Biodiesel is more eco friendly for sure, but only a small part of the fuel we use at present is bio. There are some disadvantages, but the one that concerns me the most is that biodiesel produced from agricultural crops involves additional land use. Already large areas of the US are dedicated to growing corn for bio fuel. Switching to biodiesel on a large scale requires considerable use of our arable land. Even modest usages of biodiesel would consume almost all cropland in some countries in Europe! If the same thing is to happen all over the world, the impact on global food supply could be a major concern, and could make some countries being net importers of food products, from their current status of net exporters! It could mean that most land on the planet is used to produce food for cars, not people!
Used cooking oil can be made into useful fuel – people have been doing that for awhile. I don’t know the specifics of the process though, but at the current rate of gasoline price-jacking, cooking oil starts looking pretty good.
I have a friend in San Diego that has been doing this for years. It’s not totally free (because you have to filter it and reduce the viscosity etc., but it is a great way to wring one more useful cycle from this product before it’s broken back down to it’s base components and returned to the environment.
Martha has a good point that concerns me as well, and I tend to always try to consider cause and effect / cost versus benefit / future liabilities versus immediate benefit and so on. Consider:
1) we want to move away from dependence on foreign petroleum resources, which will probably make those radical muslim extremeists hate us even more (not less, as gobment would have you believe) because they would lose their terrorist funding. 😈
2) So, we try to replace the fossil fuel with organically grown stock only to find that we loved the fossil fuel so much because nature and time did 90% of the refinement of decayed plant stock for free. We find that it ends up costing more to produce a single gallon of biofuel than it is to just buy 3 gallons of fossil fuel at $5 / gallon. People will dismiss this last statement by saying it does not cost that much more to produce a single gallon of biofuel…they are not adding in the environmental controls and permits and payrolls and benefits and unemployment insurance fund employer contributions and on and on and yet on again. MOAR EXPENSIVE.
3) So, we decide anyway to go the biofuel way. We now have to rely on monsanto to genetically slice in bovine genes ito sawgrass, corn, soy and whatever other plant we can use, to get maximum yeild. This will result in corn no longer fit for human consumption. High Fructose Corn Syrup is so widely used in food, beverage, cosmetics, pet food, construction products and the list is endless…we will have to do without all this stuff because the speculators in NY, LA and Chicago will be bumping the price of corn, soy, beets and the rest as it is now linked to another ravenous hunger—our fucking cars. We will be hungry, but we will fight those hunger pangs by driving around and living off the fumes of our biodiesel cars that smells deliciously like chips!
3)Damn, when we took over all the open spaces to grow our biodiesel stock, we edged out grazing and pasyural acreage needed for our beef and pork livestock. We will have to go Vegan (Martha is grinning at that :love: )
4) We also now will have nowhere to set up Obama’s wind turbines and solar pabels. (look at the fight over land use in Germany that is beginning .now that everybody has the right to get subsidized solar farms…
5) High fructose corn syrup is tied for the #1 cause for obesity here in the US—lack of meaningful calorie burning exercise is a tie.
Right before I became disabled, I was working in a restaurant. I had researched using old fryer oil for fuel and was in the process of finding an old 80’s model diesel Mercedes to run with my free waste cooking oil. Then I got sick and couldn’t work anymore. I was so pissed!
I had calculated it all out and I would have had enough free fuel to do all of my regular driving for free. Not only that, but I would have saved my employer considerable money since he wouldn’t have had to pay to have his grease traps emptied as often.
This is a good way to go,and have used it for a couple of years on my car – saving money and recycling the oil in the process. There can sometimes be a slight fish and chips aroma,too,hahaha.
Of course,all my good intentions are probably negated by my junk-heap of a car,but… :/
I don’t think I said using old chip-shop oil as fuel is anti-environmental. But I do think there are issues about growing freak Monsanto frankencorn to produce it.
I think this is a very good idea, which I’ve seen before. I will shamefully admit I just started recycling plastic and paper products a couple of months ago. Shame, shame on me.
Sorry, but it’s bullshit when they tell you bio-diesel is more “environmental friendly” than regular diesel. Green Peace is having a big argument with the EU parliament, because they are subventioning bio-diesel in Europe.
Bio-diesel only looks good on paper. The only thing that can said in its favour is that it’s renewable. That’s all. Beyond this fact, it’s so environmentally unfriendly, that Greenpeace is trying to stop it before it becomes mainstream.
Other facts, they won’t tell you about bio-diesel:
1) It produces more soot than regular diesel and thus more fine dust. The fine dust, fumes and soot cause cancer and allergies.
2) You need 10-20% more bio-diesel to get the same mileage as real diesel, and burns less clean.
3) Bio-diesel is produced through agriculture, which means if they want Western Civilization to use bio-diesel on the major scale, it will have to compete with areas of land for producing food. That would mean in turn one of two things:
a) Either more land has to be used for agriculture, and thus more forests chopped down OR
b) Somebody is going to have to starve so that others can drive cars.
In the case of solution “a” it means more fertilizer, more pesticides, more genetic engineering, and more environmental pollution. It’s like the argument “make everybody a vegan by law”. If they did that there would not be enough fruit, vegetable and grain products to feed everybody. Same thing with bio-diesel. If everyone would use it, we would have a dangerous agriculture problem. It was part of the problem why the wheat prices shot up drastically during the fire catastrophe in Russia last year. To Europeans were not growing wheat. Instead they were selling their grain (food) to burn as fuel in cars. What a sad thing to tell Russia: Sorry some of you have to starve, because of our environmental politics.
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http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/05/24/earlyshow/contributors/melindamurphy/main1650774.shtml?tag=contentMain;contentBody
Somehow can’t get links to post right.
