Foo - Bio Diesel

I've got a friend with a diesel car, and he wants to try bio diesel. THeres a station about 10 miles out from my town that sells the stuff, though cut with petroleum diesel as well. Has anybody else here run their vehicles off this stuff?

Willie Nelson...

Willie Nelson...
yeah, he has a pretty sweet Mercedes S-class diesel..

To the OP, check this out. GREASE CAR (http://www.greasecar.com/)

a friend of mine really wants to buy a new VW tdi to try out the grease car thing.

I've got two diesels but no biodiesel nearby. For lots of info look at tdiclub.com

WEll he went to check out the gas station, I guess its only 5% bio. So not worth it.
Might be fun to try and make some though

I work at a GMC dealership, and several customers that have the duramax diesel trucks are using biodiesel. I think you have to change a few things though...not sure if you can just dump it in. We have Kettle foods in town (they make potato chips), all of their vehicles run off their waste oil, as biodiesel.

I've got two diesels but no biodiesel nearby. For lots of info look at tdiclub.com

I've got a Jetta TDI. The nearest Biodiesel outlet is 30 miles out of my way. Commercial B100 fuel isnt priced low enough below reg diesel to make the trip worth it.

Biodiesel comes in different mixes with petrodiesel, from B-5 (5% bio) to B-100. B-20 is commonly sold in some parts of the country. B-100 is harder to find, depending on where you are. VW TDI Jettas and Golfs are pretty popular bio cars. In the midwest, where there is alot more biodiesel sold, folks run their F-150s and tractors with the stuff. No modifications are necessary to fun the stuff in the cars. You might have to replace the fuel filter a little more, is all.

B-5 to B-100 varieties of fuel are generally "virgin", that is, the fuels are not made from used Chinese food or McD's grease. There are a few biofuel co-ops around where I live that treat the grease for use in diesel cars.

The Navy requires biodiesel to be used whenever possible. The closest biodiesel station to me is at the Pentagon (it's a Citgo!) So it's far from being fringe anymore. I wish we had more choice in diesel cars in the US. I can't afford a mercedes, and VWs have too many reliability problems for me. Honda won't bring their diesel cars to the US, oh well, I might as well ride my bike.

Here are some links that might get you started.
http://www.biodiesel.org/
http://www.biodieselnow.com/
http://www.wnbiodiesel.com/ (Willie's site)
http://forums.tdiclub.com/

Next topic: corn stoves

I know a guy who runs an ancient VW Rabbit on fast-food oil.....that's right, as in McDonalds. He calls it the Happy Car, because who would'nt be happy ina car that smelled of fried chicken? It's loud, and looks a century old, but it's really cheap and efficient to run (40+ mpg). He modified it hinself, by the way.

Crazzzy!

Actually, I just saw this on a car show the other day on tv. They ran a truck through a full tank on regular diesel and did all their tests on milage and horsepower etc. Then, flushed the system, replaced the tank, and ran it using biodiesel made from cooking oil. They said it got the same mileage, and no decrease in horsepower. THey also said it seemed to run slightly smoother and the exhaust smelled like french fries. lol.

Some hippies in Ann Arbor Michigan actually have a natural gas station. Not exactly sure what you have to do to make a car run on natural gas, but the idea seems cool.

I run a jetta tdi wagon and use up to b100 during the summer (b75 in winter) with a pump only a few miles from the house. It doesn't smell like anything but burning fuel in my case(which is good, I don't need the added sensory input of french fry smell all the time). I used to have a Golf TDI till it got totalled. I love them both and regularly get 45-46 mpg out of the Jetta. Our Bio is more expensive than the petro version but I feel like it's worth it do lessen our dependence on oil as much as I can.

Might not be accomplishing anything but I'm going to do it anyway.

I have a Jetta TDI, and had been running it on B100 through the summer and fall. When winter hit, our Co-op's tank wasn't prepared and the icy conditions caused ice crystals to form. It gummed up my fuel filter and made for some pretty scary performance until my fuel filter was replaced. The shop I take it to couldn't figure what the problem was because the filter had just been replaced 1 week earlier. The Co-op hasn't come forward to pay for the damages that their product caused, so I'm back to Petrol Diesel. I want to support the alternative technologies, and even if it costs a bit more now, I think supporting it will lead to cheaper prices later. But I'm not going to support the business practices of the Co-op, and since they're the only game in town, that means no more BioDiesel for now.

