day job and buy the fuel at the pump.
It makes you marvel at how the oil companies can get the stuff out of the ground half-way around the world, ship it, refine it, ship it, distribute it, pay taxes, and still have it cost less than Perrier.
Not to mention that gasoline and diesel fumes make me want to wretch and cough, where these bio-diesel cars will make me crave greasy snacks.
A couple weeks ago I was reading the police briefs in the local rag, and there was a bit about somebody stealing dumpsters full of used cooking grease from behind restaurants. At the time, I was like, WTF? Those things smell like ass, why would somebody want to steal one? It makes a little more sense now...
Rudolph Diesel made the his diesel engine to run on peanut oil so farmers would be able to afford the fuel.
Oil seeds and even some algae are good sources of oil.
Thank you for your display of ignorance and your mastery of the non sequitur.
1. The fact that few (not "zero") famines have occurred in functioning democracies actually indicates that democracy doesn't work in the sort of fragile, underdeveloped economy that's likely to spawn famines. Democracy requires quite a few conditions to survive - most importantly, a high standard of living.
2. The Great Depression was characterised by overproduction. As commodity prices fell, producers tried to make up for the lost income by producing more, which resulted in overproduction, and further price falls. The film you saw of milk being dumped was an outcome of that. The reason that people were hungry during that period was due to the fact that they didn't have jobs or money, and so couldn't afford to buy the cheap food available. The "political and economic factors" that you refer to were called "capitalism" and "free markets"; under a socialist system, the government would have fed them. Under capitalism, they went hungry.
You are honest. Most people who want Hemp legalized say it's because it's a cheaper alternative. You want it all legalized so you can get high. Just do me a favor and stay in your house while doing so.
What about using bio-diesel for fuel oil?
We heat our house w/ fuel oil which I understand is diesel but died a different color?
What would it take to convert our furnace?
Home brew would be great because I would just syphon right into my tank.
Uhh, locking torque converters are common in all new cars.
My 2001 Honda Accord has one; you can actually feel it locking up; it feels like a subtle additional shift when you reach 40MPH or so and stop accelerating.
Actually, they go back a lot further than that. GM was using them with the Iron Duke (2.5L I4) and 2.8L V6 in Celebrities, 6000s, Fieros, Calais, etc. as far back as 1984.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Discworld.
You have a skewed view of what really happens in the private sector.
No, he's right on.
Most contractors in the private sector would, if it were really likely to be an issue, bid on a planning phase to investigate the soil for possible contaminants, assuming they didn't have to "discover" for free in order to even get in the door. Flat fees all the way. If you get screwed badly enough, all you can do is beg for mercy.
Or if you basically figure you'll be OK, just write the contract contingent on conditions you expect, and if you go outside them renegotiate... you know, agree to everything before anyone writes an invoice.
Are you getting the picture yet? Companies don't write blank checks, unless they're big, sloppy companies (of which I've worked for many - some are rich enough they can afford to be sloppy on an unimagineable scale).
Cost plus work is done all the time. Lots of bad things are done all the time. It doesn't change the fact that fraud under a cost plus regime is much easier than under a fixed price.
You make it sound like, when an unscrupulous contracter gets hauled into cort for playing games, that's money lost. This is, from another perspective, an enforcement action by the government. It costs money to have police, to have courts and prosecutors... what sense does it make to then balk at the costs of civil (and criminal!) actions against fraudulent contractors? Punishing criminals and hucksters is a net gain for society... And an unavoidable "cost of doing business" for an honest, functioning government.
As a P.S., if the civil courts are broken enough that it's "too expensive" and "too time-consuming" to fight fraud, that's another topic altogether...
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Sweet, I'm the guy that changes the fryer oil each week at Taco Bell - maybe I can make a few extra bucks selling the used oil to my fellow geeks ;p
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Check out the site... greasecar.com
You can use standard filtered vegetable oil without all of the biodiesel headaches.
Indeed. I live in a farming community, and I've heard stories about how the federal government under FDR *paid* farmers to dump milk on the ground, till under crops, and slaughter animals to reduce the supply so the prices would go back up. One group of farmers apparently formed a sort of posse outside a creamery (make dairy products)-- if another farmer brought his milk in, they would make him to turn around or empty his truck by force.
