can somebody help me, what do you have to do to run veg oil , any thing speacial.any filters , any mixing with something else

 

Assuming you've pre-filtered any bad-stuff out of the oil (you know, like bits of McNugget), the only real problem with running straight vegetable oil (SVO) is that it's too viscous to go through the tiny holes in modern injectors. The usual solution to this is to have two fuel systems with a switchover valve. You start the vehicle on normal diesel, and run it until the hot coolant has heated up the SVO tank and fuel system, making the oil less viscous. Then you flip your switch/lever and run the engine on SVO. A couple of minutes before you plan to shut down, you switch back to diesel in order to purge all the SVO from the lines and injectors.

The downside is the complication of the extra tank and plumbing and switchover valve, plus the risk that you'll shut down abruptly for some reason and allow the SVO to coagulate in your injectors. The upside is the fuel is generally completely free.

The other approach is to use a simple catalytic reaction to change the oil into biodiesel, which has the same viscosity as normal diesel, but much better lubricity and cetane. The downside is the hassle and expense of making or buying the fuel. The upside is that it's completely interchangeable with normal diesel, in any proportion, and requires no modifications to your vehicle at all (with the possible exception of needing to replace some natural rubber fuel lines, if your vehicle is old enough to have come with those, and if you plan to run higher concentrations of biodiesel.)

Duncan

 

So biodiesel is still more expensive to make, even from non waste streams such as agricultural excess?
Otherwise we would be switching over just because it's cheaper IMO.

 

As hard as it is to believe, it is currently cheaper to travel halfway around the world, fight terrorists or buy off governments, drill miles below the earth's surface, pump the crude up and out to ships, truck it back to the US, put it through an amazingly complex and stinky chemical process, put it tank trucks and on to the tanks at your local gas station.........than it is to swirl waste grease together with methanol and lye and skim the biodiesel layer off once it settles. Oh sure, the biodiesel is cheaper if you're homebrewing batches of it, but commercial straight ASTM standard biodiesel is $3.00 a gallon or more.

I think that will eventually change as the economies of scale come to bear on biodiesel production and/or someone figures out ways to make it even more efficient. But for now, commercial biodiesel is something you buy because it feels like the right thing to do, not because it's cheaper.

B20 (20% biodiesel, 80% petrodiesel) at a pump seems to cost about 20 cents a gallon more than regular petrodiesel. The energy bill that's been stuck in Congress for 4 years has a provision to cut the excise tax by 20 cents on B20. That would at least make it cost around the same as petrodiesel at the pump, which might spur on greater acceptance of it. If that bill ever passes, which doesn't look likely.

Duncan

 

I agree with you on every point here.
I have to wonder though, a 100% organic source of fuel for everyone in the world; I think that there might not be enough farmland on the planet to supply. We would have to sacrifice wilderness areas and turn them into giant fuel farms.

 

I played around with those numbers one time and you're right. The US has a *lot* of unused arable land and could grow a *lot* of soybeans, but it would be difficult to supply a large fraction of even the current diesel utilization in the US (never mind trying to switch over to biodiesel as the more common fuel source instead of gasoline.) I think you could easily turn our nation's diesel supply into B5 or B10, though, which would be a *huge* positive in terms of cutting our crude oil needs and lowering pollution... not to mention putting a lot of farmers back to work.

... but there are other sources of base stock for biodiesel.

Despite the super-sizing of the US waistline, there's not enough used fryer oil to replace all the petrodiesel with biodiesel, but we should definitely use all that anyway - it uses up what is currently a waste product that fills landfills.

They have done studies with turning algae into biodiesel: Click here for DOE study. That has the advantage of being quicker turnaround than a crop like soybeans.

There's a process called "thermal depolymerization" that takes pretty much any material except nuclear waste and efficiently turns it into its base components, which come out as a gas (which is fed back into the process to heat the next batch!), a diesel-like oil, and a fertilizer-like solid material. I had a link to a great article on the subject, but the magazine doesn't archive their articles forever, so it's gone now. You can click here for a more scientific paper on the subject. The early tests have been done with the waste products from turkey processing plants (body parts and poop), but the process can be tuned to work with anything from pig farm waste to plastic 2-liter bottles. (The no longer available article even theorized about what would come out of the process if the average human were thermally depolymerized, and they were joking, but what an environmentally friendly alternative to cremation for an eco-freak!) I like this strategy because it can get rid of existing pollution problems while solving part of the energy problem.

