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Brew Your Own Auto Fuel For 41 Cents A Gallon
Posted by
michael
on Tue Jun 01, 2004 02:36 PM
from the would-you-like-fries-with-that? dept.
from the would-you-like-fries-with-that? dept.
Iphtashu Fitz writes "Damon Toal-Rossi of Iowa City, Iowa had enough of the high price of gasoline, so it didn't take too much for his friend to talk him into switching to biodiesel, an alternative fuel based on soy or vegetable oil. But after a few months of driving 10 miles to a biodiesel fuel station he decided it was time to start brewing his own. It didn't take him long to find a recipe for biodiesel, and with used cooking oil that he gets for free from a nearby restaurant, he figures he's now getting 44 miles per gallon out of his diesel powered VW Golf and only paying 41 cents a gallon. According to the National Biodiesel Board the number of biodiesel stations in the US rose by 50% last year (to a whopping 200). The president of the American Soybean Association claims biodiesel has almost the same amount of energy as petroleum-based diesel, but cleans an engine's fuel injectors and cuts down on the number of required oil changes. Perhaps these are some of the reasons why diesel powered cars are making a comeback in the US."
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Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Have a diesel car.
b) Have somebody who will give you free used oil.
Not all of us live nearby KFC :)
Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
a) Any restaurant that does frying has used oil. (Even that mom'n'pop boutique place you like to frequent)
b) Restaurants normally have to pay someone to have their used oil hauled away.
Parent
Re:Great... (Score:5, Informative)
Not anymore -- most restaraunts get money back for recycling purposes...some have even proscecuted folks that have taken their cooking oil because while it makes very little money -- it is still a few hundred $$$s a month for them.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Funny)
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vegetable oil is not petroleum (Score:5, Interesting)
Some used cooking oil does get filtered and shipped abroad for use in food products. But most places I know (including mcd, bk, kfc etc) still have to arrange to have it hauled off and the best they can manage so far is to break even.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Informative)
It's because the demand for manual transmissions is pretty low. Manufacturers just go to the parts bin and find the appropriate (manual) tranny. If the manual they match up to the vehicle is less robust (in either strength of cooling) than the slushbox they originally speced out for the vehicle, sobeit -- it's hardly a significant market share. They just downgrade the rated towing capacity for the manual to match the transmission they put in there...the automatic tranny car keeps it's higher rating. Many manufacturers of sport sedans do the same thing with their more powerful motors. For example, the Lincoln LS V6 was available in a stick, but the V8 wasn't. They're weren't trying to undermine standard trannies -- and a stick can certainly hold that torque. They just didn't have the right manual tranny for the job and didn't want to develop a new one for that market.
IMO, manual transmissions are still better suited to pulling. Less moving/friction parts to break/replace, and I believe that they can be built stronger and cooled easier...which is one of the reasons why tractor trailers still have manual transmissions. For towing, a manual may be better anyway. They tend to hold a gear better, which may be good if you're towing in hilly regions and need to drop a gear to maintain/shed speed. Most tiptronic/sportamatic/autostick/whatever trannies can't even hold a gear.
Anyway, I digress...but this may be a case similar to Betamax Vs. VHS.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Informative)
My 2001 Honda Accord has one; you can actually feel it locking up; it feels like a subtle additional shift when you reach 40MPH or so and stop accelerating.
You can tell it's engaged, because if you depress the gas a little more, the RPM won't immediately jump, but rather it will rise linearly with your speed, since there's no fluid link (from the torque converter).
Try it on the highway; open the throttle a LITTLE more at highway speeds. The lockup can't handle too much torque, though, so if you press the gas too much further down, it will disengage the lockup and you'll see the tach spike up a bit.
-Z
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Re:Stick shift on a hybrid? (Score:5, Informative)
Electric motors don't have an 'optimal' fuel-efficient or torque-producing range of RPMs in the sense that internal combustion engines do. If you want more power, you apply more juice, and the electric motors happily spin faster all the way up to their rated capacity, providing high levels of torque through the entire range.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
Create a demand and like everything else, prices will rise.
