January 26, 2007
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SharedRoute
I’ve often thought I might do something like this: SharedRoute.
They do a shuttle bus between Seattle, Olympia, and Portland. The bus runs on biodiesel. $10-$30, depending on where you’re headed. It’s not much cheaper than Amtrak, and they pick you up and drop you off at the Amtrak stations along the way, so the real benefit is that you can bring your pet (crated) or your bike without packing it up.
Comments (6)
you mean you’d do it as in take a ride on it, or actually run the bus yourself?
I mean starting up a shuttle service business.
Homer’s Biofueled Express. Which begs the question, shouldn’t Amtrak be switching to biodiesel? We could run passenger trains nationwide purely on old French Fry grease.
Passenger trains, freight trains, semi-trucks… The nation’s shipping could all be cheap biofuel, even biodiesel for use in existing unmodified engines.
I once read something that said if you farmed an area the size of the Sonoran desert for an oil-producing fungus, you could supply all the diesel needs of the US.
Yup, I watched Mythbusters when they just poured the stuff from the deep fryer straight into a Mercedes diesel and it ran perfectly at 95% of the mileage efficiency. Of course Brazil is generating ethanol that’s 96% as efficient as gasoline from sugar cane, which sounds like a recipe for hotrodding Caribbean agriculture and maybe even reviving the Gulf Coast/Katrina region.
It’s all inevitable.
I’m curious about the pollution generated by sugar cane ethanol. I’ll have to look that up. And here it is….
Biodiesel (refined diesel fuel) burns much, much, much (much) cleaner than petrodiesel, since it doesn’t require so many additives, like sulphur. So diesel engines get the oil, and gas engines get the sugar.