Soooooo.... if you can't tell, I think we should work towards making biodiesel a standard and cost-effective part of our fuel choices, and once that ball is rolling I think the sources for all that base stock will start presenting themselves, as more and more people ponder the problem and come up with innovative solutions.

Duncan

 

Lot's of research still to be done but from the looks of your post we could find ways to even limit landfill usage.

 

My understanding of the thermal depolymerization trick is that you could take pretty much every speck of trash (not to mention sewage!) that we currently generate, and turn it into fuel and fertilizer. Talk about an endless supply of base stocks! The only problem is that the process needs to be tuned to the input waste type. So you could cost-effectively have a plant set up to replace a sewage treatment facility, and another to process plastic soda bottles, and another for grass clippings, but you're not realistically going to have one where the local garbage trucks just unload into the input of the process everything from kitchen trash to broken armchairs. But I'm all for simultaneous reduction in our landfull usage and petroleum imports and pollution, even if it doesn't completely eliminate any of them.

Duncan

 

here in minn thier is a plant that takes garbage from garbage hualers

they dump the trash in this huge building then skid loaders pushes the rubbish over to two convayor belts that feed the garbage through a long process that grinds separats the materails that can be incinorated and turned into energy the rest gets sent to metal recyclers and the ash is whats left over and that is stored in specally made pits lined out to protect the enviroment
better than just dumping all that rubbish into a land fill

 

i ran some of that biodiesel one time...ran like an old junker, a gallon of lucas, 300 agonizing miles, and 30 gallons of them good ol' donosuars later it ran like a champ

 

Odd, I wonder what was wrong with the biodiesel you got.

I've been playing with commercially produced soy biodiesel 55 gallons at a time. I've run the 120K-mile '97 F250HD at various blends up to about 70% and I've run my son's 300K-mile '82 Mercedes 300SD at various blends up to 100%. The F250HD absolutely *loves* the stuff. It has never run quieter, and with every bit as much power, as when it gets over about 20% biodiesel. The 300SD also runs quieter but I noticed anytime I got over about 50% it would lose a little power. Perhaps because it's so underpowered to begin with, any power loss is noticeable, but I didn't feel anything like that in the pickup.

In both vehicles I tried the following experiment: starting with a fairly low tank of petrodiesel, I leave it idling while pouring in 5 or 10 gallons of straight biodiesel. You can actually *hear* when the biodiesel makes it through the system and hits the engine. The nasty edge to the diesel clatter disappears and you're just left with a more pleasing diesel idle sound. Remember this stuff *is* lubricity and cetane!

Duncan

 

Frobozz you might have me interested now. If the PSD actually runs better, hmmm.
I have a 98 gallon transfer flow tank installed in the bed of my truck that enables me to drive 1500 miles between fillups, while pulling the trailer. It would be a piece of cake to fill that thing and just go on vacation without having to fill up until I get back home again. I live in Seattle, WA. Do you know of any local sources for me?

 

Now before you go running around in the Seattle area in fall with 98 gallons of straight biodiesel, I should point out that straight biodiesel has a higher cloud point than normal #2. It will start to have problems as you get below 20 or 30 degrees F. B20 (20% biodiesel blended with 80% petrodiesel) generally has the same cloud point characteristics as the underlying petrodiesel, so if you buy winter-blend B20 you should be fine. And all the same additives have the same effect, so you could toss some winterizer or #1 diesel in there too if it made you feel better. It's easier to find B5 or B20 than B100 too, so it may not even be an issue you need to worry about.

Biodiesel.org has a pump-finder... but the site seems to be down right now for some reason. I'll give you the link anyway, and you can try it later and see if it works: Biodiesel pump finder webpage

Duncan

 

Thank you for the help. I'll let you know how it goes.

 

sounds like cemetaries too. huh?