Slashdot Mirror
Utilizing Bio-fuel Beyond Experimental Use
grumpyman writes "A C$14 million factory near Montreal started producing biodiesel fuel two weeks ago from the bones, innards and other parts of farm animals. At full capacity plant will produce 35 million liters (9.2 million U.S. gallons) of biodiesel a year, the greenhouse gas equivalent of removing 16,000 light trucks or 22,000 cars from the roads."
For some time I've thought the future of automotive fuel lies in biodiesel rather than hydrogen. Hydrogen is just very hard to work with because of its low energy density and the fact it is normally a gas. Generation, transportation, storage and utilization all face large challenges.
For biodiesel, all the steps except generation are already solved and the infrastructure in place, and the generation problems do not seem large. (Even without the existing infrastructure, I suspect biodiesel wins economically.)
Generation from algae is particularly promising, as it doesn't require arable land, and can use salt water.
Check out my website: Playfully Clever
Just because no one the submitter knows uses biodiesel doesn't make biodiesel an "experimental" fuel.
There's a shuttle service of ca. 6-8 tractors towing two trams circling the entire grouds and they've been running biodiesel from local farmers for years.
I think there are plans for an "all natural" city in the northern part of the state, which will be limited to -E, biodisel, fuel cells, etc. due to switch over within the next year or two.
Not unless you are a farmyard animal, apparently.
As every car freak knows, its all about horse power!
My DeLorean has a Mr. Fusion powerplant installed. I called the manufacturer and they said that bio-diesel can be used in it. Hooray!
Biodiesel is PEOPLE!!! It's PEOPLE!!!!
Lousy facepalm.
Premptively, let me make this very clear so we don't need to have the same discussion everytime biodiesel comes up.
First, biodiesel has a positive energy balance, to the tune of about 3.2 units out for every unit you put in. http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24089.pdf
Second, biodiesel is 78% carbon neutral with regard to greenhouse gas emissions (see previous pdf). That is because the majority of the carbon emitted when you burn a gallon of biodiesel was captured from the atmosphere when you grew the plant to make the vegetable oil. However, the methanol used to make the biodiesel (fatty acid methyl ester) is made from natural gas, at least in the US. You could make 100% renewable ethyl ester biodiesel from ethanol, or make methanol from landfill recovery biogas, but we don't currently.
Third, soy and corn oil are crummy crops to make biodiesel from. But that's where the lobbying money is right now. Other plants have much higher yields.
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
Forth, no, it isn't a question of "food or fuel"? We can do both! Whenever you hear that argument ask yourself whether the person is well meaning but misinformed, or as been happening recently, is part of astroturf campaign to preserve the status quo of the petroleum economy.
Want to try making some biodiesel yourself?
http://www.biodieselcommunity.org/howitsmade/
Already making biodiesel and want to show it off?
http://www.cafepress.com/RenewableWear
This is simply a function of the efficiency of the vehicle in question. It's not a problem of any single fuel. Biodiesel burns quite clean in an efficient engine at operating temperature.
Have you ever smelled a biodiesel vehicle in operation or at rest? Uhg! What a stench.
I have yet to smell one that was offensive to me. The worst I've smelled was a bit remimniscent of carmelization. Diesel smells much worse.
Have you ever driven a biodiesel vehicle? They are a bit quieter than when running on regular diesel but they also lack power compared to when running on regular diesel.
No. I've driven an SVO for a year. It had more power on the vegetable oil than the diesel. The fuel system ran smoother and the engine knocked less.
Biodiesel may become more widely used in commercial or off-road applications but, it will never take off for highway vehicles.
What do you mean take off? A certain percentage of auto-diesels are operating on it right now. Maybe you should say "everyone that uses biodiesel is a hoser, and can take off", or just grumble to your friends at the refinery.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
I have seen them. I don't see what you describe.
I live in Denton, TX. The City has it's own Biodiesil Plant, one of the first. All the city vehicles run on B20; all the city trucks, heavy equipment, garbage trucks, etc...
Even though, its not 100% biodiesil (B20 is 80% diesel 20% biodesieal) they use a remarkable amount of it. There are a few more public biodiesel pumps in DFW area, and I think one other city around here uses it for thier equipment.
Ours plant is out by the land fill, and basicly all the vegetable oils, from restaruants and farms etc.., get processed. Pretty cool, and not experimental at all.
