Re: More Infor on BioDiesel

Great, that should last about a week. Then what? It may have a place in the diversification of energy sources but it's not a final solution.

It comes from oil, not flowers and puppy dog farts, it is not made. And it doens't matter how cheap it is to refine, I have news for you, gasoline costs about 15 cents a liter to refine including extraction and transport, does that seem to be helping you at the pump lately?

The destructive/fractional distillation of crude oil, plus the usual hydrogenation of the results (to increase the yields) is sufficiently complex to be referred to as "making". You do not pluck the diesel out of the crude oil with a spoon.

Far less complex processes are accurately referred to as "making".

But you are certainly right about "bio-diesel" not being a reasonable substitute for petroleum. It's a laughable idea: The fellow here who offered the idea is not real fond of arithmetic or careful research. He just skims a couple of web pages and goes off the deep end...

The fact is, that there is NO substitute for petroleum, nor any combination thereof: All will be significantly more expensive for the majority of the people, and that affects the price of everything, of course.

Fuel will be more expensive at the same time that more money is needed for other things: And the middle-class shrinks.

Our leaders are not idiots (well, not the ones that REALLY make the decisions)

:-)

If this weren't true there wouldn't be the desperate violence being done to keep control of the world's dwindling supplies of petroleum.

Keeping the M.E. reserves out of the hands of the Chinese (only about 200 miles from Afghanistan and needing more and more oil everyday....) is one of the main reasons the U.S. is in the M.E. right now.

AC

probably not, if the US intends to supports it's consumeristic and wasteful practices.

I forsee a VERY different lifestyle in the US once the fossil fuel dry up. While plastics can be made from vegetable oil... the use of plastics will much much more rare.

The use of locally grown plant fibers will come back into use, displacing artifical fibers. Hemp, linen,and raime will be grown locally, with some cotton in the south, but less cotton than is now being produced.

The US will become more agricultural, and more ppl will live on farms and will grow food and other renewable farm products.

Will would have to begin using more animal power. Houses would have to be built of natural available materials. These residences would be passively heated and cooled.

Only when we learned to live much more earth friendly methods can expect to be able to grow enuf oil to power those sections of our lives that require a boost.

I don't consider it "making" simply because you make a cake, you don't extract a cake from a big tanker full of cake mix. Making implies you are getting something greater than the sum of it's parts. It's the opposite with refining. Diesel wouldn't even be a viable product if it wasn't for the fact that it's a byproduct of refining oil to get gasoline and kerosene. Imagine if oil was refined only to get diesel, more than half the energy and 80% of the dollar value would just go down the drain.

I think we all know that the only thing that will drive change is the dollar and we have a long time to wait before things get that bad. Back when we were going to run out of oil by 1989 people were talking just like this.

How much land is dependent on the crop, and how rich is the land. Some oil crops produce more oil than others.

Of the crops grown for oil, coconut palms produce the most oil/acre. Naturally, coconuts don't grow everywhere, so ppl have to figure out what oil bearing crop grows best in their area.

The next most oil productive land plant is Canola, followed by Safflower and Sunflowers.

Oil can come from many sources: hemp seed, corn, and a variety of other things. There is even an oil bearing algae that grows in salt water! This algae bears up to 10X as much oil as an equivalent amount of coconut pulp.

You are using complex machinery, energy, and petroleum. That's making. That's what I think, and I don't care whether you agree with me or not.

Go get yourself a barrel of crude oil and produce some diesel from it for us, and then tell us if you still think it isn't "making".

ROTFL !!

Diesel wouldn't even be a viable product if it

That's hardly relevant.

You are very glib, but there's little substance to your arguments.

Oil is *obviously* going to run out. Just because someone missed the date where it becomes a critical issue, doesn't change that fact at all.

It doesn't have to be even CLOSE to running out to become too expensive because of increasing demand from developing countries like China and India.

And for the military costs of controlling the world's *relatively* AND absolutely, dwindling supplies to exceed the monetary advantages of using it over alternatives. All of which are far more costly than oil for the majority.

AC

On or around Fri, 14 May 2004 02:42:56 GMT, Alan Connor enlightened us thusly:

in what way? are you saying it's not viable due to the number involved? 'cos if so, I expect you're right. Technically, it can be done - you can also do ethanol for spark-ignition engines.

however, we *will* deplete the oil supply if we carry on as we are, so we need some sort of alternative. And the much in-vogue hydrogen is a long way from practical too.

Hydrogen is not an energy source.. It's an energy storage medium. The only advantage to hydrogen is that it lets you combine your energy generation plants to a few central places where it's easier to blow them up... er... easier to control the polution, because it's a point-source.

--Goedjn

However we could make a significant saving by using waste fats for fuel. It doesn't need to be created by esterification either, that's just stupid piddling about. Many diesel engines will run quite happily on vegetable oil provided that the oil has been thinned with a small proportion (about 5ml per litre) of kerosene.

What makes it uneconomic to do this in the UK is stupid government policy which taxes vegetable oil used as fuel at the same level as fossil fuel.