I admit to not knowing a lot about electric motors (other than the basic concept of how they work). However, I am positive that what you say about them not having an 'optimal' RPM is wrong. I can prove this to you simply by taking a look at some extremes:
You're very right. I know people with degrees in electrical engineering who don't understand what you do.
If you apply very little juice to an electric motor, it will not spin, not having enough power to overcome friction. So clearly, electric motors are not efficient at the extreme low end (since you get no output power for an input power).
This is true for universal motors (which use brushes). Torque is most when the motor is stalled. But remember that torque is NOT power! Power is work over time; torque is just a moment (engineering term for force around a point). Power (at a given speed) is, of course, related to force (in this case torque) by basic high school physics equations which I seem to forget right now. [grin]
A universal motor consists of a bunch of coils of wire. We'll take them as running off DC or such low frequency AC that we can ignore its effects. As the coils of wire rotate on the armature, brushes and the commutator ring switch different coils in and out of the circuit. This switching causes the rotating coils to be receiving AC power. Coils are inductors, and inductors have reactance (fancy term for resistance to AC) on top of their DC resistance.
When the motor is running, the impedance (resistance at AC) of the coils in the armature is given by Impedance = InductiveReactance + DCResistance. Ohm's law then applies as usual, where P=I*I*R=I*I*Z where Z is the impedance instead of the resistance.
When the motor is stalled, the current flowing through the windings is DC, and inductance has no effect. The only limit to the current is the DC resistance of the windings.
The magnetic field generated by a coil of wire is proportional to the amount of current flowing through the wire. And the speed (for a given load, whether that's just friction or something useful) will therefore be proportional to the current through the windings.
So, when the motor is running, the impedance ("resistance" at AC) of its windings increases, and the current flowing drops. Then the speed drops, the impedance drops, more current flows, and the motor speeds back up. In reality, it finds a happy medium.
But this all means that the more you load a universal motor, the more current it consumes. It also means that sticking an ohmmeter across the motor will let you calculate the stalled current but will give you no useful information about how much current the motor will use when it's spinning.
Of course, a universal motor doesn't care if it's running off AC or DC. The commutator ring will switch poles back and forth far faster than 50/60Hz AC power, so the effects of 60Hz AC are so small as to be negligible.
In general, the complete opposite is true for stepper motors.
With pure AC motors, there's a lot more variety. You should consider a brushless motor (whether in a computer fan or an electric car) as being an AC motor. Most common AC motors (washing machines, furnace blowers, etc.) are of the squirrel-cage induction variety. They're essentially rotating transformers, and use almost no current when they have no load. When you stall them, the effect is similar to shorting the output of a transformer. The transformer's secondary (or motor's rotor) will suck up all the magnetic field in the core. As a result, the input power will be limited only by the DC resistance of the windings, and you'll eventually blow the motor.
Most AC motors will only run happily at a given frequency and related speed.
Neither the universal motor or the garden-variety induction motor is even remotely suitable for use as traction motors in cars. The universal motor is horribly inefficient, and the induction motor has to be designed to run at a given frequency and its speed is directly related to that
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
It's funny to see you americans worry about the fuel prices; here in germany, you pay almost 1.20$ for a litre (not a gallon!). So driving costs alot of money, and the prices will raise even more.
Every problem has a solution, but every solution creates new problems.
I don't understand why used cooking oil is needed, i'd think that my and my dogs excrement could be turned into diesel, after a dinner at a fry joint and a couple beers my shit looks like diesel.
left over
i hope they have charcoal seat cushions
Just adding to what you have to say here...
It's easier to make a durable automatic...A lot of that is due to shock-loading. :) Chrysler's mighty 727 TorqueFlite automatic was designed to live behind a 426 Hemi; even slamming it into gear with the throttle pegged won't hurt it thanks to the torque converter's isolation.
The problem is not that the losses are associated with gear changing (frankly most electronic autos can change gears faster and more reliably than a person ever can)..And this is why most drag racers use modified automatics - essentially, an "brainless" automatic which needs you to tell it when to shift. It's called a manual valve body. Even a very primitive automatic like the (two speed and bulletproof) GM PowerGlide of the 1950s and 1960s can shift faster than most human beings. And being able to use the clutch consistently is very difficult when you're dealing in terms of tenths of a second; automatics are free of that.
It's the torque converter. There is constant 4-8% (or better) loss of energy due to friction in the torque converter alone.Remember shift overlap. Passenger car automatics engage a gear then release the previous one - you're in first, you're in first and second, then you're in second. The reason this is done is to reduce jerk. In fact, in Calculus, the term "jerk" (derivative of acceleration) was coined by GM engineers.