Not that I'm totally against the idea, but you can't base the impact on a real economy on a test case of a few people here and there.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, if biodiesel takes off there will be an economy of scale that will offset the increasing demand for restaurant grease. KFC and Long Jon Silver's will still have price increases, though.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Informative)
-It's about 12.5 gallons/year for one acre of Soy from what I could find.
-There's 470 million acres of arable land in the US.
-Average gas usage/person in the us is 1,050 gallons per year
-US population is 293 million
So, maximum output is 5.875 billion gallons of diesel/year. Usage is somewhere around 297 billion gallons of gasoline/year. SO it's not possible to completely replace gasoline with soy.
The other thing is that oil prices are relatively stable over time because the extraction process is fairly predicatable. They know how much is in the ground, how much is left, and how much it will cost to get it out. With a farmed fuel, the weather, from year to year can cause potentially large swings in price.
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Re:Great... (Score:5, Insightful)
So the US could stop growing corn, wheat, and everything else in order to provide a whopping 2 percent of our gasoline?
Here's a crazy idea. Why don't we use less gas.
-B
Parent
Free as in beer or free as in oil (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:More Great News About President-Vice Cheney (Score:5, Insightful)
Bechtel [bechtel.com].
Less snarkily:
Washington Group International [wgint.com]
Transportation and Logistics Directory [google.com]
Commercial Contractors Directory [google.com]
There are hundreds of such companies in the U.S. alone. The government didn't bid these contracts - they awarded them without competition. Normally, government bids are extremely competitive because of large numbers of companies. Raytheon is a false analogy - missiles are not the same as civil engineering and logistics. Far more companies are available to provide the latter.
Au contraire. In many, many fields private sector margins have been cut to the bone since 1990 as competition resulted in efficiency, process redesign, downsizing, and mergers.
What government contracts offer is steady guarantees, with reasonable margins, which is why they are so desperately competed for by many companies.
However, the deals Halliburton and Bechtel have in Iraq are nearly unprecedented. They are cost-plus deals [guardian.co.uk]. Meaning, Halliburton tells the army how much they spent
The private sector figured out a hundred years the obvious reasons why this doesn't work: your contractor now has incentive to screw you. They get rewarded for sloppy performance and procrastination, or even outright conscious delay. And human nature is what it is.
This is why private sector contracts - and better goverment contracts - bid for a set price and deadline. Now it becomes the contractor's job to figure out how to make a profit by getting the work done under the cost cap.
The cost-plus no-bid deals handed out for Iraq are unheard of in the business world, because it's a stupid, stupid way to do business, from a purely economic perspective. But, the nature of politics today seems to make it impossible to even discuss these things without getting called a "commie librul". You know the world's screwed up when smart business sense = communist liberalism.
Another suggestion of a "company that would take the work"... try the Army. Until a few years ago, they provided almost all of their own logistics. It's not at all clear that it's cheaper to do it with private companies.
It also means the military now depends on civilian companies that can and will cut and run if the security situation gets too bad
Imagine how fast Halliburton would be gone if some terrorist DID set off a stolen nuke in Iraq, killing 1000 of their employees. But nuke or no nuke, someone's got to feed our troops. This is why Army logistics should stay in the Army.
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How's it smell? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How's it smell? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How's it smell? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How's it smell? (Score:5, Funny)
Great, so then every cop in a 10-mile radius is magically drawn to your car. Even if you're not doing anything wrong it would still be unnerving as hell leading a parade of squad cars all trying to get a contact sugar high from your exhaust.
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Like they say about Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like a fun project though. The warnings about the various poisons certainly got my attention.
Re:Like they say about Linux... (Score:5, Funny)
For my time/money, I'll wade through man pages and dependency checks long before I'll touch a drum of boiled fat.
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The tax man cometh (Score:5, Interesting)
a few caveats (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's why this isn't sustainable... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nifty, but if we all went out and did this, the price would skyrocket. Hell, if only all the people who read this story on Slashdot went out and did this, the price would skyrocket.
All this story says is, "If you get free stuff, you can make other cheap stuff out of it." Regrettably, we're not solving any energy problems by starting with "If you get free stuff..."
