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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 :)
Sounds like a fun project though. The warnings about the various poisons certainly got my attention.
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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!
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...
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.
Which is why you get your grease at dunkin donuts or tim hortons. Mmmmm.... donuts.... EVERY TIME YOU DRIVE! ;-)
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Uh, yeah. God forbid we deprive the poor starving masses of their USED cooking oil.
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!!!!
Um... i've done a fair amount of frying, and I don't really see how one would fry with oil diluted with water, or, even if it was, if there would be a problem seperating the two. I, on the other hand, know nothing about the fry oil used in chain resteraunts, so hey, maybe its so.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Taking that into account, I'm surprised McDonalds and all the other fast food places aren't doing everything in their power to promote biodiesel. It's another great advertising avenue, and they could make money by selling biodiesel made from their exaust.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
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.
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.
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.
.... 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!
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)
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.
Gasoline is only $2/gallon if your planet is worth nothing.
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
You still can't get more energy out than you put in. Growing that crop waste and feeding it requires energy. That energy *has* to come from somewhere other than biofuels. You are going to use some other fuel source.
Mass conversion to biofuels is relevent only after we figure out a way to produce large quantities of energy without creating large amounts of waste products. You know, like Carbon Dioxide.
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
Hey there's this awesome invention, maybe you've heard of it, it's called the Sun. At our distance from it we receive about 1kW/m^2 of energy at ground level. That is a lot of energy to collect. Photosynthetic organisms make excellent use of this energy and can do all sorts of cool things with it.
Oh yeah we can also convert this energy into other forms and store it for our own use chemically. Crop tenders, processing equipment, water pumps, and many other aspects of biodiesel manufacture can be performed by solar powered machinery.
Besides you seem to not understand the biofuel carbon cycle is closed. Any carbon released from burning biodiesel is carbon absorbed from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. If you've got an end-to-end solar-biodiesel system you're not releasing any extra carbon into the environment. Pumping fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them is releasing carbon into the environment that has been effectively removed from it for millions of years.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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
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!
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!
Yes, obviously, plants need fertilizer to grow. That's why there was no farming before the Haber process.
(Maybe if we cut the subsidies, we wouldn't be throwing so much Haber-derived fertilizer on the ground, and would just rotate in nitrogen-fixing crops or spread shit on the fields.)
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.
Well, I always thought that was the point and that is indeed how the original mother earth news hybrid worked and how diesel locomotives have always worked (if you see a diesel locomotive, you can safely assume it is a hybrid). That and the fact that you only need a tiny engine since you only need peak power a small percentage of the time. Call those series hybrids: Engine drives generator, charges battery, battery drives motor. Car makers have come up with some parallel designs that seem to forget that principle. I think the honda insight uses a parallel hybrid where the motor/generator is connected in parallel with the engine and works in a buck/boost manner sort of like the corner cutting design of an APC UPS. The savings of this design are that you only need half as much peak horsepower from then engine for accelleration but the engine can no longer be optimized for constant speed operation. The Toyota Prius is even more perverse (and their website is so horrible that you can't get a decent explanation) but basically falls into the same category. Parallel hybrids have been around since at least the 1970s. And maybe the advantage of running at a constant speed is significantly less with fuel injected engines than carbuerated engines.
Even the 1979 Mother Earth News hybrid car conversion design that sparked so much interest in hybrids was flawed in that it used the original vehicle transmission and power train. It got about 80mpg but only had a top sustainable speed of 45mph (though it could go much faster for short periods of time using battery power).
Now the way I would design a car (and I do have experience developing motor controllers for mining locomotives and industrial uses) would be different. There would be one motor per wheel. No transmission. No differential (that eliminates 3 on 4WD vehicles). No CV Joints. No drive shaft and U Joint. Indeed the motor would probably be directly coupled to the wheel (indeed the wheel bearings would be the motor bearings) if the motor design can be properly matched to the vehicles speed/torque (locomotives have a simple reducing gear set but they operate at much higher torque). Each motor would have a separate controller, though they would be linked. Full 4 wheel drive. The metal, weight, and cost you saved by eliminating all those unnecessary components (and by reducing the size of the engine) would be reinvested in motors, generators, and batteries. And I would be tempted to have two small gasoline engines and generator instead of 1 large one. This way, you could keep one engine shut down when it wasn't needed and if there was an engine or generator failure you could still drive home but at a slower speed. The dual engine system would be great for people who wanted to experiment with alternative fuels, too, particularly with a second gas tank. You could replace the jets on one of the carbs for a different fuel (like ethanol) or swap out a diesel engine for a gasoline engine (bear in mind these would be small, cheap, and even expendable lawnmower size engines). Likewise, a failure of any of the four motors or controllers would leave the vehicle driveable. For a fully electric vehicle, you pop out the engine/generator modules and replace them with batteries. And of course you have regenerative braking. A vehicle like this would probably be more expensive (and there would certainly be more up front engineering costs) but I would expect considerably more mileage. One could also consider eliminating the steering mechanism. With separate motors and controllers on each wheel it is quite possible to turn the vehicl