A big improvement in fuel efficiency could be had by simply removing that overlap (as anyone building an automatic for performance or racing will do, check out the RWD Valve Body Assembly on the 18th page of this Mopar Performance Catalog PDF) but Joe Consumer will complain if the car accelerates like a heavy-clutched stickshift. (Note the "Race Only" warning on the valve body assembly's caption.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Once the US switches over to low-sulpher diesel fuel it might be possible for these new diesel engines to meet the high standards we set here in California, but for the moment these new engines may be good enough for Europe but they are not clean enough to be acceptable over here.
:-)
One of the big problems with US-refined motor fuels is its very high level of sulfur compounds in the fuel--sometimes as high as 2,000 parts per million! Unfortunately, these compounds have very corrosive properties, as BMW found out much to their chargrin when their first V-8 engines were sold in the USA back in the early 1990's using all-aluminum engine blocks suffered serious corrosion problems. BMW was forced to redesign their engine blocks with iron-alloy cylinder liners to correct this problem.
However, with the EPA mandating no more than 40 parts per million of sulfur compounds starting next year, this will offer two major benefits:
For gasoline (petrol) engines, this means we can widely apply direct fuel injection (e.g., fuel is directly injected into the combustion chamber), which improves fuel efficiency as much as 15-20% compared to gasoline (petrol) engines that inject the fuel in the air just before the air-fuel mixture is sent into the combustion chamber. It also allows for better catalytic converters that remove the NOx from the engine exhaust more efficiently.
For diesel engines, it means we can apply common-rail pressurized direct injection of diesel fuel into the combustion chamber, and also apply the very latest in catalytic converter technology that not only reduces emissions efficiently, but also "burns off" the particulate particles from the diesel engine exhaust, which means a diesel engine could meet the stringent Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard easily. If we convert our pickup trucks, SUV's and minivans to run off these new generation of clean diesel engines we could improve fuel efficiency of these class of vehicles by an impressive 40 percent!
In fact, I think CARB won't certify diesel-powered automobiles until low-sulfur diesel fuel becomes widely available in 2005--probably in time for the 2006 model year.
Why does it seem like each and every massive pickup truck I see on the road that has the double tires in back look shiny brand new like it's never been used for any form of work? I drive a long commute these days, through a lot of types of traffic, and I never ever can recall seeing one of those quad-rear-tire trucks in an application as an actual working truck. The beat up real tradesmen trucks all seem to be normal single-tires-in-rear vehicles.
They're called "duallies". They offer an increased load capacity, but the car companies massively mark them up - unless you need it, a regular pickup truck offers far more bang for the buck. (Preferably with rubber floormats instead of carpets, no power windows, no silly "features" that jack up the price stupidly.)
Given the cost - in purchase, fuel, cost of extra tires, and because registration is more expensive in many places - most people who have them do actually need them. Next time you see one, look in the bed and see if you see a large greasy plate like on the back of a semi without its trailer. That's called a 5th wheel hitch; they probably tow anything from a big RV to horses to car trailers.
In a perfect world, you'd buy a duallie truck for towing your horses and a regular one for more mundane tasks (carrying a few sheets of drywall, helping a friend move), but the reality is that pickup trucks are now so expensive due to gas-guzzler taxes and the current fashion for balding middle-aged accountants to drive trucks, that you simply can't afford the cute little Dakota to park beside the Ram 3500.
I'm starting to feel like it's some sort of a dicksize or inadequacy thing.See the comment about balding middle-aged accountants.
I can understand wanting to drive a truck even if you don't need one - I don't like front wheel drive and it's getting pretty hard to find a real car (body on frame construction, rear wheel drive) these days, so even if I was only commuting to work, I'd be buying a truck, too.
(In actual fact, I have a truck, but it actually gets used as a truck. It has to do double-duty as a car because it's far too expensive to keep two vehicles licensed at once here. An intelligent solution would be to make licensing a car free if you've already got a truck or van on the road, to encourage more people to purchase and drive cars for grocery shopping and commuting.)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
You can make biodiesel out of algae too, which can produce more biodiesel per acre. Some have suggested ocean water as a great base to grow it in otherwise useless land, like deserts and such.