Now I've seen Everything
http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/007802.php
It covers: Bio, Electricity, Fossil Fuels, Geothermal, Hydrogen, Nuclear, Solar, Water, Wind
US biodiesel production will reach 75 million gallons in 2005
A former malting facility in Jefferson, Wisconsin will be converted to house an innovative, $200 million ethanol production plant that, in addition to 140 million gallons of ethanol a year, will produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel and, yes, 8 million pounds of tilapia fish filets.
an Illinois fertilizer plant that previously used natural gas as a feedstock is being converted to utilize gasified coal instead, and will produce 87 million gallons/year of synthetic gasoline and electricity to boot.
and with solar: Plans for large solar thermal power plants have recently been approved in Nevada and California, with a 64 MW plant planned near Boulder City and a 4,500-acre, 500 MW plant north of Los Angeles.
The "White Smoke" you speak of is - oh my god - Steam! Yep, hot water - other stuff, too, but that's what makes it white.
I'm not sure what Biodiesel vehicles you've been stuck behind in traffic. My only experience with biodiesel vehicles is a local hobbyist who buys (cheaply) used oil from local restaurants and filters/processes it, and it doesn't stink at all when his old Volvo Diesel is buring that fuel. In fact, it smells faintly of french fries. And I've ridden with him many times on the highway; he certainly doesn't have any trouble getting into traffic or passing slower vehicles; I've never seen him drive over 75 mph, but since 70 is the highest speed limit on local hiways, I can't imagine *needing* much more. Most resources one can locate on Google suggest a 10% loss in power. Significant, but not fatal; a 225 HP diesel will be a ~203 hp biodiesel. A matching 10% loss in 'economy' is also measured, so if you got 25 MPG, you're now going to get ~22.5 MPG. Again, not fatal from a pragmatic standpoint.
To the poster earlier that noted that it must still produce CO2, therefore cannot be carbon neutral - your assumptions are wrong. It's carbon neutral because it's adding no NEW CO2 to the atmosphere - ie, it can only release CO2 that was already in the atmosphere, and then bound by plants in the production of leaves, seeds, stems, etc. Thus, using biodiesel adds no NEW CO2 to the atmosphere, and cannot increase the overall CO2 percentage; burning petrochemicals releases CO2 that has been locked under the crust of the planet, increasing the overall CO2 content of the atmosphere.
To anyone who's looking at this thread and interested in Biodiesel, I suggest you get cozy with google and find out for yourself, rather than paying attention to the FUD here.
Thinking outside my Head
Farm tractors burn diesel to harvest the peanuts
And farmers can cut the process's net carbon contribution by running their tractors on biodiesel. In the future they may be modified to burn straight vegetable oil, using diesel only to start up and shut down the engine.
fetiziliers made from and processed with petroleum are throw into the field
Not all farming methods use petrofertilizers.
Montreal stores report hot dog shortages
My first bio-fuel powered car was a Brazilian 1983 Chevette with a 1.6 liter motor burning 96% pure ethanol. For over 25 years there have been ethanol pumps in every Brazilian gas station.
Besides the cars that burn strraight ethanol, the gasoline distilled from petroleum in Brazil gets a mix from 20% to 25% ethanol, depending on the season. Today, most new Brazilian cars are equipped with "flex" motors that can burn any proportion, from 0% to 100% ethanol.
I see one everyday. My VW doesn't smoke unless the engine has coldsoaked for a couple of days below freezing. And then the smoke clears up within the first minute.
Have you ever smelled a biodiesel vehicle in operation or at rest? Uhg! What a stench.
Why yes I have. I've even gotten down on all fours and sniffed my tailpipe. It has a distinct smell, but it doesn't smell like fries or eggrolls, and it smells much much better than the sulfur laden petrodiesel we get here in New England.
Have you ever driven a biodiesel vehicle? They are a bit quieter than when running on regular diesel but they also lack power compared to when running on regular diesel.
I drive one everyday. It's certainly not lacking in power and the increased cetane rating makes the engine run much smoother. The BTU content of biodiesel is about 95% of that of petrodiesel. So does it get slightly worse mileage? Sure. But it isn't the anemic dog you make it out to be.
Biodiesel may become more widely used in commercial or off-road applications but, it will never take off for highway vehicles.
My commute is 90 miles by highway and I use biodiesel. I know of two retail biodiesel pumps just off I91 (one in Holyoke and one in Brattleboro). I think you are misinformed.
Finally, I have a question for you Mr. Anonymous Coward. You seem rather put off by your biodiesel exposure. Is that just armchair experience from surfing or have your actually driven a BD powered vehicle. If so, was it a modern german turbodiesel like my '03 Jetta or was it a 20 year old out of tune beater MB hippiemobile. No offense to the old-school MB diesel hippies, but they make the rest of us look bad.
