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Powering Restaurants WIth Deep Fried Fuel
Mike writes "Here's a brilliant idea for biofuels: rather than filtering used fry oil for use in vehicles, why not simplify matters and use it to heat and power the restaurant itself? The VegaWatt turns used vegetable oil into clean heat and energy for restaurants, eliminating the dirty and costly mess of oil disposal while producing 10-25% of the electricity needed to run a small restaurant. It also produces fuel free of chemicals or fossil fuels, unlike standard biodiesel."
Soylent heat is people (leftovers)!
McDonalds Energy,
Solving home heating crisis by providing clean deep fryer vegetable oil!
Where is the "Ignorant" mod tag?
"It also produces fuel free of chemicals..." As a somewhat tired internet meme would say; "O rly?"
FFS people, virtually everything is made of "chemicals" and that isn't a problem. Sure, there are loads of quite nasty chemicals that will play hell with your chemistry and are to be avoided; but the notion that there are chemical free fuels is beyond asinine.
I for one welcome smog warnings that are accompanied by the delicate scent of fries.
If everybody started using used vegetable oil for an energy source, wouldn't the cost of used vegetable oil go way up?
If the restaurants all start using their used oil for this secondary purpose instead of selling it, how would the market for that now-mostly-free waste product exist?
I've done that fryer-cleaning job. Trust me, if you factor in the man hours it takes to move and store that oil compared to having a hose you could plug in there to drain directly to your fuel tank, you'll chose the option that lets you spend your time scrubbing something instead of messing with fluctuating oil markets.
It'd be worth it just to remove the occasional slip & fall with a couple of buckets full of oil spilling as you drop: The accident that causes itself.
You can't take the sky from me...
Plastic surgery clinics could do that too. It would be better than just leaving their lipid waste in big plastic bags in bio hazard dumpsters, where anyone can just jump the fence and steal it.
You can't take the sky from me...
It's CO2 that was pulled out of the atmosphere when the vegetables it came from were grown, so in that respect it's carbon-neutral. The CO2 emitted by farming equipment, fertilizer production, and so forth would have happened anyway.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
use of biofuels in no way shape or form raises the price of basic food stuffs....
Rising prices of oil / fuel raises the price of food stuffs.
Ban all trading of commodities futures for things like crude oil, grains and watch prices fall and stabilize.
Modify trading of these items so that if you buy something, you buy it (and are asked where to ship / store it)...
You pay for shipping, storing whatever you bought, and the person selling it is done with it.
These small changes to the market would lower the profiteering and margins of those trying to extract every last cent from the market. Prices to those who actually use the products would drop, and the prices for those who sell the product would go up (most middle men would be cut, if they had to pay for shipping/storage of said products) and the markets would equalize into something that would actually improve our economy.
the root cause of our current financial woes is greed... pure and simple...
When was that carbon last in the atmosphere? If the answer is "within the past two years" then it doesn't make things worse.
If the answer is "fifty-seven million years ago" then there may be a problem.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/599471.html
It was a really distressing story to see that someone who went out of his way to avoid using oil for powering his car got fined for essentially evading fuel taxes by buying vegetable oil from costo
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Here in the Netherlands it is forbidden to use vegetable oil or left-over frying oil as fuel for cars, even if the cars are perfectly able to run on it and pollute less then running on normal diesel. The reason: Taxes. They get no chance to skim off 'some' money so you can't use it.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?