Plus, biodiesel will not be the be-all end-all solution. Mater of fact, nothing will. It is, however, better than taking carbon from out of the ground, using a LOT of ugly chemicals to process it and then pumping it into the sky.
w00t, we're on the map! Goooo Seatttllleee!
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The government didn't bid these contracts - they awarded them without competition.
How can that even be legal? (It isn't here in Australia) I mean this is taxpayer's money after all. I guess it must just be a cultural difference and that American taxpayers don't care too much about how their taxes are spent.
A cynical observer could be forgiven for thinking this entire Iraq deal was nothing but a big scam for siphoning billions of dollars of taxpayer's money into the coffers of a company (or companies) friendly to the Vice President. I mean what a great heist to pull off, taking over the White House. You really have to admire these guys, this is the masterpiece of white collar crime, nothing else even comes close.
Just as well that the American public isn't at all cynical, and has a pretty laid back attitude regarding who their taxes are handed out to.
Mod parent up!
Thousands of tonnes of good food -- meat, fruits, vegetables, wheat products -- get thrown out of large supermarket chains EVERY DAY. Much of this food comes from underdeveloped countries -- the same countries which are starving -- only to end up in western countries' rubbish. WalMart and friends can pay much more for food than a starving population, even if they end up throwing that food away.
According to this PDF, "In 2003, the City converted to 100% Biodiesel for its diesel vehicles. Berkeley it is the first city of its size in America to convert to 100% Biodiesel for virtually an entire fleet. B100 is in use in over 180 of the City's diesel vehicles representing 90 percent of its fleet of 200 diesel vehicles. (The remaining 10 percent of diesel vehicles are Fire Department vehicles that will be converted to 100% Biodiesel when accommodations are made for delivering Biodiesel to the more remote Fire Stations throughout the City"
Also, "The City is committed to reducing its negative impact on air quality through alternative fuel use in the city fleet including electric, CNG and biodiesel. In 2001, Berkeley received a TFCA grant and purchased four compressed natural gas (CNG) refuse trucks, and one bus for homeless transportation. The City also leases one electric vehicle for housing inspections. These new vehicles expand the City's alternatively fueled vehicle fleet which already includes 10 CNG vehicles, two electric pick up trucks, one electric sedan, 10 electric parking scooters, 2 electric utility carts and 9 fleet bicycles. The City provides an electric vehicle recharging station in Center Street Garage and preferential street parking for electric vehicles."
Plus, I saw a cop on a segway once.
As a side note to that, you know those people who reuse disposable plates and cups? Bad idea... the styrofoam holds onto all kinds of nasty bacterial organisms through repeated washings and most of the disposable materials release chemicals on washing. *wry grin* I will admit that I've never seen a good reputable cite on this, but it's been rpeated over and over again on the Internet so it must be true, right?
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
The story is here.
As this is off the top of my head, TWAGOS (Take With A Grain Of Salt).
A scientist (who has been validated by winners of the Nobel prize, has mentioned a personal theory that oil (of which gasoline is a derivative) is a bacterial byproduct.
In other words, some species of bug has been treating sections of this planet, where certain mineral nutrients are located, as a prime food source. A byproduct is the crude oil we find so useful.
References can be found using Google and the terms "oil byproduct bacteria".
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
People have been doing it for donkeys years, just as people have been running deisels on unexcised heating oil for years too.
BTW in many places one can be charged for dodging road tax by running deisel cars on old fish 'n chip oil (like the UK), just as one can get done for dodging road tax for running diesels on unexcised heating oil.
I use to work at a warehouse & distribution centre that converted their heating over from oil to natural gas but kept the huge oil tanks along the side & had some car filler nozzles fitted that were purchased at auction when a mine went bankrupt (which were hidden behind panelling when the oil delivery bloke was due). They bought some ex-govt deisel Landcruisers & for years afterwards ran them on a mix of fuel oil & diesel, on average anything up to 80% fuel oil in winter & up to 10% in summer - the powers that be might get a bit sus if they have to refuel their heating oil in the middle of summer all the time.
Deisels will run fine on virtually any oil - in the pacific coconut oil fueled diesels arn't uncommon. People will rattle on how it's only designed for this or that but anyone will see that their diesel Toyota will still run fine no matter virtually what oil's thrown in it.
No it doesn't. Correlation, causation, yadda yadda.
