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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Biodiesel
  • Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2006 13:22:59 EDT

Wendy,

> Get a diesel truck and make your biodiesel from used restaruant fryer oil.
> Not hard and dirt cheap.
>

Not available anymore. All it took was 1/20th of 1% of 1% of the people to
pick up on the fryer oil bit and it is all spoken for weeks ahead of time.

Let's suppose that we took all the vegetable based oil produced in the world
in a year and converted it into biodiesel for motor fuel. Last year all the
biological based oils produced from all sources in the world, land and sea,
was 135 million metric tons. Less than a quarter of this is suitable for
biodiesel.

Let's imagine that it costs no energy whatever to produce and refine the
biodiesel and that we all (the entire world) goes on a fat free diet for a
year
--- which we clearly can't do, but let's hallucinate for the moment. If we
convert every vehicle in the world to using that biodiesel, how long would it
last? The answer is something like three days.

But we can't produce it free. It takes a lot of energy to grow and fertilize
the oilseed crops, transport it, refine it, etc. Deducting the energy it
takes to grow the fuel and get it ready to put in the tank, if we all (the
whole
world) used all our year's supply of suitable oil for biodiesel, we would be
slap out of fuel before noon the first day.

Doing the math on ethanol and any of the other alternate motor fuels leads to
the same dismal conclusion. If we used ALL the corn grown in the US to make
ethanol and used it exclusively as a motor fuel (and deducted the energy it
takes to grow and distill and refine it), our tanks go empty in the early
evening of the first day.

There is a scant handful of people powering personal motor vehicles with
fryer oil. But all it takes in a community the size of this one is for six
people
to get that idea and then there is no more fryer oil available. Already the
people with the oil have caught on and are selling it rather than giving it
away.

There is a horse stable 8 miles away from me and the barn litter and manure
are a liability to the owner. He is all too glad for me to haul away as much
of it as I can. But that's because I am building soil with it and no one
else
is. If only 50 other people (out of seveal hundred thousand in driving
distance) wanted to build their soil the same way I do, the resource would be
gone
in an afternoon.

James




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