There was a congressman from Kentucky that ran his campaign vehicle on "industrial hemp" oil. Always had a paceline of tie-dyed mtb'ers. Made frequent stops at pizza huts and taco stands.

Lots of trucks and busses running on propane/natural gas. Pretty simple conversion.

If gasoline prices can remain high for the next 5 years or so, there will be a lot more biodiesel stations and vehicles that use them available.

Crappy diesels from Detroit in the 80's and cheap gasoline ever since pretty much killed off the diesel car in the U.S. But the Japanese and European car makers have them sitting and waiting. And once again, the American car makers will be left behind.

Brazil has been running their cars on ethanol for decades now.

It is a myth that burning biodiesel or hemp oil or whatever will reduce our dependence on foreign oil in the sense that we will buy less of it as a consequence. Foreign oil is the cheapest so it will get used first. Using biodiesel means less U.S. oil will be pumped from the ground. This is the real reason why we haven't drilled in ANWR despite being perfectly able to do so for the past 30 or so years. All these people driving hybrids and riding bicycles just reduce demand for gasoline, thereby helping to lower the price for those in monster SUV's.

This is not necessarily a bad thing; we can suck the foreign oil dry and then we'll be the fat cats sitting on the remaining oil.

Meanwhile, it has become economically feasible to tap the humongous oil sands deposits in Canada. And they've got a HUGE amount of oil up there. We've got a huge amount of oil trapped in shale deposits but at the moment it's too expensive to retrieve it.

Money thrown at ethanol to be added to gasoline is nothing more than corporate welfare. I'm not sure but I believe the energy required to create ethanol is not recovered when the ethanol is burned. The only benefit is a reduction in smog produced by cars but what about the pollution caused by the coal burning plant the supplied the energy to creat the ethanol in the first place? Far better to use nuclear power.

Hydrogen :)

For Hydrogen to be of any value, there's got to be a cheap way of making it. Electrolysis of seawater would be great if you had a cheap energy source. Solar and wind are still too expensive. Nuclear is too. Not sure where the break even point is, though. Time for some Googlin'.

With the high energy prices it's almost feasible economically to install solar panels on your house. Back in the 70's/80's, the only way solar made any sense was when it was coupled with fat subsidies from the gov't. Better insulation, building techniques, and advances in home furnace and air conditioning technology have proven far more effective than going solar.

You should be able to run true biodiesel in any diesel engine without a problem. When you have to change stuff is when you run it on pure vegetable oil. Diesels will run on oil but not when it gets too cold (the oil gets too thick). And the oil has different characteristics so newer computer-controlled diesels are sensitive to the change, older ones (like the VW rabbit mentioned ealier) are really tolerant of a wide variety of fuel characteristics.

Biodeisel is made by chemically "cracking" the vegetable oil molecule into a different one that is a lot less viscous. The cracking is most easily done with Methanol (the methanol is a catalyst, it can later be re-extracted from the byproducts) but can be done with ethanol. This is similar to the way that crude oil is "cracked" into the useful products (gasoline, kerosene, etc) except it doesn't require the same temperature and pressure and stuff... you can get the equipment to do it yourself relatively inexpensively.

Very nice economic study of hydrogen generated from wind power in California.
http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/publications/2005/UCD-ITS-RP-05-09.pdf

Highlights the problems inherent in using wind power to generate electricity, what it would take to overcome them, and the costs involved.

Very nice economic study of hydrogen generated from wind power in California.
http://www.its.ucdavis.edu/publications/2005/UCD-ITS-RP-05-09.pdf

Highlights the problems inherent in using wind power to generate electricity, what it would take to overcome them, and the costs involved.
toyota has been building several hydrogen engines/vehicles that address the hydrogen problem in several ways. One car is designed to operate well in places that would have poor hydrogen station coverage while others are designed to cover vehicles that would have frequent access to hydrogen stations. From my understanding the technology just is not being researched by enough companies. Maybe 1 company out of 1000 companies that are researching something gasoline or gasoline engine related.

Anybody think they could find a breakdown on the amount of gasoline/petroleum used by certain industries.

e.g.

Transportation, possiblybroken down by trains, cars, semi-s, boats
Industrial
Electricity producing

Anybody think they could find a breakdown on the amount of gasoline/petroleum used by certain industries.

e.g.

Transportation, possiblybroken down by trains, cars, semi-s, boats
Industrial
Electricity producing

Here you go:

The United States consumes roughly 20 million barrels per day (MMbpd) of crude oil. This is a phenomenal amount, and constitutes about 25% of the world's oil production. So where does it all go? The stats show that personal transport accounts for 45% of U.S. consumption -- about twice the consumption of trucking, aviation and shipping combined.

