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Run Your Car on Grease
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I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
or (Score:5, Interesting)
Does this look legit? I am always wary of this kind of stuff, but there's no obvious reasons to doubt it - it isn't making fantastic claims...
It's already been done (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't seem too amazing to me... (Score:3, Interesting)
Did Greasel discover that diesel engines will run on cooking oil?
No. The first diesel engines (invented by Rudolf Diesel in the late 1800's) were actually designed to run on plant oils. Immediately after Rudolf's untimely demise, his colleagues (who were just then tapping the resources of petro-based fuel sources) swept his veggie ideas under the rug and actually converted his design to run on petro-based 'diesel' fuel (which they were nice enough to name after him).
(Emphasis mine)
Re:It's already been done (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A few years late on the news front (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a small company performing research into alterations to diesel engines. One of the things we played with was vegetable oil and biodiesel. Biodiesel is a great fuel since it produces no net carbon dioxide (all of the carbon in it was pulled from the air by the plants) and it lacks the sulfur found in normal diesel.
You can also run an engine on straight vegetable oil, which is different from biodiesel. The only problem is that the oil is really thick, so you have to start and stop the engine with normal fuel to heat it up, then switch to the vegetable oil after a minute or two. I've heard of products that will do this automatically for vehicles, but we just switched fuels manually. Although it doesn't burn to well, and the fuel economy is not a good as diesel (as in volume of fuel/power) but the pollution is not that bad. There is a slight increase in the particulates (smoke) produced, but otherwise its comparable to normal diesel without the sulfur. Also (this being appreciated more when you're standing around the engine all day) the smell of fries is a decent change from normal exhaust.
Re:It's already been done (Score:3, Interesting)
Implications (Score:2, Interesting)
The issue about engine temperature is disheartening, perhaps an inexpensive additive can be developed to thin the vegetable oil to an appropriate viscosity instead of relying on temperature?
We need a vegan-friendly option (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose you could use olive oil, but she's kind of thin
McNugget-powered Volkswagen Rabbi (Score:5, Interesting)
People have been making "Biodesiel" for years now. This is nothing new. A little lye and some vegetable oil is all it takes.
That's not even necessary.
I worked at a McDonalds in high school (about 1991), and one of the maintenance guys had an old (even then!) mid-1970s VW Rabbi (someone chiselled off the T for the fun of it) which was running on used shortening.
Actually, the guy was bright and knew a lot about cars, though he had no formal education. He built a system into an old gas can which rested on a "hot plate" heated by engine coolant. McDonalds filters their oil every day, and on those days on the schedule when it was being replaced, he'd just run it through the McDonalds filtration pump and into the gas cans.
The shortening would thicken, but when he was driving, he'd wait until the engine was warm and the oil was liquid, then throw the valve over to run it off the shortening. The fuel line was a copper tube taped against the lengths of copper plumbing pipe carring the hot coolant to the "hot plate" in the cargo area of the hatchback. Running out of fuel was no big deal - when the engine started to sputter, he'd flip the valve back to diesel off his regular tank, then at the next stop, he'd swap the gas can sitting on the hot plate. The pickup tube was hacked into the cap of a gas can, so the car sucked the oil right out of the gas can.
Riding in that car with him from Ottawa to Toronto (for a Ramones concert) in the dead of winter, I found only two small problems. One, the interior of the car was damned hot because of the hot plate. Two... the car - and I mean *the whole car*, from interior to exhaust - smelled like Chicken McNuggets. Sometimes, Filet-O-Fish.
On the other hand, the fuel was free, it was filtered with McDonalds specially-designed oil-filtation equipment and never seemed to cause him a problem with fuel filters, and my 340-4bbl Duster was getting about 8 miles per gallon... so I envied the utility but declined his offer to trade for my Duster.
What is interesting is that it is still cheaper to buy real desiel than vegetable oil. Where biodesiel has an advantage is in recycling used vegetable oil that is no longer food quality but is with a little work good enough to burn in your car/airplane. Unfortunatly there is not enough of this to make a real dent in the American desiel usage.This is true. Actually, the cost advantage isn't so great, when you figure that your time is worth something. Rather than scouting out restaurant dumpsters (which are pretty unpleasant places), you could be doing something more fun like getting fellatio or posting to Slashdot.
