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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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
...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?
I read a news story about people in the UK making their own biodiesel and being harrassed for not paying fuel taxes, but I haven't heard anything like that in the US. Which is not to say that it hasn't happened or couldn't.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!!
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
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.
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.
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 (?).
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?
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' $178,000 last year is incorrect. he had already earned it but took the deferred compensation. He would have got it no matter who got that contact.
ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does, or another company that would take the work. Government work has half the margins of private sector work, its slum and the companies that take it suck. (raytheon is still a bad investment. and no one else makes the exact same missles they do.)
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Be careful with the ingredients as these are dangerous chemicals.
The alchohol and sodium hydroxide needed to crack the hydrocarbon chains creates sodium methoxide that is toxic to your nervous system.
You probably should wear gloves, wear a respirator, and not get the stuff on your skin.
You are also still responsible for ~$.50 per gallon fuel tax (depending on where you live) that you would normally pay at the pump.
Silpon Designs
Scented Paper Products
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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...
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?
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)
Now I can buy a hummer!!
www.lonseidman.com
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'
ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does
Schlumberger. I'll take my ten points, please.
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.
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
Bechtel
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.
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!
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
With the right fertilizers and perhaps some genetic engineering, soy if more feasible than fuel-cells or fusion at this point.
Maybe, but I doubt it.
In the end all energy in Biodiesel (and Mineral Oil) comes from the sun. The usable energy in the sun's radiation is proportional to the area of exposure (and of course the angle).
Now, I don't know the enery efficiency of soy, I also do not know the average energy of sun radiation per areal unit... That would be an interesting calculation... Maybe I have some time later today.
I know, though, that current Solarcells efficiency is about 30% and there's some theoretical limit around 50% effiency using semiconductors. Also knowing from other research that current energy consumption has to be drastically reduced in order to make solar only energy supply feasible (because of areal limitation on this planet), I have a hard time believing that growing Soy can solve the problem (even IF Soy has a higher energy efficiency, it can't go higher than 100%).
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
What ever happened to depolymerization?
Idiots. You drain the oil because it becomes contaminated with some very nasty chemicals. If you change the complete oil you can wait twice as long before you have to do it again and in the first half the quality is better than it will be ever compaired with draining half. But you shouldn't take cooking advise from people who can't cook, like the British
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
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!
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 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
The story is here.