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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

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