In what way. I have been over here in London for the past 2 years so don't know.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Right, but you could whore yourself out to 500 of those fat chicks at $100 a piece, or to 10 really fat chicks for $5000 a piece, and you'd make $50,000. Then you could pay off that biodiesel-burning boat of yours before your house got taken away...
I did not design this game/I did not name the stakes/I just happen to like apples/And I am not afraid of snakes-AniD
There are other potential fuels. One such can be found at this URL (http://jlnlabs.imars.com/bingofuel/html/bfr10.htm ). Here are a couple of paragraphs from the site:
The BingoFuel Reactor (*) uses ordinary tap water and low voltage electrical energy for producing a synthetic gas. A high temperature ( 3000-4000C ) plasma is generated underwater by an electrical arc between carbon electrodes. The BingoFuel Reactor produces a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen (COH2) and this gas can burn very cleanly in oxygen or air, and so it can be used as fuel for an internal combustion engine. When burned, COH2 produces carbon dioxide and water vapor, so it generates very little, if any, pollution to the environnement.
This gas burns cleanly, producing water vapor and only the amount of CO2 that was originally absorbed by the biological mass when it was growing in the ground. Contrast this with burning fossil fuels (oil and natural gas) which resurrect old buried carbon and add it to the atmosphere from ancient cemeteries in the ground. Instead, biomass gas burning recycles recently absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide. The input energy is typically about a thousand watt-hours or about 3300 BTU to produce about 250 liters per hour of carbo-hydrogen (8.5 cubic feet per hour). With a heating value of over 500 BTU per cubic feet, the COH2 output energy exceeds 4000 BTU, often approaching 5000 BTU in high efficiency designs. Thus, this biomass gasification process has an overunity efficiency of about 125% to 150%. However, when the entire energetics of the system are accounted for, including the ultraviolet light radiation, heat loss, etc., estimates of 200% to 400% are reasonable.
Steve
I don't care if it is offtopic. You're my hero.
IMO the best browser game ever http://wittyrpg.com
Tm
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Tm
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Engine size is a red herring anyway. GM uses tall gearing on their large V6 engines
I noticed that too. My theory is that improved engine control and multi-point injection (which is nearly universal now) permits more aggressive EGR (exhaust gas recirculation), a technique whose effect is similar to reducing displacement. Smaller engines (and manual transmissions, for that matter) run at a wider range of RPM's changing at a faster rate, so the EGR can't be as aggressive without risk of recirculating too much and stalling the engine out. Hence the efficiency gain from a smaller engine with manual transmission is less than what we traditionally expect.
That's my theory, anyhow.
You are not an "alumi" [sic]. You are an alumnus. If you were a woman and not a /. poster, you would be an alumna. The plural of alumnus is alumni. The plural of alumna is alumnae. Alumni is the plural for a group with both men and women.
If you read my post, you would see "free" is describing "cooking oil", not "biodiesel".
Now, why do I need it to be free? Because is says so in TFA. Hell, it's even on the summary posted on the front page:
It didn't take him long to find a recipe for biodiesel, and with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant, he figures he's now getting 44 miles per gallon out of his diesel powered VW Golf and only paying 41 cents a gallon.
It's $0.41 a gallon provided that he doesn't have to pay for the used vegetable oil. As in "gets used oil for free". Get it?
So, when you are going to flame somebody because they didn't read, please DO read first. Otherwise, you might be just making an ass out of yourself. Like, say, right now.
Do you actually work in construction? I can't believe you do, since you post is so off base I don't even know where to start.
I'll throw my qualifications on the table. I work for an ENR Top 20 contracting firm as a project manager. I have done cost plus work and hard bid work for BOTH government and commercial and commercial clients. My government work has been both negociated hard bid and competitive hard bid. My commercial work has been hard bid, negociated hard bid, cost plus, and cost plus with a guaranteed maximum price.
You are right in that no one writes blank checks, but you are wrong in equating "cost plus" with "blank check". On a cost-plus job, the work is evaluated with every invoice, and if costs or schedule are going out of bounds, the work gets stopped. On a hard bid project, the work is also checked over on a monthly basis.
As for your comment on my example: no, most contractors wouldn't bid on testing - that is properly the job of a testing firm, which contracts to the owner for liability purposes. Guess how testing firms bill? Cost plus.
As for balking at the Gov't taking contractors to court, I am all for it; yet at the end of the fiscal year, court is not a cost efficient process, and many private will do a great deal to stay out of court. The Gov't doesn't have this option - Government employees can't "cut deals," and for very good reasons.
