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RV Processes Own Fuel on Cross-Country Trip
An anonymous reader writes "Frybrid has realized the dream of Dr. Emmet Brown's Delorean: putting garbage directly into your vehicle, and have it be turned into directly into fuel. This past fall, Frybrid installed a system into a 40' luxury RV that sucked up waste vegetable oil from the back of restaurants, removed the water and filtered it, and then burned the dry and cleaned vegetable oil as fuel. The family drove their converted RV from Seattle to Rhode Island on $47 worth of diesel fuel. Plans are underway for a smaller version of the system to fit in the bed of a pickup truck."
They did this on Mythbusters, they took used cooking oil, filtered it, and put it into a standard Diesel truck. It ran perfectly normally.
As they observed on the show, the only reason it's such a cheap source of fuel is because it's a waste product now. If people start using it as fuel, it will cost just as much as Diesel fuel does.
Used vegetable oil has to be the stupidest replacement fuel ever thought up. Sure it's cheap now, it's a waste product... but not for long the way these soon to be short lived startups are going.
a s_fuel#Waste_Vegetable_Oil) of the current petroleum demands... sure it's better than draining an non-renewable resource... but it's no replacement.
The only ones who will profit from a Veg Oil economy will be McDonald's and the like... their oil will be just as valuable before and after use, thus they spend nothing on oil at all, instead of throwing it away at the end of the day they sell it for their cost.
Eventually demand will surpass capacity to produce... and this is probably 1% (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetable_oil_used_
I surely wouldn't want to stake my future wealth on it by starting a business around it... the economics just don't work... if you are successful it won't take long to put yourself out of business. When the veggie oil starts matching unleaded, you will have capped.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
When ever you read about someone with this wonderful used fryer-oil powered vehicle, they're always taking it on some cross-country trip. Is that because if they stay in one place they use up all the fryer-oil from the local restaurants?
I'm only half joking about that. The people who advocate this stuff have the same program as the Verizon employees who can't understand the difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents. They just don't seem to grasp the orders of magnitude difference between the amount of corn oil this country produces vs the amount of crude oil it consumes.
Thats just it, it will not catch on and prices will remain low, or at least mostly free.
As it is, Diesel is not a popular technology in the United States. Most consumers in northern states avoid it for fear of jelling in cold weather, and Diesel all-around has gotten a bad reputation for small vehicles. Consumers prefer Gasoline to Diesel. The only place where Diesel is strong is in the transportation industry as just about every transportation truck fleet is Diesel powered. Now, considering that consumer Diesel vehicles are a small market to begin with, Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) vehicles are an even smaller fraction of this market.
No commercial automobile manufacturer is going to make WVO an option, so any WVO vehicles on the road will be strictly conversions. The number of conversion kits will be limited to a select number of individuals who are either "in-the-know" or have been talked into making the change by someone who is familiar with the concept. I suspect that while numbers of WVO vehicles may fluctuate from year to year, after an initial rapid growth of the industry, the volume of WVO vehicles will plateau and stay maintained at several thousand. This of course assumes that early adopters do not cool to the idea and replace their WVO vehicles with non-WVO vehicles, causing a dip in overall WVO vehicles as other alternative fuel vehicles generate interest or fast food restaurants limit access to WVO for fear of litigation should their WVO cause damage to the vehicle.
While this is an interesting case study, and WVO vehicles generate interest, I doubt that the concept will take off, or that WVO vehicles will ever become "mainstream" despite their obvious draws.
I also question how biodiesel and federal regulations figures into all of this, and what impact biodiesel will have on WVO and vice versa. Will WVO be converted in bulk into commercial biodiesel thus creating a demand on WVO? Will new federal regulations concerning Diesel emission quality limit WVO conversions? As biodiesel moves dependence away from foreign oil toward domestic renewable fuel, will the price drop enough to make WVO conversions financially impractical?
No, this technology will be niche at best or dead in a decade at worst.
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
- The current used vegetable oil was currently being thrown away, lubricating landfills I guess.
- But it's not, it's already going into special dumpsters, which I suspect get dumped into recycling systems that filter the oil and resell it for non-human consumption by mouth uses, such as candles, ointments, plastic feedstocks, greases, etc....
- there were a LOT of veg oil per person being used. But if you think about it, it's doubtful that you're using more than a cup of oil a day, which doesnt translate into a significant amount of energy. Most people use at least a gallon of gas a day-- offsetting that with a cup of veggie oil is not a big win.
- And let's not forget a good percentage of that oil is effectively consumed in the process of shipping, filtering, and re-refining the oil.
p. Perhaps it would be better overall to nip this "waste" in the bud, and we all cut back on our consumption of fried foods. Less waste and less "waist"-- a two-'fer