The breakdown for 2003 is:
Total oil consumption: 19.7 MMbpd
Transportation: 13.1 MMbpd
Autos/light trucks: 9 MMbpd
Medium/heavy trucks: 3.8 MMbpd
Jet fuel: 1.6 MMbpd
Feedstock: 3.5 MMbpd

http://www.hilltoplancers.org/stories/hirsch0502.pdf

I
. INTRODUCTION
II. PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION
I
II. WHY TRANSITION WILL BE TIME CONSUMING
I
V. LESSONS FROM PAST EXPERIENCE
V. LEARNING FROM NATURAL GAS
VI. MITIGATION OPTIONS & ISSUES
A. Conservation
B. Improved Oil Recovery
C. Heavy Oil and Oil Sands
D. Gas-To-Liquids
E. Liquids from U.S Domestic Sources
F. Fuel Switching to Electricity
G. Other Fuel Switching
H. Hydrogen
I. Factors That Can Cause Delay
VII. A WORLD PROBLEM
VIII. THREE SCENARIOS
I
X. MARKET SIGNALS AS PEAKING IS APPROACHED
X. WILD CARDS
XI. SUMMARY AND CONCLUDING REMARKS

It is a myth that burning biodiesel or hemp oil or whatever will reduce our dependence on foreign oil in the sense that we will buy less of it as a consequence. <snip>

Myth or not. I'm not using as much oil foreign or otherwise.

I have a Jetta TDI, and had been running it on B100 through the summer and fall. When winter hit, our Co-op's tank wasn't prepared and the icy conditions caused ice crystals to form. It gummed up my fuel filter and made for some pretty scary performance until my fuel filter was replaced. The shop I take it to couldn't figure what the problem was because the filter had just been replaced 1 week earlier. The Co-op hasn't come forward to pay for the damages that their product caused, so I'm back to Petrol Diesel. I want to support the alternative technologies, and even if it costs a bit more now, I think supporting it will lead to cheaper prices later. But I'm not going to support the business practices of the Co-op, and since they're the only game in town, that means no more BioDiesel for now.

There's bio in Carrboro, and if you find yourself in the western part of the state, several in Asheville. Here's a link to a map where you can find stations. We have only the Citgo around here, selling B-20. If there were more supply, I'd be interested in a Golf TDI (I really hope VWs get better in the reliability department, though)

http://www.biodiesel.org/buyingbiodiesel/retailfuelingsites/

All garbage trucks here in Kyoto run on recycled cooking oil. I believe Germany has the largest number of vehicles running on the stuff.

University of Maryland runs it's campus busses on bio. DC just got a bunch of diesel-hybrid busses to replace the aging fleet of regular diesel (not hybrid) busses. I hope they will eventually use bio in them.

Hydrogen :)

Hydrogen is NOT an energy source - all the hydrogen we can get at is bound up in some sort of chemical. The simplest source is water, but it takes energy to separate the hydrogen from the oxygen. Hydrogen should be regarded as a form of battery.

did

Some hippies in Ann Arbor Michigan actually have a natural gas station. Not exactly sure what you have to do to make a car run on natural gas, but the idea seems cool.
Forward thinking always means hippies :rolleyes: . Anyway, I want to get a diesel and run it off of good ole unprocessed vegetable oil you can find rotting out back of any restraunt with a fryer.


Hydrogen is NOT an energy source

Yes it is. You can run hydrogen in any car outfitted to run CNG. It all is in the carburator and fuel lines. Obviously, you need a different tank and lines.

Yes it is. You can run hydrogen in any car outfitted to run CNG. It all is in the carburator and fuel lines. Obviously, you need a different tank and lines.

You misunderstand me. Yes, hydrogen burned with oxygen releases energy which you can use to do work. However, you have to get the hydrogen first. There is no way to get hydrogen without expending more energy than you get back when you do burn it. There is essentially no free hydrogen anywhere on earth; it's all locked up in chemical compounds (water being the most common one). You can't mine hydrogen out of the ground the way you can with oil. Obtaining hydrogen requires that you expend energy to break chemical bonds; due to inevitable inefficiencies, you won't get all of that energy back when you burn the hydrogen.