In his case, though, it was win-win since he was already gonna smell like McNuggets at the end of the day.
On the other hand, virgin vegetable oil could be a highly viable fuel. But the problem is that the very same people who jump up and down and scream about how nasty petroleum is, also jump up and down and scream about how nasty genetically modified corn and soy (which is the only way to make this economically viable) is. The best line I've ever heard came from a Greenpeace activist driving a sick little moped (blue clouds of poorly-tuned two-stroke, measurably more noxious than the exhaust from any well-tuned land-yacht SUV that he also complained about) screaming about how we can't feed cars while people are starving in Somalia. (If Somalis don't want to starve, they should have less children. Sorry, but it's not my problem.)
Re:A few years late on the news front (Score:2, Interesting)
But really diversity is the key to a more balanced enviroment. The fact of the matter is this is waste that could be recycled and the method can sustain a lot more people then currently do it. I know, as I'm a grease burner.
Unfortunately even plant fuel isn't perfect (Score:4, Interesting)
But looking at how plants are grown, you find out that fertilizers and all those other chemicals needed for modern agriculture are PETRO-chemicals, meaning you still need oil to make them. And wherever I read this (wish I could remember) they had done a study and found that natural fuel economies actually used MORE oil than oil economies. Kind of like how electric cars still need to get their energy from somewhere, you are just pushing the pollutants farther upstream in the process.
Needless to say I found it depressing.
Turkey guts & other offal (Score:5, Interesting)
.nosig
Re:Turkey guts & other offal (Score:2, Interesting)
Why people are still talking about running a car on vegetable oil when we can turn vegetables into real (petroleum) oil, I don't know...
Oil forever? (Score:2, Interesting)
Tax implications (Score:3, Interesting)
The authorities came down on this lot, not because there's anything illegal about Biodiesel, but because once it's engine fuel, it's taxed as engine fuel, and they hadn't been paying the appropriate taxes. With the taxes added on, it's still cheaper than standard Diesel, but not as dramatically so.
However, this Greasel site appears to be about modified engines which run on ordinary vegetable oil, not Biodiesel. So what are the tax implications there? Does the taxman have to rule that vegetable oil is taxable as soon as you put it in a fuel tank? Or based on your intention for the oil at the point of sale? What?
Wrong on 2 counts (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Natural gas, not oil, is used in making commercial fertilizer.
This is an important point from the USA's point of view, since the vast majority of our natural gas comes from domestic sources and Canada.
2) Most natural fuel does NOT use more (fossil) fuel than it produces (in natural fuel).
Corn-based ethanol is the evil fuel you're speaking of. It is indeed a huge energy sink. The only reason it exists is because of huge government subsidies. Biodiesel, on the other hand, is 78% solar-powered. That is, only 22% of the energy in virgin soybean oil-derived biodiesel comes from fossil fuels.
Also consider that animal waste (pig crap) based methanol can be used in place of natural gas, thus completely removing fossil fuels from the biodiesel equation. However, this is not going to happen until one or both of the following happen:
1) consumers demand environmentally-friendly fuel by refusing to use fossil fuels
and/or
2) the demand for oil exceeds the easily-extractable supply of oil, thus raising the economic costs of extracting fossil fuel high enough to where bio-fuels can compete
Of these two alternatives, (2) is the most likely. Already, biodiesel can purchased for a little over $2/gallon in bulk, state fuel taxes included. I give it another 10 years before the increasing world energy demand outstrips its soon-to-peak supply.
As for myself, I drive a 2002 VW New Beetle TDI, which is in stock form (no fuel mods) and is powered by biodiesel. While the biodiesel is more expensive than regular diesel, the fuel economy of my vehicle is high enough (50 mpg) that I still enjoy fuel savings when compared to my gasoline-powered brethren.
Here are some interesting links:
Biodiesel Now [biodieselnow.com]
Biodiesel [biodiesel.org]
TDI Club [tdiclub.com]