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."

Comments

Mythbusters

[Jason1729]

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.

Re:Mythbusters

[Mr. Hankey]

Given current production methods, certainly. If we had the same sort of money going into farming that we now have going into finding new sources of oil, I'd bet we'd find better ways.

Why is always a cross country trip?

[tap]

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.

Re:McDonalds new revenue stream

[Mr. Hankey]

I don't think it's that bad of an idea myself. It's cleaner to burn, and if the demand goes up there will be farmers happy to produce more vegetables. I'd rather the waste vegetable oil goes toward reducing our petroleum dependency than some of the alternatives, and I don't really care if the fast food industry is one of the beneficiaries. Maybe they'll start processing the oil for cars instead of people, finding it more lucrative, and make their food a bit less greasy. We can only hope.

Even if the waste oil is only 1% of petroleum usage, which is not all turned into diesel, if the US ramps up its resources to produce more vegetable-based fuel we'd be able to dramatically reduce the amount of petroleum going into vehicles. Most diesel vehicles in the US tend to be used in freight transport. Imagine smelling french fries or popcorn instead of the current diesel when you're behind a large truck that's belching smoke all over the place. I know what I'd prefer.

Very silly article

[Ancient_Hacker]

This would only be good news if:

• 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