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Rubber
Pure biodiesel will eventually devour any natural or butyl rubber parts in the fuel system (hoses and seals). Check with the vehicle manufacturer and replace the parts with resistant synthetic parts (such as Viton B). See Durability of plastics table. Newer motors don't use rubber. See also Biodiesel and your vehicle.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
No, I'm not in construction, so that's a big factor if our experiences are different. Probably like most people here, my contracting experience has been computer related, though running the gamut: as an employee of agencies (including as a project manager), a freelancer, and entrepeneur... running projects to do ongoing support (sysadmin, maintenance), install big (i.e. "campus-"wide) networks, and of course, software development, from million dollar entertainment projects to multi-million dollar big-enterprise systems (financial markets). My clients have ranged from about a dozen Fortune 100 to NFPs and schools - but never the government. I've been doing this for about a decade and a half. And I can still count the number of times I got a cost plus job.
:) If I understand you correctly, you can "throw your qualifications on the table," and find potential clients that will agree to cost plus. If this is true, I'm pretty impressed.
I'm thinking now that maybe I should go into construction though. You make it sound great.
Actually, this leads me to a question which I hope isn't too off-topic... When a government agency is considering a choice between contractors who want to bill on a cost plus basis, how does that agency choose a contractor? Do people in your field supply non-binding estimates, or rate sheets for materials and services? Is it based on reputation and handshakes? Or is it all back rooms, family rooms, and college roommates?
This all comes down to how strict the oversight is. If I can invoice for a phenomenal amount and then cut and run when your review process scolds me (assuming you can even afford to fire me), and worse, our contractual arrangement makes determining whether I actually violated our agreement a rather subtle and complex process, so your legal remedies are curtailed... I think the description "blank check" still sounds pretty accurate; I hope you can help me understand why that's not the case.
Putting it as simply as I can, I guess what a construction layman like myself has trouble with, is that if I sent someone off to run a project for me, and then later found out the project was going wrong... and the punch line was that nobody had gone to the trouble of creating limits or an estimate for the work in advance (at least, any that was strong enough to go to court over)... wouldn't I fire that person? Even (or especially) if that person was the federal government?
All this is just because I have trouble imagining how often you really need to do cost plus, rather than your other contract scenarios. Keeping in mind that unexpected events and unreliable estimates are the norm in both of our fields... outside of your hypothetical example, why is it done?
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"I'm thinking now that maybe I should go into construction though. You make it sound great. :) If I understand you correctly, you can "throw your qualifications on the table," and find potential clients that will agree to cost plus. If this is true, I'm pretty impressed."
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No, I did not say that. I was stating my qualifications to be saying the things I'm saying here on
"Actually, this leads me to a question which I hope isn't too off-topic... When a government agency is considering a choice between contractors who want to bill on a cost plus basis, how does that agency choose a contractor? Do people in your field supply non-binding estimates, or rate sheets for materials and services? Is it based on reputation and handshakes? Or is it all back rooms, family rooms, and college roommates?"
If we are supplying services, we bid on rates and margin. Qualifications are written and evaluated as part of the bid (experience, bonding capacity, etc.) A budget will often be provided, but it is just that - a budget. If an Owner wants something more concrete than that, a Guaranteed Maximum Price will be proposed. This is where a contractor says tehy will do the project on a cost-plus basis at X% overhead and Y% profit (BTW, probably single digits on both of those percentages), and the budget is $Z. However, if the costs exceed $Z plus a certain amount, the contractor will take the hit. It limits the Owner's exposure.
"This all comes down to how strict the oversight is. If I can invoice for a phenomenal amount and then cut and run when your review process scolds me (assuming you can even afford to fire me), and worse, our contractual arrangement makes determining whether I actually violated our agreement a rather subtle and complex process, so your legal remedies are curtailed... I think the description "blank check" still sounds pretty accurate; I hope you can help me understand why that's not the case."
Realize that you are skipping over the initial invoice review process. In order for an invoice to get paid, it first must be submitted to the Gov't officer in charge of construction, who then reviews it and either approves it or asks for revisions. After that official is satisfied, they submit it to the money people. And that official can require a LOT of backup material - subcontractor invoices, work tickets, daily reports, etc.