Strictly speaking, oil and other fossil fuels aren't energy sources either - they're just millions of years of solar energy stored in the form of decayed life forms. Ultimately, the only true energy sources we have are nuclear reactions and the sun (which is of course just another nuclear reaction).

did

I think somebody should stop being "pedantic" :-P

I think somebody should stop being "pedantic" :-P

Shaddap and go for a bike ride, warm state boy!

did

Shaddap and go for a bike ride, warm state boy!

did
Oh trust me. I'm going to go out and enjoy my 70 degree weather later this afternoon :p

Oh trust me. I'm going to go out and enjoy my 70 degree weather later this afternoon :p

Are the bluebonnets blooming yet??

I'm sure they're trying :p

Actually, it's quite surprising because despite the fact that normally January and February are our coldest months (read under 30/40 F) and us instead being inthe 60's and 70's and maybe even 80's there is very little new growth. I guess the heat wave hasn't fooled most of mother nature.

I know my dad is enjoying the weather as he has onions, peppers, tomatoes and all sorts of flowers and fruit trees growing

Oh trust me. I'm going to go out and enjoy my 70 degree weather later this afternoon :p

I hate you.

http://homepage.mac.com/diddidit/weather.jpg

did

:D

You should be able to run true biodiesel in any diesel engine without a problem. When you have to change stuff is when you run it on pure vegetable oil. Diesels will run on oil but not when it gets too cold (the oil gets too thick). And the oil has different characteristics so newer computer-controlled diesels are sensitive to the change, older ones (like the VW rabbit mentioned ealier) are really tolerant of a wide variety of fuel characteristics.

Biodeisel is made by chemically "cracking" the vegetable oil molecule into a different one that is a lot less viscous. The cracking is most easily done with Methanol (the methanol is a catalyst, it can later be re-extracted from the byproducts) but can be done with ethanol. This is similar to the way that crude oil is "cracked" into the useful products (gasoline, kerosene, etc) except it doesn't require the same temperature and pressure and stuff... you can get the equipment to do it yourself relatively inexpensively.


Eggplant has it pretty well covered. To answer the original question, I've run my Dodge on B100, with no ill affects. Its a 95. Reportedly they all handle it just fine.

Some hippies in Ann Arbor Michigan actually have a natural gas station. Not exactly sure what you have to do to make a car run on natural gas, but the idea seems cool.


Here's a hippy running on propane. (http://www.bc4x4.com/fv/2002/hulk/)

Eggplant has it pretty well covered. To answer the original question, I've run my Dodge on B100, with no ill affects. Its a 95. Reportedly they all handle it just fine.He was close. Transesterification of heavier vegetable oils into biodiesel uses a base such as potasium-hydroxide (KOH) or sodium-hydroxide (NaOH) as a catalyst to break off the glycerol in the triglyceride. The methanol/ethanol is used to provide the methyl group that replaces the glycerol to form three single-chain methyl esters. The catalytic base is then recoverd as potassium-phosphate or sodium-phospate.

There are various ways of running this reaction from a simple single-stage base reaction to a more complicated two-stage acid-base process with higher yields. Cool thing is you get soap and glycerin as byproducts. :)

I think somebody should stop being "pedantic" :-P


No, he's just restating what I've already posted; it takes more energy to get hydrogen than hydrogen will deliver. Just as it takes more energy to produce ethanol than ethanol can deliver.

That means that the environmental benefit of clean-burning hydrogen is lost when coal/oil/gas is used to produce the hydrogen. I posted earlier a 91 page report that said wind power was not a great way to generate the electricity needed to produce hydrogen so that only leaves solar and nuclear. Solar is even further behind than wind power and the environmentalist squawk at the idea of more nuclear plants in this country even though they have by far the safest record of any power generating source in the world.

So, it's keep on burning oil and gas until they run out or jack up taxes sky high on fuels and run the economy into the ground and then everybody will be too poor to drive cars and a carbon fiber bicycle will be elevated to Cadillac status. Plus, no heat in the winter and no air conditioning in the summer.

What's it going to be?

I say, let's build twenty more nuclear plants to start with. Then build twenty more. All the while, slowly increasing gasoline taxes while encouraging communities to build more bike lanes and mass transit. Keep telling the folks that the days of the Suburban are coming to an end; you can get on board or you cansuffer later.

No, he's just restating what I've already posted; it takes more energy to get hydrogen than hydrogen will deliver. Just as it takes more energy to produce ethanol than ethanol can deliver.