Unless there is a tax or government subsidy for recyclable diesel (diesel in which the CO2 was trapped by plants recently)
Motor vehicle fuels are already taxed. Drastically cutting taxes on biofuels compared to petrofuels can subsidize them without "subsidizing" them, although European countries generally have more room to cut taxes than North American countries do.
few consumers will double or triple their fuel costs to use a sustainable energy source.
Unless worldwide crude oil extraction peaks and the supply curve moves so as to double or triple petrodiesel prices anyway. Then biodiesel will become even more attractive.
9,200,000/42/365 = 600 BOPD.
The USA uses about 20,000,000 BOPD. Canada and the USA use over 22 million BOPD. This is a drop in the bucket.
If they scaled this up by a factor of 1000 (a $14 BILLION plant) then this would still be small potatoes compared to what we need. Even the Alberta tar sands expansions which will take us to about 3.3 million BOPD with investments in the 10's of billions and maybe 100's of billions by 2015 are small potatoes compared to what we need.
Yes - every bit helps but...
Lets look at the 4 top oil fields:
Ghawar (Saudit Arabia) 5 million BOPD Likely near decline
Canaterall (Mexico) 2.2 million BOPD In decline, 14% per year
Bergan (Kuwait) 1.6 million BOPD In decline, rate unknown
DaQing (China) 1 million BOPD In decline, 7% per year
These 4 feilds produce about 10 million BOPD, or about 12.5% of the world's 82 million BOPD production.
A decline rate of 10% in these 4 feilds translates to a loss of over 1 million BOPD. If we multiply that biodiesel plant by 1000 we still do not make up for the lost production of the top 4 oil fields.
The North sea went into decline in 1999 at a rate of about 14%. The UK became an oil importer this year.
Indonesia became an oil importer this year.
Australia use to be supplied by Indoneasia and since Indonesia can no longer supply Oz, Oz also has lined up at the Straits of Hormuz, hat in hand, asking for middle east oil.
This plant is just a drop in the bucket! If we build a plant like this every day for the next 10 years it won't be enough. That is how big the world oil peak problem is. We do not have a workable energy policy in place.
Has anyone even heard any of the damn pollies even dicusssing it seriously?
The most believable estimate I have is that world oil production will peak in 2007 and this is an optimistic estimate taking into consideration every oil production project on the planet.
Have you ever seen a biodiesel vehicle in operation? White smoke pumping out.
I have followed my friend who has a biodiesel burning Dodge/Cummins truck from Nashville, Tn to Dayton, Oh. (among other trips that are 100s of miles) I didn't see any "white smoke".
Have you ever smelled a biodiesel vehicle in operation or at rest? Uhg! What a stench.
The slight smell of french fries maybe, but I like french fries. No worse than any other diesel.
Have you ever driven a biodiesel vehicle? They are a bit quieter than when running on regular diesel but they also lack power compared to when running on regular diesel.
He pulls a huge trailer packed with heavy gear all over the southeast when going to hamfests. It has plenty of power.
--fatboy
The city also runs Natural Gas in it's busses. The air quality in Dallas is better than it used to be, based just on my impression of the way things are.
Bio is the way to go IMO, especially when produced by small time operators. We have so much of the raw materiel that is treated as waste matter (cooking oil), we can kill multiple birds with one or two old water heater processors.
Water vapor is the gaseous form of water. It's fog that's liquid water in suspension in air.
Prion disease might be an in issue if you started ingesting the biofuel. :P
:( :)
On a slightly different note, I wonder what consequences it will have on the utilization of farm animals. Kind of puts a different twist on the idea of horsepower.
I'm going to assume you're trolling. If not I have to ask how did someone as dumb as you get a four digit /. ID? You're giving the rest of us a bad name.
And, fucking *Insightful* moderation? Jeesus...
Deleted
Although small, this processing plant in Canada is at least a good step, we need more setups like this.
In the UK, there is a 20p/litre tax relief for biodiesel, but this isn't enough. Even with current oil prices biodiesel is still more expensive. What we need is to completely drop the tax on biodiesel, that way oil companies and others will see a reason to invest. The tax break would also need to be guaranteed for a decent length of time, say 20 years so that investments would pay off.
There are problems with biodiesel. It would require vast tracts of land, and would probably end up using land in the 3rd and developing worlds to meet our needs for fuel. This land may have been better used for local food production. IMHO, this is not a huge problem, as it would provide much needed investment into developing and 3rd world nations, and of course many ppl would be employed to harvest the crops.
