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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."
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?
See also the Grassolean folks featuring "Grease Grrrl", Daryl Hannah.
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...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?
Except for NOx (oxides of nitrogen), pretty low
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
"b) Restaurants normally have to pay someone to have their used oil hauled away."
Not anymore -- most restaraunts get money back for recycling purposes...some have even proscecuted folks that have taken their cooking oil because while it makes very little money -- it is still a few hundred $$$s a month for them.
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.
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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 (?).
Forget about soy beans then and think about using hemp instead. Hemp has enough bio mass and grows practically anywhere.
emission is a catchall for a lot of things. more detailed statistics can be foun on the biodiesel.org website.
from my understanding it's gotmore nox and less c02 (especially since the c02 is mitigated via the growing of the plants), but cancer-causing and smog-forming particulates are drastically reduced (something like 30-90%) again find the stats on the website or on the epas relevant pages.
You filter the oil first... if it's used from a restaurant then you'd filter it a number of times before actually using it.
Petrol and cooking oil are not the same type of hydrocarbon (they don't have the same number of carbon atoms in the chain). For whatever reason, using high concentrations of biodiesel has a solvent effect. If you have a diesel car or truck that has been running on dino-diesel for a long time and suddenly switch to B100 (100% bio-d, chances are high that you'll have to get a new fuel filter because the bio-d will break up all the crud that has accumulated in the fuel tank and deposit it into your filter, clogging it.
And when using waste oil for bio-d, you do have to process and clean it before putting it in your car's fuel tank.
Which around here, is nobody. In fact I'm suprised this guy can get the oil for free. Most of the fast food places and restaurants have contracts already with people who buy their used oil.
This is only "cheap" because he's able to get something for free, that is not free. I'm sure if he had to actually pay for the cooking oil it would be just as expensive (if not more) than regular diesel.
Plus of course, there's only a limited amount of "used cooking oil" from restaurants. If everyone wanted to buy it for their cars then the price would naturally rise.
Biodiesel is already commercially available in Europe, either as a blend with dinodiesel or as 100%. Check this link [Rix Biodiesel] out: http://www.rixbiodiesel.co.uk
I believe this is being done in many US states also.
And:
ie. Biodiesel provides no net increase in carbon dioxide.Most comparisons focus on the difference between biodiesel and dino-diesel, not gasoline. However, in general, gasoline has higher levels of greenhouse gasses and unburned hydrocarbons. Biodiesel produces more nitrogen oxides than gasoline, which, combined with unburned hydrocarbons, makes smog.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
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
All diesels can run on biodiesel. The only issue is that biodiesel is highly solvent, so it will "eat" rubber hoses and gaskets. They must be replaced with synthetics.
If you are planning to run straight or waste vegetable oil (SVO/WVO), then you need to modify the vehicle.
Biodiesel is not SVO. It has been processed with methanol and lye to convert long carbon chains to short.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
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.
Old news in the UK!
We have the 2nd most expensive petrol in the world with our excessive 'fuel duty' which is worded vaguely enough that it HAS been applied to cars converted such as these.
see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/2312521.stm
(they can handle a slashdotting...)
"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'
Yeah, but then you get nonsense like this, wherein an environmental scientist writes up a beautiful plan for making Biodiesel for the whole US and then carefully downplays the fact that the cost per gallon exceeds $4.00 before you even ship the product to a fueling station
This kind of thing only works if it's cheap, and it's only cheap for this guy because so few other people do it.
ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does
Schlumberger. I'll take my ten points, please.
Right, but it's a question of scale.
According to the article linked in this slashdot discussion, the US uses the equivalent of about 141 billion gallons of diesel fuel per year.
That's around 500 gallons per person in the country. You'd need a thousand times as many restaurant fryers to come up with that much vegetable oil.
Biodiesel is renewable, yes, but it all has to come from somewhere. How much soy, or what have you needs to be grown to make a gallon of biodiesel? Is there enough arable land to make enough fuel to run the world economy in place of petroleum?
-It's about 12.5 gallons/year for one acre of Soy from what I could find.
-There's 470 million acres of arable land in the US.
-Average gas usage/person in the us is 1,050 gallons per year
-US population is 293 million
So, maximum output is 5.875 billion gallons of diesel/year. Usage is somewhere around 297 billion gallons of gasoline/year. SO it's not possible to completely replace gasoline with soy.