(It's great the guy did this and I respect the hack that this embodies. But people shouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from this. All the cooking oil I've used so far this year (and I don't order many fried foods from restaurants so that's the majority of "my" share of oil) wouldn't hardly get me out of the city.)
one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:one problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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Availability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Availability (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Availability (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Availability (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the biodiesel in use today in the US is not from used vegetable oil - it's from new soybean (and other seed) oil. Put the American farmer back into the energy loop growing soybeans and take foreign oil sources out - how is that a "bad solution"?
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Re:Availability (Score:5, Insightful)
I really hope that biodiesel does pan out. I really don't see fuel cells getting anywhere, nor do I see battery technology getting good enough anytime in the future. If we don't get a good fuel before the price of oil jacks up, then the only viable form of transportation is going to be electric rail, which is fine for dense areas, but is bad news for the US.
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Fuel Taxes (Score:5, Interesting)
Ha (Score:5, Funny)
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Mercedes New E-Class (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.edmunds.com/new/2004/mercedesbenz/ec
And you know what they use to control emissions in the US market with higher sulpher content fuels. A urea injection system... That's right... Urea is sprayed into the mix with fuel and air.
Humboldt California (Score:5, Informative)
CCAT's website includes a recipe for biodiesel:
http://www.humboldt.edu/~ccat/biodies
I've been told that most of the public trasportation in Berkeley, CA runs off of biodiesel (?).
Good for individuals, not practical for society (Score:5, Interesting)
First, the amount of land required to grow enough oil for all the cars currently operating has been estimated to be about the same amount of land contained in the continental US, and I believe there are a couple of other uses people had in mind for that land too. I've seen similar estimates for the UK fleet vs. UK landmass.
Second, our current style of agri-business uses large quantities of fossil fuels in the production of crops. Fertilizers, herbicides, and pestidcides are all produced using fossil fuels, and actually require more than a gallon of oil input to generate a gallon of vegetable oil. This isn't really a problem if you're using oil that was already purchased by McDonalds since the oil would have been produced and consumed anyway, but producing biodiesel as the primary aim of the operation is simply counter-productive. Unless you're buying organic biodiesel, and let's face it, there's only so much manure to go around.
Re:Good for individuals, not practical for society (Score:5, Informative)
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Before everyone whines.. (Score:5, Interesting)
So while there might be a bit of an increase in the price of diesel or biodiesel, the price of gasoline would be affected as well because we would consume less of it. The more alternatives you have for an activity, the more in touch with reality their pricing is. Take CDs -- their pricing should be dropping because DVDs and video games are (bang for the buck) much more effective. However, because the RIAA is ignorant, they're trying to use price fixing. Naturally, this isn't working as the price elasticity for that good has been increasing in the past few years
Every time there is another way to solve a problem, we all benefit.
why diesel is popular (Score:5, Insightful)
No, not really. It has more to do with skyrocketing gasoline costs and the fact that TDI technology is miles above the old diesels. It's quieter, more efficient, more powerful, the blocks are lighter thanks to superior materials, and TDI isn't nearly as sensitive to the cold- it doesn't even need the glowplugs above 40 or so degrees. The glowplug system is tied into the central locking, so when you approach the car and unlock the doors, it figures out if it's cold enough to need the glowplugs and starts warming them; as a result, the car's ready to go before you are, most of the time. Diesel is also much more prevalent now that there are a lot more diesels in pickups, vans, etc used by small businesses and non-fleet operators.
That addresses many of the concerns the public had about diesel- hard to find fuel, noisy, heavy, and a bitch in the cold.
A lot of people get hybrids wrong too, thinking it's all the hippies buying them. Dealers say that was true initially, now it's just regular commuters who want the most efficient car. Biodiesel is a boutique fuel aside from use in fleets in 2% mixes to replace sulfur in low-sulfur fuels.
Motor vehicle fuel tax evasion (Score:5, Informative)
You can run a diesel car on home heating oil too, but you are evadeing the fuel tax.