Some interesting biodiesel sites:
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html
http://www.vegetableoildiesel.co.uk/
You're not seeing the big picture. Sure, this is not the be all, end all solution to the entire environment problem, but it might turn out to be a large piece of the puzzle. Other pieces might include finding a way to make cheap plastics and rubber-like materials out of something other than oil, somehow changing the suburban lifestyle in the U.S. so that public transport starts to make sense, creating environemnt friendly batteries or some other form of portable energy source, finding a way to control pests without using dangerous pesticides and finding a reliable way to free the mallocs.
Complaining that the potential solution to one of our biggest environmental problems will not make the entire problem go away is short-sighted and unproductive.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Biodiesel really is amazing!
Bzzzt. Back to intro physics for you. To quote MC Hawking:
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fsck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!"
Biodiesel is just solar energy, in liquid form.
Unless you knew this, in which case, if you were making a joke, you should have used a smiley.
A couple of years ago, a company called Changing World Technologies was all the news. They had perfected a process for converting garbage to oil. There was an article in Discovery magazine. They built a plant to convert turkey guts and had plans to roll out the technology to several more plants. It really hasn't moved forward a lot. I presume they are having some kind of trouble. www.changingworldtech.com
One of the statistics that Changing World cited was that if you could convert all the agricultural WASTE in the US to oil, that would do away with the need to import oil. If that statistic is true, then what Rothsay has done is really important. If their process is actually economical then they have beaten Changing World to the prize.
The other thing not to be ignored is that the Changing World process, and this one too presumably, destroys the prions that cause mad cow disease. This process may take animal carcasses out of the livestock feed chain by providing an alternate market for slaughterhouse refuse and dead stock.
On the other hand, their business stinks, literally, and I don't expect that to change. Anyway, I hope they succeed.
If you meant drilled oil, perhaps yes, it could peak in 2007. I don't think so, but it could be.
But there are projects to unlock the oil sands in Canada, they'll be online and working soon, and they'll certainly take up the slack for any drop in liquid crude pumping.
I'm not nearly as concerned about "peak oil" as I am about the precipitous rise in use. Yes, we're bad in the US, buying so many SUVs we don't get any better gas mileage than we did in the 70s. But the real issue is so many countries that are increasing their oil use many times for cars and power generation (article said Indonesia became an importer this year for example.
If the rate of oil use continues to rise rapidly, it doesn't matter how much we drill, we can drill it faster and faster, and we'll just bring the true date of peak oil sooner.
The 3rd world is going to increase their industrialization, so energy use will rise. We have to increase our energy efficiency to minimize the problems, and find alternate sources (including nuclear) also.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I know it sounds like a violation of the law of thermodynamics, but it isn't.
If you put in x energy to obtain the biodiesel, and get x * 3 energy from the biodiesel itself, you win. The energy that is being obtained from the biodiesel is actually solar energy, which, while technically a finite resource, isn't going to run out in our lifetimes, or those of our children, etc., etc. Unless humans survive, what, another 5 billion years?
They're not the first to do this.. there's a product called Petrel made from seabirds. The same firm also makes fuel from surplus wine and other renewal sources, in addition to a range of other interesting fuels.
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
Exept we really haven't.
Say we have a Thermal Depolymerization Plant (which is what the article seems to talk about). Into the plant I dump animal wastes (offal, bones, skin, etc.) I add a little energy to run the process. Out the other side I get a hydrocarbon soup which is essentially light crude oil (technically not BioDiesel) as well as some other goodies like methane gas, nearly pure carbon (as a solid) and clean water.
Lo and behold, the energy I can get from burning the oil product is greater than the energy I put into the perocess! We can litterally take a portion of our output (usually the methane) and feed it back into the plant to keep it running. How can this be?!
Answer: There is energy in the animal wastes that you are not taking into consideration. Energy that otherwise would be completely wasted. Energy in the animal wastes + energy added to process < energy available as fuel product. This satisfies the laws of thermo just fine. But your USEFUL energy has increased. Looking only at the useful energy, your efficiency is up around 560% (see wiki article). If you consider the energy in the waste as part of the balance, the real efficiency is closer to 85%
Also, since pure carbon solids is a byproduct, you are actually removing carbon from the atmosphere. All of that carbon was once CO2, absorbed by plants and then eaten by animals which you then processed into fuel. Even if you burn all that carbon again there is a net zero change in CO2 levels. Thus, carbon-neutral.