Biodiesel is more eco friendly for sure, but only a small part of the fuel we use at present is bio. There are some disadvantages, but the one that concerns me the most is that biodiesel produced from agricultural crops involves additional land use. Already large areas of the US are dedicated to growing corn for bio fuel. Switching to biodiesel on a large scale requires considerable use of our arable land. Even modest usages of biodiesel would consume almost all cropland in some countries in Europe! If the same thing is to happen all over the world, the impact on global food supply could be a major concern, and could make some countries being net importers of food products, from their current status of net exporters! It could mean that most land on the planet is used to produce food for cars, not people!
Used cooking oil can be made into useful fuel – people have been doing that for awhile. I don’t know the specifics of the process though, but at the current rate of gasoline price-jacking, cooking oil starts looking pretty good.
I have a friend in San Diego that has been doing this for years. It’s not totally free (because you have to filter it and reduce the viscosity etc., but it is a great way to wring one more useful cycle from this product before it’s broken back down to it’s base components and returned to the environment.
Martha has a good point that concerns me as well, and I tend to always try to consider cause and effect / cost versus benefit / future liabilities versus immediate benefit and so on. Consider:
1) we want to move away from dependence on foreign petroleum resources, which will probably make those radical muslim extremeists hate us even more (not less, as gobment would have you believe) because they would lose their terrorist funding. 😈
2) So, we try to replace the fossil fuel with organically grown stock only to find that we loved the fossil fuel so much because nature and time did 90% of the refinement of decayed plant stock for free. We find that it ends up costing more to produce a single gallon of biofuel than it is to just buy 3 gallons of fossil fuel at $5 / gallon. People will dismiss this last statement by saying it does not cost that much more to produce a single gallon of biofuel…they are not adding in the environmental controls and permits and payrolls and benefits and unemployment insurance fund employer contributions and on and on and yet on again. MOAR EXPENSIVE.
3) So, we decide anyway to go the biofuel way. We now have to rely on monsanto to genetically slice in bovine genes ito sawgrass, corn, soy and whatever other plant we can use, to get maximum yeild. This will result in corn no longer fit for human consumption. High Fructose Corn Syrup is so widely used in food, beverage, cosmetics, pet food, construction products and the list is endless…we will have to do without all this stuff because the speculators in NY, LA and Chicago will be bumping the price of corn, soy, beets and the rest as it is now linked to another ravenous hunger—our fucking cars. We will be hungry, but we will fight those hunger pangs by driving around and living off the fumes of our biodiesel cars that smells deliciously like chips!
3)Damn, when we took over all the open spaces to grow our biodiesel stock, we edged out grazing and pasyural acreage needed for our beef and pork livestock. We will have to go Vegan
(Martha is grinning at that :love: )
4) We also now will have nowhere to set up Obama’s wind turbines and solar pabels. (look at the fight over land use in Germany that is beginning .now that everybody has the right to get subsidized solar farms…
5) High fructose corn syrup is tied for the #1 cause for obesity here in the US—lack of meaningful calorie burning exercise is a tie.
Biodiesel is a great idea…on paper. 🙄
Right before I became disabled, I was working in a restaurant. I had researched using old fryer oil for fuel and was in the process of finding an old 80’s model diesel Mercedes to run with my free waste cooking oil. Then I got sick and couldn’t work anymore. I was so pissed!
I had calculated it all out and I would have had enough free fuel to do all of my regular driving for free. Not only that, but I would have saved my employer considerable money since he wouldn’t have had to pay to have his grease traps emptied as often.
*likes*
This is a good way to go,and have used it for a couple of years on my car – saving money and recycling the oil in the process. There can sometimes be a slight fish and chips aroma,too,hahaha.
Of course,all my good intentions are probably negated by my junk-heap of a car,but… :/
I don’t think I said using old chip-shop oil as fuel is anti-environmental. But I do think there are issues about growing freak Monsanto frankencorn to produce it.
I am all for renewable energy sources. This is very interesting
I think this is a very good idea, which I’ve seen before. I will shamefully admit I just started recycling plastic and paper products a couple of months ago. Shame, shame on me.
Sorry, but it’s bullshit when they tell you bio-diesel is more “environmental friendly” than regular diesel. Green Peace is having a big argument with the EU parliament, because they are subventioning bio-diesel in Europe.
Bio-diesel only looks good on paper. The only thing that can said in its favour is that it’s renewable. That’s all. Beyond this fact, it’s so environmentally unfriendly, that Greenpeace is trying to stop it before it becomes mainstream.
Other facts, they won’t tell you about bio-diesel:
1) It produces more soot than regular diesel and thus more fine dust. The fine dust, fumes and soot cause cancer and allergies.
2) You need 10-20% more bio-diesel to get the same mileage as real diesel, and burns less clean.
3) Bio-diesel is produced through agriculture, which means if they want Western Civilization to use bio-diesel on the major scale, it will have to compete with areas of land for producing food. That would mean in turn one of two things:
a) Either more land has to be used for agriculture, and thus more forests chopped down OR
b) Somebody is going to have to starve so that others can drive cars.
In the case of solution “a” it means more fertilizer, more pesticides, more genetic engineering, and more environmental pollution. It’s like the argument “make everybody a vegan by law”. If they did that there would not be enough fruit, vegetable and grain products to feed everybody. Same thing with bio-diesel. If everyone would use it, we would have a dangerous agriculture problem. It was part of the problem why the wheat prices shot up drastically during the fire catastrophe in Russia last year. To Europeans were not growing wheat. Instead they were selling their grain (food) to burn as fuel in cars. What a sad thing to tell Russia: Sorry some of you have to starve, because of our environmental politics.