That means that the environmental benefit of clean-burning hydrogen is lost when coal/oil/gas is used to produce the hydrogen. I posted earlier a 91 page report that said wind power was not a great way to generate the electricity needed to produce hydrogen so that only leaves solar and nuclear. Solar is even further behind than wind power and the environmentalist squawk at the idea of more nuclear plants in this country even though they have by far the safest record of any power generating source in the world.

So, it's keep on burning oil and gas until they run out or jack up taxes sky high on fuels and run the economy into the ground and then everybody will be too poor to drive cars and a carbon fiber bicycle will be elevated to Cadillac status. Plus, no heat in the winter and no air conditioning in the summer.

What's it going to be?

I say, let's build twenty more nuclear plants to start with. Then build twenty more. All the while, slowly increasing gasoline taxes while encouraging communities to build more bike lanes and mass transit. Keep telling the folks that the days of the Suburban are coming to an end; you can get on board or you cansuffer later.
well technically it takes more energy to make energy -It supposedly took billions upon trillions of years and billions of dinosaurs and trees and crap to produce what we're using now ...
and the pedantic comment was geared towards people who were arguing that there was no actual true energy source because - ...

I honestly dont think that we will run out of fuel any time soon and by the time it does come to a shortage due to prices I believe that somebody will have started looking at tehcnologies that they killed inthe 60's . Doomsday theories are all fun and games, but sadly they have little purpose in the real world :p I dont believe there is one doomsdayer from the 70's 80's or 90's that would have predicted that prices would have skyrocketed to where they are now or for the reasons , none of which are related to shortage of natural supplies but mere politics.

Actually, I just saw this on a car show the other day on tv. They ran a truck through a full tank on regular diesel and did all their tests on milage and horsepower etc. Then, flushed the system, replaced the tank, and ran it using biodiesel made from cooking oil. They said it got the same mileage, and no decrease in horsepower. THey also said it seemed to run slightly smoother and the exhaust smelled like french fries. lol.

If they said this on the show, they didn't know what they were talking about.

Bio has less energy than diesel fuel. That is, there are less BTUs per gallon than in diesel fuel. So, if you ran 100% bio, you would get less mileage and have less power, though you'd not be burning any oil at all.

My truck's engine maker (Cummins) says I can only run up to B5 or I void the warranty. Several people are running blends higher than that with no problems.

The concensus seems to be that up to B20 you get the same mileage and power but more than that and you start to lose both. I've heard some guys say they're pretty close up to B50 but really falls off after that.

Either way, you're still burning less fossil fuel so if I could find a station nearby where the price was comparable to dino diesel, I'd use B5. Once my engine passes the warranty period, I'll probably go up to B20.

The concensus seems to be that up to B20 you get the same mileage and power but more than that and you start to lose both. I've heard some guys say they're pretty close up to B50 but really falls off after that.


I ran B100 in my engine with a barely noticable loss of power. Reports I read placed the difference at 2%-3% loss of power, and that concurs with my experience. I actually liked the difference, because it made for smoother driving... hard to describe really. I'm off the juice for the winter, and depending on availability in my area hope to use it again in the spring. It all depends on whether or not my local co-op owns up to their responsibilities.

A report from the 70's said that it took a gallon of gas to make a gallon of biodiesel, but a lot has changed since then. Modern day reports say it takes a gallon of petrol to make three gallons of biodiesel, but that it depends on what crops are used to produce the oil, and exact methods of harvesting are used. This compares favorably with petrol, which takes a gallon of petrol to make four gallons of petrol. Remember that there's a lot that has to happen to the fuel from the point that it comes out of the ground to the point of going into your car.

The trick is to use renewable sources of energy to generate things like biodiesel, hydrogen, ethanol, etc. There's no one solution; it'll take a combination of sources, same as it always has.

There was a plan to construct windmills off the coast of Massachusetts. Even though the windmills would be beyond the sight of land, the plan was rejected because of fears of the unsightliness of them. In the Gulf of Mexico, they could put up thousands of windmills offshore, out of sight. Hurricane damage could make that expensive, though. I suppose they could be turned off and rotated to face the winds with minimal surfaces presented and ride out the storms. But then what do you do for electricity when they aren't running?

In the Appalachians, utiltiy companies are building windmills on many mountaintops.

I participate in a "Green Switch" program where I pay a little extra each month so the utility company will buy green power. They are getting electricity from windmills, methane plants that get the gas from landfills, and even a solar plant nearby. The total amount of electricity these sources put out is still less than one decent nuclear plant but it's a start.