The other thing is that oil prices are relatively stable over time because the extraction process is fairly predicatable. They know how much is in the ground, how much is left, and how much it will cost to get it out. With a farmed fuel, the weather, from year to year can cause potentially large swings in price.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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.
E-Mail Revives Calls to Probe Halliburton, Cheney
Biofuels become much more practical when produced usng genetically engineered enzymes (such as high-activity cellulase to digest cellulose waste products from existing crops), or genetically-engineering microbes that do their own enhanced photosynthesis-to-fuel production.
Bechtel
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!
"Don't bother looking for any links, he's wrong. Toyota Doesn't Do Diesel and they have no plans to either."
They aren't available in the US but Toyota "does do diesel". They even make diesel engines for other car manufacturers (e.g. the diesel version of the Mini is a Toyota-made engine...again, not available in the US).
Do a google search of "Toyota Diesel".
Then you were doing something wrong.
Some facts: one gallon of vegetable oil will produce one gallon of biodiesel (you also add some methanol and lye, but not in large quantities).
One acre of each of these crops can produce this many gallons of biodiesel: soybean 49, sunflower 84, canola 76.
when she said it produced no carbon dioxide, I just switched the channel.
Biodiesel produces no net increase in carbon dioxide. Burning biodiesel does release carbon dioxide, but the plants grown to produce the biodiesel convert carbon dioxide to oxygen in the same or higher amounts.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
I would worry less about the fuel filter and more about the plastic parts in fuel system dissolving. A number of them are made of plastics that are great in gasoline, M85, and regular dead-dinosaur diesel, but will melt away in Biodiesel, especially the European stuff made out of rapeseed oil. I think it's safe to say you will void your warranty if you use this stuff. Yes, I work in automotive fuel systems.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
Almost right: kinetic energy (KE) = 0.5 * m * v^2
Halve the mass of the vehicle and you halve the amount of energy required.
Another intersting formula is: F = ma.
If you have a heavier vehicle then you have to use more force to accelerate it, which of course mean more energy being expended.
We can all drive a little more slowly and little less aggresively to save energy. But if we don't want to be bored to tears then then the other option is to reduce the weight of the vehicle. You're right though, it's stupid to move around extra weight.
Is one gallon of diesel equivalent to one gallon of gas? No...my truck makes 10-12 mpg on gas. An equivalent truck on diesel typically makes around 20+ mpg last I checked (1995).
And, what does it matter as long as we can make a dent in gas consumption. We don't want another end-all-be-all energy, do we?
btw - Do you think swings in my area from $1.30 to $2.00 per gallon over a few months is stable?
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.
You can tell it's engaged, because if you depress the gas a little more, the RPM won't immediately jump, but rather it will rise linearly with your speed, since there's no fluid link (from the torque converter).
Try it on the highway; open the throttle a LITTLE more at highway speeds. The lockup can't handle too much torque, though, so if you press the gas too much further down, it will disengage the lockup and you'll see the tach spike up a bit.
-Z
Soy is not the most efficient crop for producing vegetable oil. You can get around 100 gallons from an acre of Canola (rape seed). That will significantly alter your calculations. The other ingredients to make biodiesel are lye and methanol. I'm not sure where methanol comes from?
It's because the demand for manual transmissions is pretty low. Manufacturers just go to the parts bin and find the appropriate (manual) tranny. If the manual they match up to the vehicle is less robust (in either strength of cooling) than the slushbox they originally speced out for the vehicle, sobeit -- it's hardly a significant market share. They just downgrade the rated towing capacity for the manual to match the transmission they put in there...the automatic tranny car keeps it's higher rating. Many manufacturers of sport sedans do the same thing with their more powerful motors. For example, the Lincoln LS V6 was available in a stick, but the V8 wasn't. They're weren't trying to undermine standard trannies -- and a stick can certainly hold that torque. They just didn't have the right manual tranny for the job and didn't want to develop a new one for that market.
IMO, manual transmissions are still better suited to pulling. Less moving/friction parts to break/replace, and I believe that they can be built stronger and cooled easier...which is one of the reasons why tractor trailers still have manual transmissions. For towing, a manual may be better anyway. They tend to hold a gear better, which may be good if you're towing in hilly regions and need to drop a gear to maintain/shed speed. Most tiptronic/sportamatic/autostick/whatever trannies can't even hold a gear.
