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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."
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.
...input garbage directly into my browser, and have it turned directly into a "+5 insightful" comment ? So funny comment like this one... err... oops.. No way ? Sorry. ;)
-- Rastignac was here.
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.
The problem with this system is that it could only ever work in the good 'ol USA -- the only country where people produce enough used fry-vat oil!
(by the way, they've been doing exactly this for years in other places, like Germany...)
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.
In fact my own car has been adapted to run on vegetable oil, (either used or fresh) I collect used oil and filter it in my back yard, down to 5 microns. My car runs just great on it, absolutely no difference in performance, and I'm sill getting the same mileage, around 45mpg (US) or 55mpg(UK). My car's exhaust smells a LOT nicer (sort of a popcorn, or hot oil 'flavor'), and vegetable oil is a cleaner burning fuel, so emissions are lower. And of course, it's carbon neutral
A friend of mine is doing the same, at his place of work, they have a canteen, and they're getting through more oil than he needs. the places that we're getting it from, are more than happy for us to take it away, because they have to pay to have it taken away, and we'll do it for free...
now that I've gone veggie, I won't be going back. The heat exchanger kit that is installed in my car can easily be taken out and fitted into my next car. It's a win win situation:
We're using a waste product that was grown locally
It's cheaper (as in free!)
We're not funding Big Oil, who are themselves supporting dodgy, corrupt, undemocratic and/or unstable regimes.
There are some strong economic, political and ethical reasons to run on vegetable oil. For me, it's a no-brainer :o)
-- Fuck Beta
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.
Can it travel through time when it reaches 88MPH?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
GPL: Free as in will
vegetable oil ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
There's scads of papers on biodiesel, its efficiency, and cost.
e l/
If petroleum goes up in price a bunch more, biodiesel gets to break even.
The unmapped territory is that although it burns a hydrocarbon, 100% biodiesel
doesn't increase atmospheric CO2, because that CO2 was removed from the atmosphere
less than a year prior. It is cyclic in the short-term. Biodiesel could be a
near drop-in replacement for gasoline in cars and solve greenhouse gas
problems from automobiles. Of course, if you use peanuts instead of soybeans, and
oil costs stay high....people bet billions on shifts like this, the shift
to biodiesel would become reality if regular diesel wholesale prices get too
high and we have a strong need to minimize emissions...both of which are
very real scenarios. Both factors have shifted a lot since this white paper
in 2002.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biodies
- 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-'feri didn't rtfa, but
i had some friends who were traveling across the country on tour, in a rock band. they had converted their diesel van (a 15 passenger ford, if memory serves) for around 1500 bucks. the conversion tank/filter/box took up all the cargo space in the van, so they had to tow a trailer in which to put their amps, instruments, etc. the mileage still came out in their favor.
i would not have believed it if i hadn't seen them pouring filthy used oil into the tank inside the van.
some things they shared:
american fast food is about the worst place to get used oil, as they use the shit out of the oil before tossing it. asian, and middle eastern restaurants were the best, cleanest oil they had seen so far.
they got better gas mileage on the greasel than on the diesel.
the van had a switch up front, with which to change the lines from the greasel to the diesel. apparently the veg oil doesn't burn hot enough, and it was bad news to leave the van overnight with the veg oil in the lines. so before shutting it down for the night, they'd switch back to diesel, and let it run for 10 minutes. then in the morning, they'd switch it back to veggie oil after it warmed up.
the box in the back of the van did three things: it was a tank, in which to store the oil as it was processed, it floated out the water from the oil, (a sort of inline spit valve, not unlike on many wood instruments) and it filtered out the particulates. burnt fries, crispy shrimp tails, etc.
the filter was at the front of the line, so it was basically a big thick sock (they got them at home depot, and had to change them about 1000 miles. it was designed for some other use, but someone figured out it's capability to clean oil, and put it in there) turned inside out. they had also bought some ordinary kitchen strainers, which fit over the hole in the tank, and would grab the huge particles before they made it to the filter. once the strainers clogged, they could lift them out and tap them on the ground to get the particles out. much easier than changing the sock like filter.
they usually would go and ask for oil, but sometimes would need to refill after a show, which could be 2 or 3 am, so they'd just go poach it. most places paid to have the stuff taken away, so wouldn't care if you got caught taking it, but would generally assume you're up to no good if you were behind their restaurant in the middle of the night acting shady.
with 4 guys in the band, they had a system down. some places kept the used oil in a 55 gallon drum. for this, one would scoop, one would prep the empty 5 gallon plastic tubs, one would lift the tubs into the van, and one would pour the oil into the tank.
sometimes the places had the oil just sitting in the tubs they came in. one would either nab the full 5 gallon tubs, and put them in the van to be poured later, while another put empties in their place.
the back of the van was messy/oily, but this was their first trip with the conversion, so were still dialing in their storage system/process. next time i see them, i predict the van'll be much cleaner. as clean as a touring rock band's van can be, anyway....
i live in denver. they live in l.a. they drove from their home, up to vancouver, canada, and then over to denver, when i saw them. so far, on that tour, when i saw them, they had put one tank of gas in the van, and not even used the entire tank. this even includes a few hours running on diesel, as the water trap had some issues, and they had to drive around portland looking for someone who could fix it.
i was totally impressed. i haven't driven in almost a year, but i was convinced that if/when i do buy my next car, it'll be a diesel.
if anyone's interested in the conversion, and able to get to l.a., let me know, and i can put you in touch with the guy who did theirs.
Every year we essentially throw away a lot of vegetable oil after cooking with it at restaurants. Much of this oil gets dumped out or just incinerated. Clearly we need to recycle this oil and burning it as a fuel is a good idea. Except for NO2 and particulates (which we know how to deal with) there is no pollution from using old vegetable oil for fuel in a diesel engine.
However the problem is that there's not enough vegetable oil coming from restaurants to impact even slightly our national oil usage. So it is a cheap fuel source for a few people. That's all. What we really need is a way to create organic oils on a large scale from algae, plants, or some other way using only energy from the sun. If we could immediately replace all our fossil fuels with organic (as it carbon-neutral) oils, we could stop our carbon emissions completely, having an immediate, dramatic, and hopefully non-warming effect on our environment.
Been here, dodged the tax on that. Police impound cars run on cooking oil.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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_Braz
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.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.