The per gallon Federal Motor Fuel Excise Tax is 18.4 cents on gasoline, 13.6 cents on LPG, 24.4 cents on diesel fuel, 13.0 cents on gasohol, 19.4 cents on aviation gas, and 4.4 cents on jet fuel. These monies go to the Federal Highway Trust Fund. [sddot.com]
The by-state fuel tax averages 22 cents a gallon for gasoline [sddot.com], I am too lazy to find a diesel link.
Google for federal fuel tax and state fuel tax for more info.
Here is one of many links for the actual prices of fuels, before the tax. [doe.gov]
What about road taxes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sooner or later there's going to be a crackdown. Making your own biodiesel may soon be illegal, for all practical purposes -- either explicitly, or through red tape that's too hard to deal with. You're either going to have to add red dye, prove that you're paying road taxes, or something.
Personally, I think the best way for the government to spur development of alternative fuel infrastructure is to offer a road tax holiday for alternative fuel users -- say 5 years or so. Let this apply to all biodiesel, CNG, hydrogen, ethanol, and electric vehicles.
Diesel's US Comeback? (Score:5, Interesting)
True, diesel may be making a comeback in the U.S., but not so in California (unless you count pickup trucks).
I was in the market for a new car a few months ago and (after renting one in Germany) was very interested in a Volkswagen Jetta. I saw the Volkswagen offered a TDI (turbo-diesel injection) model which had more horsepower, better gas-mileage and lower emissions than the standard unleaded gasoline engine. However, for some unknown reason, the TDI model is not approved for sale or import into California,
Upon further research, I've found some BMW and Mercedes-Benz models that offer diesel engines (also with lower emissions and better mileage than their unleaded counterparts) that are available for sale in the U.S., but not in California.
It strikes me as very odd that in a state as liberal and environmentally minded as California, a lower emission engine isn't available in these cars. My guess is that some old-timer remembers the diesels that belched black smoke all day and doesn't realize how many advances have been made in diesel engines.
Methane is the real answer (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no idea why this idea has never been persued by a few corporations. All the technology is already in place, the program could be started today, and creating methane reactors for our bio-waste would actually be a simple prospect.
Not foolish at all... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:It seems foolish... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen argues that there has never been a famine in a working democracy. This leads to the conclusion that famines are ultimately political in nature. There's always a warlord blocking food convoys, or a landlord exacting rent right off the dinner table. Or there may be plenty of food, but the sociopolitical environment does not provide the means for a person to acquire the food.
I remember seeing footing of the great depression, in which dairy farmers dumped huge vats of milk on the ground. The problem was that they weren't getting paid enough for their milk to live on, so in protest they just dumped the milk. Perhaps they were trying to raise the price by limiting supply. In either case, if people went without milk, it wasn't because there wasn't enough milk, it was because of political and economic factors that prevented the distribution of milk to those who needed it.
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Re:French Fry Smell (Score:5, Funny)
"Yes, I'd like a Big Mac, large fry, small diet coke, and filler-up with McDiesel."
"Would you like to Biggie-size that to include an oil change?"
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Re:Clean?! (Score:5, Funny)
Would this have anything to do with people like my friends and me throwing massive chunks of ice into the fryers while working at Wendy's in high school? There's nothing quite like watching (and hearing) a deep fryer exploding with gigantic scalding bubbles of grease. However, I'm thinking your water-diluted grease gets the water after it's cooled.
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Re:Biodiesel - myth? (Score:5, Funny)
How are things going at NASA?
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Re:Biodiesel - myth? (Score:5, Informative)
Then you were doing something wrong.
Some facts: one gallon of vegetable oil will produce one gallon of biodiesel (you also add some methanol and lye, but not in large quantities).
One acre of each of these crops can produce this many gallons of biodiesel: soybean 49, sunflower 84, canola 76.
when she said it produced no carbon dioxide, I just switched the channel.
Biodiesel produces no net increase in carbon dioxide. Burning biodiesel does release carbon dioxide, but the plants grown to produce the biodiesel convert carbon dioxide to oxygen in the same or higher amounts.
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