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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.
"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 (?).
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Paper production is not responsible for deforestation.
Wood-pulp paper products are almost entirely from newgrowth forest, where reforestation happens at greater than 1.1 planted trees/harvested one.
Feh
"...In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true..."
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!
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.
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
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.
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.