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

IF

[Anonymous Coward]

If it ever catches on. Veg oil will cost just as much as gasoline.

Already at many places you can't get it free anymore.

Re:IF

[CrazyDuke]

Quick quiz, what happens to overall fuel prices when supply increases far faster than demand?

Re:IF

[turtled]

Although slow, personal use of diesel is gaining ground. Honda has the Diesel CR-V coming to the states in the next model year or 2.

Also, the more people talk about it, the more interest it will gather. Maybe not all people with diesels will convert, but it is more people aware of it. I have a close friend that I have helped him convert 2 diesels to run off of WVO. We live in the Chicagoland area. First was a 1985 K5 Blazer, the second is and he is currently driving, 2005 Chevy Silverado HD Duramax 2500 diesel. Has a secondary 45 gallon tank with coolant lines that run to it to keep the grease / WVO liquified. We have talked to local restaurants and they are fine with us taking the WVO.

The point is, the more people that talk about it, the more of a chance it will catch on. I would gladly pay someone to filter and store WVO in the winter time than fetching myself, so I would be willing to pay $.50 a gallon for WVO instead of the always higher than gasoline $2.89 diesel.

Also, think of the commercial industry...

Re:IF

[timjdot]

Talked to a guy who owns some trash trucks and said in NY there was a vendor who processed the oil and added additives so it ran in the trucks WITHOUT modification. Sold for $1.04/gallon and guy said he was saving $300/month PER TRUCK. NY state government shut them down. Said antitrust law makes it illegal to sell for less with like 4 cents below the established price. E.g. legally it is illegal to sell vegetable oil for less than diesel in the state of NY. I'm sure this is the same sort of nonsense going on in all states.

Folks, the road to freedom is exactly like this article. Home power production. The aristocrats will continue to make competition illegal. Just take a look at how handily electric power was killed. Hobbyists in the mid-1990's were making cars which could go twice what Ford and GM were able to make. Surprise. Guess a garage is better than a lab! Not to mention the millions to billions of subsidies the country spends on oil and oil-related infrastructure rather than spending such on electric (induction charging stations, power rails, etc).

Technology in this country is presently eliminated by large corporations and the government who works for them. Only by innovations and a concerted citizen adoption and cooperation can innovation be reborn in the USA. The vege-diesel is going to be a big problem for the lawmakers who work for the MNC's because the technology works. People are driving around in trucks powered by vegetable oil. And, yes, saving money. It's a fact.

The government, at least in NY State, has outlawed this. What does that mean? Like Cubans are we under a regime who wants us to stay in the 1900's? Is this like so many science fiction novels where individuals are not allowed to excel. Yes. It exactly is. Soon, perhaps, the personal use of innovative technologies will be made illegal - for the corporate good of course.

TimJowers http://www.serviza.com/ Fully Loaded Innovation. Power on and GO!

Re:Mr Fusion

[simcop2387]

go watch, BTF3 again, Mr Fusion only powered the time circuits he never got around to converting the car to electric, it still needed gasoline to run.

Re:Only in the USA

[ghc71]

Running diesels of cooking oil has been done in the UK enough for the government to threaten prosecution for it - since vehicle fuels are taxed at a higher rate than foodstuffs, this is seen more as tax evasion than an environmental initiative.

Re:Mythbusters

[Mr. Hankey]

I'd also add that vegetable oil is a renewable resource, which is a big plus in my eyes. In the US we have a huge agricultural industry. If we started using vegetable oil for fuel instead of petroleum, that would go a long way toward reducing our dependence on foreign oil. That alone would be a good shot in the arm for our economy. As a nice side effect, farming might even become a good way for a family to support itself again.

Re:Why is always a cross country trip?

[FFFish]

And using corn oil instead of crude doesn't actually solve the problem of CO2 emissions. The problem being that we had all this carbon nicely sequestered underground instead of polluting our atmosphere. In essence we're taking the hot, muggy, lizard-friendly atmosphere of prehistoric earth back out of storage. Not exactly a wise move, that.

Corn oil would be zero-sum (the plants fix carbon into their biomass, removing it from our atmosphere; burning the oil releases CO2 back into the atmosphere) except for one inconvenient fact: corn production is a big consumer of crude oil in the form of chemical fertilizers, machinery operations, and post-harvest processing plants.

Burning corn oil is equivalent to burning crude. Moreso, in fact, because converting crude into corn is less efficient than converting it directly to fuel and putting it in one's tank.

French fry oils are not going to save us. Not in the least.

Re:Mythbusters

[Mr. Hankey]

Are you sure about that? Vegetable oil from fast food restaurants as you have observed is indeed a waste product. Even if you only count the vegetable oil coming out of fast food places, the oil did not take millions of years to form. As for the pollution, you may be generating gasses, but the resulting output is indeed cleaner than current petroleum based diesel.

If it becomes profitable to produce vegetable oil on a much larger scale, I guarantee you people will find ways of producing more with less. This would also give companies an incentive to clean up unused land that could be used for farming. We have a lot invested in getting the most out of petroleum, it's time we start doing the same with alternative fuels. Vegetable oil is a close analog that should be able to use similar techniques before we rely on more radical methods.

As long as you can make fuel without using petroleum, it's a step in the right direction. The important thing for the US at this point is to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. We know the supply is not unlimited, and each barrel of oil we import is money leaving our economy. More likely we'll see biodiesel combined with other alternatives working together to replace our current runaway usage of petroleum-based products, but we need to start somewhere. This is a good - and functionally proven - place to start.

Old, old news in UKia

[Rogerborg]

Been here, dodged the tax on that. Police impound cars run on cooking oil.

Re:Supply chain costs

[thc69]

Biodiesel could be a near drop-in replacement for gasoline in cars

Wow! Where do I sign up?

While I was about to write some more smartassery regarding what I assume is a mistakenly placed "gasoline" where you meant "diesel", I came across something odd in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_Brazi l - "Although Brazil is a major oil producer and now exports gasoline (19,000 m/day), it still must import oil because of internal demand for other oil byproducts, chiefly diesel fuel (which cannot be easily replaced by ethanol)."

You'd think Brazil would at least figure out how to use biodiesel...but even better, the same climate that's good for growing sugarcane is also good for using SVO, which they must be able to produce.