Vegetable oil can be obtained for about 24p/litre - around the same price as central heating oil. Also it can be used twice, since your engine really doesn't care if the oil has been used for frying first. Hence there's less need to dedicate land to growing crops just for fuel. And a 5% saving on fossil fuel use is worth making.

As with the earlier poster (maybe it was you, I can't easily check), you just don't realize what a "piddling" (to use your own words) amount of deep fryer fat and frying pan fat is available. Besides the issue that most households use very little vegetable fat (that is recoverable, as opposed to being eaten, thrown out with the dregs, etc.), even restaurants and fast food places are using less today than in earlier years.

A rough measure of this can be seen by noting the traffic of gas tankers (a lot!) compared to the "waste vegetable oil tankers" (rare!).

If used vegetable oil totals up to even 2% of gas and diesel supplies, I'll be very surprised.

In other words, inconsequential to even worry about.

Sure, a tiny percentage of people can figure out some source (probably intermittent, requiring them to store on their sites) of used deep fat fryer oil, and the local newspapers will run the usual bullshit articles like "Local man runs diesel tractor on restaurant grease!," but the impact is inconsequential.

--Tim May

Perhaps you could turn your brain on before typing?

On or around Fri, 14 May 2004 13:10:29 -0400, default enlightened us thusly:

so are all fuels. What really makes sense is a hydrogen fusion-powered watre-cracker making hydrogen... but that's a way off, too. Most commercial H at the moment comes from methane.

That's it!

We should eat beans and capture it for our countries!

Splendid idea, instead of taking a bubble bath with my reserve of methane from eating beans tonight. I shall go to the convenience store, get a bottle of soda, and harness both the anal and upper G.I. methanes and ship it to whomever it may help.

Refinish King

I made a bit mistake when I wrote a post about bio diesel. I said that we could make 20,000,000 gallons of bio diesel with out a substantial impact on our agriculture.

What I meant to say was that we could plant an additional 20,000,000 acres of rape seed with out substantial impact on our agriculture.

Now that I have done some additional research 20,000,000 acres would probably cause some dislocation (higher prices) but the increase in the price of crude to $41.18 a barrel will also cause even a larger market dislocation in other agricultural goods.

An additional 20,000,000 dedicated to rape seed production and an additional million acres of acres would be a much better solution.

If we increase our acreage of things that we go now and can use the calce (solids left over for cattle feed or other uses), we could increase the production of the following

Corn @ 18 gal per acre Oats @ 23 gal per acre cotton @ 35 gal per acre hemp @ 39 gal per acre soybean @ 48 gal per acre Flax @ 51 gal per acre Pumpkin Seed @ 57 gal per acre Mustard Seed @ 61 gal per acre Safflower @ 83 gal per acre rice @ 88 gal per acre sunflower @ 102 gal per acre Peanuts @ 113 gal per acre Rape seed @ 127 gal per acre Olives @ 129 gal per acre Caster beans @ 151 gal per acre Jojoba seeds @ 202 gal per acre Avocado @ 282 gal per acre

We could probably increase our production of vegetable oils by 20 billion gallons

Also for those inclined to build there own still to make ethanol the site

has instructions to build two different type of still that can make

180 proof (95% pure) ethanol in one pass. The still can be build for less than $100.00 with simple hand tools. It also has a lot of information about government laws, and safety per cautions.

It also cover a lot about how to make sippin alcohol.

The nicest still is made from stainless steel beer kegs with the upper reflex part made from copper plumbing tubing. When polished they look really nice and they get about 2.5 to 3.0 gallons of alcohol from a bushel of corn.

In any case, for the survivalist I urge you to go to

for information on alternate fuel, solar power, small farms, sustainable farming seeds, blacksmithing, water-powered water pumps, small vermin traps, making hand tools, organic gardening, low-tech radios, (sophisticated crystal radios that work), a 250 watt pico turbine from producing electricity, (a mini pico turbine was built by a bunch of 10 year olds that put out 1/3 watt of power,) and information on just about anything you might be interested in. It is a site that is primarily an index to link to other sites.

An very interesting subject topic is City Farms.

The Independent

Chris Phillipo wrote:

I'm have not and have never said bio-diesel would replace petroleum oil derived diesel fuel. We use 178 trillion gallons of petroleum products per year in the United States today. The most we can hope to replace with Bio-diesel under the most favorable conditions is about 2 to 5%.

May be with a crash program that would convert a large part of our agricultural lands to the output ot bio diesel and ethanol we might make it up to 10%. However that 10% would go a long way to wipe out our balance of payments debt.

The main purpose for my comments on bio-diesel is to run a diesel gen set and to make fuel for my C-120 in the case of a major disruption of resource markets by war, or economic depression.

Of course if TEOTWAWKI comes then having bio-diesel and ethanol may be a survival necessity.

The Independent

You could burn crude oil for energy and even power an engine with it, you can't take flour, eggs and milk and put birthday candles on it. ROTFL, indeed.

Hardly relevant!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?

?!??

FACT IS there would be no cheap diesel available were it not for gasoline production.

Actually it's the opposite, Hydrogen can be produced on site anywhere there is water and electricity, it allows for the very thing we need, decentralization of both the energy and the monopolies controlling it.