April 6, 2004
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I’ve been reading a lot about biodiesel lately.
Essentially, biodiesel is diesel fuel made from organic material. It’s easy to make and cheap to produce and is ‘carbon neutral,’ so there’s no greenhouse emissions when you burn it. If you can make soap, you can make biodiesel (one of the ‘waste’ materials from biodiesel production is glycerine).
Good web sites about it are the National Biodiesel Board and the University of Colorado’s biodiesel research non-profit.
The reason I’m blogging this is because through the NBB, I found out there’s a biodiesel retail outlet in Texas City, TX. And this makes me very, very happy, because Texas City is one of the largest collections of petroleum refineries on the planet, and also one of the most toxic places on the planet, as well. So I’m considering getting a diesel auto just so I can drive there and buy a tank of happy-making biodiesel while the refineries chug and churn around me.
Comments (7)
<3 biodiesel. You can rig some cars to drive on vegetable oil and get that for free from resteraunts (you can recycle their veggie oil that they’ve fried stuff in, etc) isn’t that CRAZY??!!!
Sounds like a good idea except for putting yourself into that “chug and churn” polluted atmosphere. I know I can make soap, so I guess I’ll have to look into biodiesel. For a while I’d had fantasies of a big methane-generating compost pile in my yard, but that was more physical labor that I could do alone and the collection of biomass became problematic in just the planning stages. This would be better for the environment, if it’s feasible on a small scale.
thinkingamerican: Biodiesel doesn’t require any modification to the engine. It’s just diesel fuel created from organic material. The only problem is that it eats away at some types of plastics, so it can damage some engines, depending on how they’re constructed.
SuSu: The CU-Biodiesel site talks about the process of making biodiesel in very general terms. They also talk about how bio-fuels could be a boon to the developing world, such that remote villages could create their own fuel. (I dunno about that picture, though. Somehow the idea of creating diesel fuel over a cooking fire seems a little risky.)
Biodiesel IS the stuff from used french fry grease, actually. We in the fire artist community did some research into it about 3 years ago. One guy even tried running his car on it.
He emptied his gas tank & cleaned it. He added 3 gallons of biodiesel from a local SF supplier. It’s smoky as hell, but it’ll ignite. Leaves a trail of gassing that smells like a Burger King. Not bad, just not that clean either.
I suppose if the world switched over to it, the issue of deforestation would become even worse, and it would justify the fast-foood industry to no end.
Farm groups are promoting it as an alternative market for soybean oil. Trouble is, soybean production uses lots of fuel and pesticides and allows relatively heavy topsoil erosion.
And in a hungry world, do we want to divert food crops for motor fuel? Just ride a bke! (SuSu can use sled dogs.)
Biodiesel takes on a bunch of forms: There’s the fry-grease-in-your-tank version, and there’s the refined-to-replace-regular-diesel version. And of course mixtures of the two, as well as mixtures of refined biodiesel and petrodiesel.
The refined version doesn’t smoke or stink like the raw-oil version.
Learn.
one of the local school districts here has been running their busses with a mix very successfully. It’s probably not a total cure, but seems like one part of a logical set of solutions.