Powering Restaurants WIth Deep Fried Fuel 148
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."
Coming soon, (Score:4, Insightful)
McDonalds Energy,
Solving home heating crisis by providing clean deep fryer vegetable oil!
Just one problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Right, right.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Just one problem (Score:3, Insightful)
The only exception to that would occur because of fixed costs and economies of scale. If, say, an oil generator costs $10,000,000, or if large generators have far better efficiency than small ones, then it would make sense for everyone in a given area to sell oil to a large producer, and buy electricity. Given that shipping costs money, the savings of centralization would have to be large enough to overcome the costs.
Re:Just one problem (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
Re:Right, right.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if you take it to mean a reasonable interpretation -- free of added or unwanted chemicals (which, as you point out, really means added or unwanted *anything*), it's still not true. Oil that's been held at high temperatures and used repeatedly to fry food is by no means free of impurities. At least some of these chemicals are hazardous or carcinogenic. Maybe the fuel overall is clean compared to the alternatives, but it's not truly clean.
Re:Just one problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Meaning it would be more cost effective to sell the oil and buy the electricity rather than use the oil to generate my own electricity.
I doubt it, this technology has three major advantages over selling the oil and buying the electricity.
1) No transmission loss from the power plant to the customer.
2) No waste heat from the power generation, as it is used to heat the restaurant's water.
3) No fuel is burned in transporting the soon-to-be fuel.
In theory, the markets sort out the most efficient use of resources. If this technology is truly more efficient, it will thrive.
Two problems, you get fined for not paying taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/599471.html [newsobserver.com]
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
Re:What type of conversion? (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
...and if the energy being replaced is from fossil fuels, it's effectively better than carbon-neutral.
Re:Just one problem (Score:3, Insightful)
You're missing the big picture: if the restaurant sells the oil for use in diesel vehicles, that displaces the dino-diesel the vehicles would otherwise use. If you assumed that the electricity the restaurant would use otherwise was created more efficiently than mining, refining, and burning the diesel in the vehicle, then selling the waste veggie oil wins.
Restaurants can easily be powered with electricity generated from clean and renewable resources. Vehicles still need fuel, because [synthetic] gasoline and [bio]diesel work much better than batteries (or hydrogen, or any other alternative so far).
Just one problem: taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
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.