Anyway, I digress...but this may be a case similar to Betamax Vs. VHS.
-Turkey
I'm all for recycling, but is it really true that oil can be used again without its properties changing? I thought one of the reasons motor oil has to be replaced is that the hydrocarbon chains start to break apart and reduce lubrication after a while. Sorry for being a pedant :)
:p
Recycling vegetable oil is not important anyway. The oil was produced by CO2 fixing plants within the last year, you could just burn it and not add anything to the Carbon Cycle (which is why using it to fuel cars is so cool).
Btw, just bought a fresh bottle of extra virgin olive oil. That's pretty much straight from the plant, and clean enough for me
No transmission necessary for hybrids. The entire point of running a hybrid vehicle is that you can run an engine attached to a generator at constant (optimal-efficiency) RPMs, which produces power that goes to the batteries and the electric motors driving the wheels, instead of a direct-conversion setup which requires the engine to operate through a widely-varying range as in mechanical transmissions.
Electric motors don't have an 'optimal' fuel-efficient or torque-producing range of RPMs in the sense that internal combustion engines do. If you want more power, you apply more juice, and the electric motors happily spin faster all the way up to their rated capacity, providing high levels of torque through the entire range.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
> It is free because no one else is competing with you for that resource.
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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)
Like, depending on who you believe, it may require more energy to produce a gallon of biodesel than you'd get from burning the biodesel.
I think everyone worth listening to would agree that it requires more energy to produce biodiesel than you get from burning it. The question is how much of the energy comes directly from the sun vs. from petrol. I think this has been aswered somewhat. In the US midwest it takes about as much petrol to create the biodiesel as it displaces, in Brazil it takes much less petrol to create the biodiesel than the petrol it displaces. Climate and technology is the major difference. In the midwest you have poor soils, poor climate and a very resource intensive farming methods. In Brazil you have poor soil, good climate, and more efficient farming technology. Midwestern farmers are buying up land in Brazil at the moment, and I'm sure we will adopt some of their technology too our climate and crops someday. Significant amounts of government funded research was needed to create their process, and it's based on using sugar which doesn't grow in our climate.
That number is about double what we consume, if you mean gasoline. The 1050 gallons a year / person seems accurate (20 gallons a week), that is only among people who drive.
In 2003 We consumed 20 Million Barrels per day. (ref: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html). That would be 7.3 Billion barrels a year.
There are 42 Gallons per barrel, which gives us 306 Billion Gallons per year of crude oil. This number seems very close to 297 Billion Gallons, until you note that only 45% of this is used for automotive fuel.
Most of the "using up" of engine oil is due to the limited ability of the oil (and the additives packages) to absorb various forms of contamination (carbon, unburned hydroncarbons, water, metal, etc.). while still retaining suitable lubrication qualities. Some temperatute dependent "cooking" of the oil is also a factor, but this "cooked" oil is still a lot closer to your clean oil than the crude oil it started out as.
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.
What ever happened to depolymerization?
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
No way! The chemical properties of oil change when it's heated. Used oil causes cancer!
All oils may be recycled. But they're not gonna be used to the same purpose! Give me a break, recycle cooking oil to fry stuff? Just the thought of it makes me sick!
My granma uses NaOH and used cooking oil to make soap. And she makes a very nice soap. This is a fine way to convert a highly polluting product into a useful and environment-friendly one.
soybean is not a high oil yield crop. However, there are many crops, from iol type sunflower to Honge trees that are capable of producing 200+ gal of oil per acre. It should also be noted that ethanol from non edible crops like swithgrass, etc is on the horizon. Switchgrass can easily yield 10 ton/acre. At 80 gal/ton this translates to 800 gal per acre. BIOFUELS ARE THE FUTURE. They were here before petro, and they will be here after petro.
If you want to get philosophical, you can say that living kills, or other totally redundant stuff.
Saying that all causes cancer is a good way of ending a discussion, but it adds nothing to it.
What's wrong with rapeseed oil?
Check out the site... greasecar.com
You can use standard filtered vegetable oil without all of the biodiesel headaches.
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.
We pay the same price [or did before the recent hikes] per gallon of fuel that you do, it's that while we pay 100% tax, you guys pay 500% tax.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
No its not - you just have to pay the tax!
UK tax rules
I am brewing my own biodiesel legally in the UK!
http://prisonerblog.zapto.org
Canola IS rapeseed.