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Tiny Biodiesel Reactors
Lee_in_KC writes "A professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State University
developed a small reactor to directly convert vegetable oil to biodiesel.
Goran Jovanovic reports his invention is approximately the size of a credit
card. It pumps vegetable oil and alcohol through parallel channels to
convert the oil into biodiesel almost instantly. Current mainstream
methods to produce biodiesel take more than a day and also produces other byproducts which must be neutralized before disposal or use in other manufacturing processes."
Japanese researchers announced several months ago that they've eliminated the need for expensive acids in biodiesel reactors.
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make install -not war
Not only that, but the point of catalysts is to increase the rate of reaction (in some cases with equilibrium reactions it results in shifting the balance to the other side)
With microchannels like he's using, the surface area is so high you've got a naturally higher rate of reaction, so you may not need the catalyst at all.
First, the amount of energy needed will stay the same, whether you run your truck on gasoline, diesel, alcohol, natural gas, wood, coal, electricity, hydrogen or gooseshit.
Well, yes, but biodiesel's energy comes from the Sun, via photosynthesis. And while solar will eventually run out, when it does the Earth will be uninhabitable anyway.
Second, the result of combustion will always be CO2 (except for Hydrogen and electricity), so forget about cancelling global warming.
Except, of course, all the CO2 put out by burning by biodisel is CO2 that the plants took out of the air in the first place, so there's no increase in atmospheric CO2.
Third, where are you going to grow all the plants needed to make all that vegetable oil and alcohol???
Ah, now you've struck a useful note. Even if all the Earth's arable land surface were farmed at American productivity levels with maximum-production oil crops, we still couldn't displace ordinary diesel use.
However, there is an alternative; oily algae. While the infrastructure to start producing it in necessary qantities would be expensive, it has high-enough oil output per acre to be a practical alternative. And the land for it can be vast tracts of desert, the pools filled with seawater.
Where are you going to take the energy needed to transform all those plants into biodiesel?
The energy content of biodiesel exceeds the energy necessary to process high-oil algae; the primary energy source for the creation of the long oil chains is the plant's photosynthesis. The result is that biodiesel-powered generators could be used to generate the power for the pressing and conversion process.
How many people will starve so the americans can still move their arses in their plush trucks???
None, just like today. Some will continue to starve because of deliberately chosen policies of thier national governments, like every recorded famine of the last thirty years. But changing that is a matter of willingness to violently violate the soverignty of the famine-causing governments, not economics or resource distribution.
There is no miracle solution,
Right, just solutions that require difficult and expensive -- but achievable -- engineering.
Nice karma whoring. That's from your blog eh? I personally collated those statistics and added them to the Wikipedia biodiesel article with this diff. They were subsequently improved with additional unit conversions and I and maybe others added some additional ones later. And your units aren't even right, what's an m/km?. If you're going to take GFDL material, which I do agree you can use freely as long as you follow the license, at least get the fixes too.