What I find most interesting is how the process could possibly be tweaked to work on nearly anything carbon-based, like plastics. Imagine digging up old landfills and recycling the contents as fuel (organics and plastics) and materials (metals, glass, etc.)
=Smidge=
Some of the people who contracted Mad Cow disease were vegetarians who got it from using fertilizer that (unknown to them) contained cow offal. There's no question that if a prion gets blasted out of someone's tailpipe, it will wind up in the food chain. The prion that causes Mad Cow is extremely difficult to destroy - it's a protein molecule, not a living organism. Even heat as high as 360C will not break it down, and traditional chemical sterilization doesn't work. I would be extremely worried about using any animals known to carry prion brain wasting disease (cow, deer, humans).
Horses are probably OK.
Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!
I recently splurged and bought a VW Jetta TDI simply because the highway mileage is so good (~50 mpg) and it can run at least partially on biodiesel. My old newspaper The Wisconsinite ran a story on biodiesel (b.d.) in 2004, and I've been excited about it ever since. My Jetta seems to run a little more smoothly with it, and it doesn't smell bad in cold weather like dino diesel does.
The problem currently I have with it is trying to find it in great quantities. I fill up at a CENEX agricultural co-op gas station. They have B2, which is 98% dino diesel, 2% bio. It's still mostly dino diesel, of course, which annoys me. But it's better than nothing. What I really want is B20, which is 20% bio, 80% dino. And during the summer, I want to try progressively higher ratios of bio to dino diesel. Volkswagen officially approves using B5. I'm pretty sure then it can take a higher grade biodiesel.
The problem of availability will be overcome in good time. There are b.d. production centers opening up around the country, everywhere from Oklahoma to Nevada, and one coming soon near Madison, Wisconsin (which is near to me). I'm contemplating opening a biodiesel fueling station in Milwaukee. Anyone interested? I regularly post about b.d./alt.energy on my blog; you can easily reach me through there.
-- haaz.
The article states that the plant processes animal remains that come from a rendering plant, having already been cooked down to glop. The question this raises is simply, does the analysis take into account the energy requirement of the rendering plant?
The promotion of "gasahol" here in the US turned out in fact to be a scam. The alcohol (distilled from corn) that we add to our gasoline actually REQUIRES MORE PETROLEUM to run the farm machinery and the stills than the energy content it brings to your tank. When this was revealed some years ago, suddenly gasoline with alcohol added was re-branded "oxegenated fuel" and touted as an anti-pollution measure. In reality, the legal mandate for its use is largely the result of intense lobbying by agri-business (in particular, Archer Daniels Midland) to rake in the subsidies the government pays to corn producers.
About the only place in the world where the use of biofuel in vehicles has been a net energy gain is Brazil, where they produce large quantities of ethanol from cane sugar, using the stalks as boiler fuel for the distillation. (A "rum-based economy", if you will...) This is however far less than ideal, since the distilleries generate quite a bit of pollution and the whole enterprise contributes to destruction of the Amazon rain forest to obtain more arable land.
The notion that ethanol production is an energy loss stems from the eroneous conclusions of David Pimenthal, a Corenell university insect scientist. He should have stuck with his bugs.
Making fuel from corn however is not nearly as good an idea as making it from plants such as hemp.
(grumble, it's 2005, and Slashdot STILL doesn't have an edit function...)
If you REALLY want to play the gasoline-in-a-modern-diesel game, here's a thread over at TDIClub on it...
http://forums.tdiclub.com/showthread.php?t=123995
"European countries generally have more room to cut taxes than North American countries do."
::shrug::
And they don't. Cut them, I mean. A friend of mine lives in the UK and has told me stories about how you can go to jail for using biodiesel you make yourself because it isn't subject to the same exorbitant taxes their petrofuels are.
What apparently goes right over Parliament's heads is that they have a huge opportunity to lead the way in alternative fuels technology, but I guess they just don't think their constituents are interested. Maybe they aren't.
+++ATH0
"One MJ of biodiesel requires an input of 1.2414 MJ of primary energy," Which means you consume more primary energy (ie Oil) than the process creates as an output, which results in a net loss.
So what? Every process for extracting or converting energy will result in a net loss; this is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. But here, "primary energy" does not mean fossil energy from petroleum. This ratio of 1 to 1.24 counts the solar energy stored in the soybean oil: "The largest contribution to primary energy (87%) is the soybean oil conversion step because this is where we have chosen to include the feedstock energy associated with the soybean oil itself" (13-14). Fossil energy is called "process energy" in this analysis. Furthermore: