Have you seen the Bio Diesel info.. ?? you can make it for $0.70 gal

[sam sarrha]

check out.. Make Bio Diesel on the internet... they will probably make more illegal than WEED.

[graham67]

1. Ok, .70 a gallon the make it....

For how much would it be sold for public consumption? How much does it actually cost to make gasoline out of crude oil? Just curious....


Edited to correct spelling

[trogdor]

14. Gasoline is distilled from crude.

Simply cook it, and collect the vapor as you would moonshine. That gets you basic gasoline - about 68 octane. That was good enough for prewar automobiles, but your car will choke on it.

There is another process that involves a catalyst which cracks larger molecules (like those found in diesel oil) into smaller ones.

Neither process is particularly energy-intensive, especially on a large scale.

[trogdor]

30. Here is a film (Real Media) on the manufacture of gasoline.

http://www.archive.org/stream/InsideSt1946/InsideSt1946_256kb.rm

less cheesy animation and more info here:
http://www.archive.org/stream/GasolineForE/GasolineForE_256kb.mp4

[phantom power]

2. has anybody worked out how much acreage it would require

to grow enough crops (of what?) to make enough bio-diesel to satisfy our current consumption rate?

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. You can recover old cooking oil from restaurants

That helps cut down on growing extra crops for the sake of fuel.

[phantom power]

5. America consumes millions of barrels of oil each day

We aren't going to get that from restaurants.

[LTR]

9. Sounds like the average intake from KFC

[AngryAmish]

23. Not my retirement grease!

[BiggJawn]

11. Easier to grow crops than it is to grow "Dead Dinosaurs"

Bio-Diesel and Ethanol have a lot going for them, and I'm not just saying that because I live in farm country...

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. rough figures

biodiesel yield using high-yield rape seed: 145 gallons/acre
US usage of gasoline and diesel: 130 billion gallons/year
area needed: about 900 million acres = about 1.4 million square miles
area of lower 48 states: about 3 million square miles

I belive the 145 gallons/acre figure does not account for the extra energy needed to farm and produce the diesel - the efficiency is something like 3 gallons out for each gallon of fuel in, which would mean the yield is 2/3 of 145. That would make it about 2 million square miles needed.

[phantom power]

16. so, that would be about 2/3 of the continental US

not including area we would need for growing food, and whatever area we're currently living on.

[yella_dawg]

18. More to the point...

Has anybody worked out how many gallons of bio-diesel are needed to grow the crops that produce a gallon of bio-diesel?

[muriel_volestrangler]

19. one calculation

"for every unit of energy used to produce biodiesel, 3.71 units were made available"

http://www.biodiesel.co.uk/levington.htm

[TheFarseer]

22. i get so tired of this argument

don't you think that once you get this up and running you will be able to make enough bio diesel to plant the crops and have some left over to sell? and if not, we should be doing research to make it more efficient so that we can. Making energy out of renewable sources that are made right here in the USA: I don't see the downside.

[phantom power]

28. EROEI is positive, but that doesn't answer the land-use problem

Somebody in this thread computed that we'd require 2/3 the land-mass of the continental US to grow the biodiesel equivalent to our current consumption rate. That doesn't sound like a plan that works, to me.

[salin]

33. but to me it sounds like a challenge to sink r&d money (lots of it)

in to solve. Funny how technological advances can move tremendously fast... when there is capital investment (and likely capital returns) seen to be readily available. And yet the major oil producers just don't seem to want investment in this area (as evidenced by their energy bill.)

[phantom power]

34. might get some leverage with genetic engineering, or

improved agricultural techniques. But I'm personally worried that people have bought too deep into the idea that we can keep improving the productivity of an acre of land indefinitely with technology. And I say that as a big believer in technology. But it's powers aren't infinite, especially in the time-frame we will be working with.

We're pushing our luck just with food production, forget adding a huge burden of producing fuel.

[HFishbine]

37. Oh, that's easy

Vertical farming.

[yella_dawg]

31. The problem you aren't seeing

is that the soil too is a finite resource. One that is becoming rapidly depleted. Arable soil is not a mineral, but a biological system. I love the idea of bio-fuels. But they aren't a quick and easy solution. There is little that can be done to force more out of soil. The corporate farms are already running at a high level of efficiency. And they are dependent on government subsidies to survive. That goes double for ethanol producers. There is no quick fix for our energy problems. Bio-fuel may be a valid solution for some of our needs. But without a revolution in public transportation, consumption patterns, and diversified energy sources, we will encounter rapidly rising energy costs that will eventually destabilize our economy. We can't just dust off bio-fuels, or solar panels, and solve the problem overnight. When Carter started the push for alternative energy in the seventies, we had time to solve the problem. We may well not have time enough now, even if research and development went into overdrive today.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. Give us a link

because this implies an oil source cheaper than $0.70 a gallon - which is very cheap for vegetable oil. Are you using a source of used oil?

[Don_G]

7. Link To Biodiesel Fuel Processing Instructions

http://www.journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html

[graham67]

8. I just looked at a site....

www.biodiesel.org. Contrary to the site above, this site says biodiesel isn't raw vegetable oil.

http://www.biodiesel.org/resources/faqs/

[Don_G]

10. I'm Certain There Is More One Way

To skin a cat and to fuel a car. Old cooking oil might be easier to come by for the average individual.

[phantom power]

15. cooking oil

I just ran some numbers, which I believe are on the conservative side: assume a car has a 10-gallon tank (most are larger), and assume filling up once a week. That is over 500 gallons a year, for each car.

I'm trying to imagine coming up with 1000 gallons of cooking oil per year (we have two cars), while competing with a hundred million other car owners, and the trucking industry, and the electric companies, etc.

[wabeewoman]

13. There are at least 2

methods for using vegetable oil. One uses a converter starting a diesel engine with regular diesel and then switching to vegetable oil from a seperate tank. The other uses a chemical reaction which isn't too complicated but more than most people would mess with in order to change vegetable oil to biodiesel. Both use 'french fry oil' or waste oil which restaurants currently pay to have hauled away. It certainly isn't the entire solution to our oil problem but its a start especially if combined with solar and hybrid cars. Biodiesel can also be used in place of home heating oil. A great reference is "From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank" http://www.veggievan.org/

[slaveplanet]

26. Quite simply

.70 a gallon can only hoped to be reached by recycling used cooking oils that can be had for free. I think I read somewhere that fresh production Biodiesel is in the $2.50 a gallon range. I suspect if hemp was legalized this could be brought down to the $1.50 range.
Large scale production would only work as a supplement to fossil fuels. Would require a crop that is highly pest resistant, and need next to zero fertilization. I'm not sure about the crop rotation requirements and how those would come into play.

Hydrogen stored in solid state seem like a much better possibility for large scale alt fuel applications

[Triana]

6. project in my area for it...

http://www.humankindness.org/grassroots.html

http://www.carolinabiodiesel.org/

[sam sarrha]

17. Links......good ones

http://www.rmsg.us/fuel/biofuels.htm it probably cost more now but has only 10% of the emissions

[calimary]

20. Neil Young has been running his entire tour this year on bio diesel.

All his trucks and stuff.

Cool, 'eh?

[TheFarseer]

21. you're forgetting

that the world will explode and Armageddon will be upon us if a farmer makes a nickel. At least that is what the powers that be seem to think.

[gpandas]

24. make it and sell it...

if it is so cheap and wonderful, i'm sure someone would go into the business.

[sam sarrha]

25. already saw an ad on TV for the units to make it...

[slaveplanet]

27. People do

But anything other than large scale production become too prhibitive due to regulations....small producers can only sell for Off-road applications. There's a small Brewerey in Cleveland that converted some vats to biodiesel production but it can only sell to golf courses and offroaders.

[maggrwaggr]

29. Hawaii's got it

http://www.biodiesel.com/

On a yoga DVD that my wife bought, the yoga instructor in that tape lives in Hawaii, she's off the grid (all solar) and has a car that runs on Hawaiian biodiesel.

Looks like a pretty sweet life.

[gpandas]

32. that's what selling dvds about information that's ...

free in any public library can get you. as i said before, when the profit is there, the system will exploit the concept. as the price of oil inevitably moves higher, many energy ideas become more feasible. imho that solar is out for me as i live in ohio, where the sun rarely shines. my knowledge of biodiesel is quite limited, but i tend to not rely on sources that sell it for my info.

[TexasBushwhacker]

35. It's not ONLY about replacing regular diesel

We couldn't plant fence to fence and replace fossil fuels with biodiesel and ethanol, HOWEVER, we could produce enough biodiesel and ethanol to reduce our dependence on FOREIGN OIL and that is a problem that's not going away. It also makes sense to recycle used cooking oil, etc. rather than just disposing of it if you can come up with a net gain in energy and/or cleaner air.

It's not unlike our situation with recycling aluminum cans. It costs less to produce new cans from old cans than it does to produce new aluminum from bauxite ore AND it keeps the cans out of landfills. It's a win/win.

What will really be nice is when they develop a system to produce usable fuel from any organic matter, including cellulose coming from paper, wood scraps, waste plant material, etc. We're not that far away on this. Anything that we can recycle, especially if we can recycle it to make clean energy, is a good thing!

When we add these new plant based fuels to hybrid cars (which we still need for air pollution reduction if nothing else) and hydrogen power for vehicles and to produce electricity (that's not far off either) we can dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and clean up the atmosphere to boot. What's not to love?

BTW, it's my understanding that hemp produces the most vegetable oil (that could be used for biodiesel) acre for acre, and you can use the fibers to make clothes and paper!

[phantom power]

36. oil from generic organic waste might be feasible

These people claim to have a process that works on a wide variety of organic waste.
http://www.changingworldtech.com/home.html

[Hammie]

38. Only if the oil is free.

The costs that they outline on that website are only for the conversion of oil to Bio Diesel. They also don't go into the costs of disposing of the byproducts.

It might be a decent method of recycling waste vegetable oils but it isn't going to supplant petroleum based fuels while there is still oil in the ground.

[jmowreader]

39. Most biodiesel is used as blend stock

There appear to be three "blends" of biodiesel.

B5 biodiesel is 95 percent petroleum diesel, 5 percent biodiesel. You can run this in any diesel engine without changing all the fuel lines.

B20 biodiesel is 80 percent petroleum diesel, 20 percent biodiesel. You can run this in most diesels--older Japanese diesels appear to be the exception.

B100 biodiesel is pure biodiesel. Your engine needs biodiesel-proof lines on it to use this fuel.

Next problem with homemade fuel: road use tax. If you go to the local DMV and tell them what you're doing, they will set you up with the same forms truckers use. You report and pay fuel tax on a large truck based on mileage, not on gallonage, which saves them big bucks--especially operators that run refrigerated trailers and ones who do a lot of off-road service, like loggers and dump truck operators. But if you don't do it, and someone wearing a badge happens to take a whiff of your exhaust, you are severely screwed.

I love the calculation: 500 gallons of fuel burned means 500 gallons of waste vegetable oil required. Not true--the saponification process used to make biodiesel means a lot of your waste oil winds up as soap. I've heard wildly varying numbers, but 2 gallons of oil for each gallon of fuel looks like a good one.