"Putting it as simply as I can, I guess what a construction layman like myself has trouble with, is that if I sent someone off to run a project for me, and then later found out the project was going wrong... and the punch line was that nobody had gone to the trouble of creating limits or an estimate for the work in advance (at least, any that was strong enough to go to court over)... wouldn't I fire that person? Even (or especially) if that person was the federal government?"
Certainly, if a Contractor isn't performing, you let them go. That is far easier under a cost plus arrangement than a fixed bid. But lack of oversight is a problem no matter what the contract structure. You just described a (reputable) Contractor's nightmare of an Owner: lack of knowledge, lack of skills, and just signs off on everything. Then when the final bill comes due, they want EVERYTHING explained before they pay up, even for work they have already signed off on. Yes, an unscrupulous contractor will tell an Owner that they did more work that actually happened, but the alternate is also true: unscrupulous Owners will attempt to renegociate the contract after the fact.
"All this is just because I have trouble imagining how often you really need to do cost plus, rather than your other contract scenarios. Keeping in mind that unexpected events and unreliable estimates are the norm in both of our fields... outside of your hypothetical example, why is it done?"
It is simply a matter of risk - how it is defined, and who bears the burden. Example: http://www.enr.com/news/transportation/archives/04
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Hey, RW, Good to see you in gen-pop.
No, I did not say that. I was stating my qualifications to be saying the things I'm saying here on /.
I never took it otherwise. My comment was a (slightly disrespectful) joke; pointing out that "throw[ing] your qualifications on the table" is now a very important part of the process in getting work, if you don't do it based on price. But you do point out other factors:
If we are supplying services, we bid on rates and margin. Qualifications are written and evaluated as part of the bid (experience, bonding capacity, etc.) A budget will often be provided, but it is just that - a budget. If an Owner wants something more concrete than that, a Guaranteed Maximum Price will be proposed.
OK, all this I understand. You get to make a non-binding estimate. You do fix rates, overhead and profit. Those rates you can plan in advance, of course. And I think the bigger picture here is that, as you bring up the invoice review process, to an extent the buyer can try to verify that your costs really were your costs - if you open up your books and show what you paid out, I suppose the theory goes, then we can do the simple math on overhead and profit... it might sound good on paper.
But what about the distance/time quicksand? That is, if you'll forgive an awful play on words: if I don't know the distance or the time, how can I really know your rate? You won't give a real estimate, and your rates+overhead+profit doesn't tell me how fast you can do the work, let alone how well. All the incentive is now for you to do it as slowly as possible. You don't even have to commit fraud - just take your sweet time. We have, in this quicksand we're now mired in, very few definite answers as to how badly the buyer is getting screwed. This is the problem with reviews, even detailed ones - the same problem that complicates legal remedies.
What sane person wouldn't at this point, at least put more checks on the process? "Cost plus with a guaranteed maximum," as you say? And from there it's a much shorter trip to a fixed bid. In fact, it starts to resemble many "complex" fixed bid contracts that I've seen - the kind that have various contingencies planned for in advance...
Too complex, perhaps, when you're hiring someone to fix your toilet - but these are big money deals. It might be worh the extra effort?
Certainly, if a Contractor isn't performing, you let them go. That is far easier under a cost plus arrangement than a fixed bid.
I disagree. It is never easy. In most cases, whether you are building something or fixing something, you are married to whoever you sign with. Replacing them, even amicably, usually results in enormous expense, trouble, sometimes even danger.
In my experience, fixed bid contracts always explicitly provide for termination, usually with pro-rating or a pre-arranged a lump sum... How is that far less easy than finding out you have a bill for an egregious amount that you might not be able to convincingly argue that you shouldn't have to pay?
But lack of oversight is a problem no matter what the contract structure. You just described a (reputable) Contractor's nightmare of an Owner: lack of knowledge, lack of skills, and just signs off on everything. Then when the final bill comes due, they want EVERYTHING explained before they pay up, even for work they have already signed off on. Yes, an unscrupulous contractor will tell an Owner that they did more work that actually happened, but the alternate is also true: unscrupulous Owners will attempt to renegociate the contract after the fact.
I've certainly seen both - I could tell you some horror stories. But none of this makes a convincing case for cost plus. In fact, I would suggest it says the opposite. More on that in a minute.
First, an oddball design and wildly fluctuating steel prices compelled the bidder to put in a lot of contingency in his bid. Is the price of steel going to go up 50% or 100% over the next 6 months (and no, thos
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