Drunk but serious question: why can't we run things on french fry grease?

[K8-EEE]

I've seen some cars that have bumper stickers saying they run on veg oil. I'm wondering if anybody has noticed how fat we are as a country, and how much fried food we eat. How come we can't just refine french fry grease and everybody drive around on it, instead of refining dino-grease with all the mess and ruination and bad dictators and all of that.

[catnhatnh]

1. Well, First of all there ain't enough....

...but french fry grease is most of what they mean by running on vegetable oil. See, homemade bio-diesel is mostly collected from restaurants and such and then filtered and cleaned before burning as fuel. Can you imagine the fun and mess involved in hauling home say a 55 gallon drum of dirty fry oil and pouring it through cheesecloth? Of course to collect the oil you would have to spend the time to drive a collection route as well AND produce enough extra bio-diesel to drive the route. Did I mention 55 gallons of dirty oil would weigh over 400lbs. without the weight of the containers it was collected in? Not too bad in your bio-diesel pickup with a hoist or lift gate but a bit tougher in your bio-diesel VW Rabbit...

In short, it is a messy, heavy, labor intensive project. Running bio-diesel in the winter requires tank and in some cases fuel line heaters to prevent the fuel from congealing, which requires overnight plug in and limits dwell time when not plugged in. An 8 or 10 hour shift of work in cold weather could park your car until the spring thaw...

Bio-diesel is doable but dino-grease is a hell of a lot more convenient.

[K8-EEE]

2. I guess the part I don't understand is

Why supporting horrid dictators, drilling way down into the earth and shipping product from halfway around the world is so much EASIER than if we had oil company effort in collecting and refining what makes us the biggest ass country in the world.

I mean it's not cheap or EFFORTLESS to get the status quo and it needs more refining and transporting? Can you even go 10 miles in the US without running into french fry grease?

[catnhatnh]

3. There's actually much less than you think...

A large fryer holds 40lbs (about 5 gallons) and a mickey d's might have six or eight units. But large users filter their oil nightly and extend its life cycle by adding anti-foaming chemicals. Let say they change oil twice a week-thats still only 6-700 gallons a week-say enough for 60 cars...and in an operation that large the oil is already sold to a volume recycler. You could get free oil from smaller operations but it is likely that no single small restaurant could offer enough for even a single vehicle.

The fact is no restaurant throws away its used oil-that would be illegal. Every bit in the whole country is either sold, given away, or paid to be disposed of BY a recycler.

[MineralMan]

4. What part of there not being enough of that oil to make this work

is hard to understand? There simply isn't enough.

[Codeine]

7. All the fryer oil in every fast food place and diner in the country

would be insufficient to power more than a fraction of a percent of the nation's automobiles. It's nice when people with lots of time and resources do it but it's not even vaguely an answer to our transportation energy needs.

[GliderGuider]

5. The USA currently consumes 15 million tonnes of edible oils a year

However, you use 900 million tonnes of petroleum a year - 60 times as much.

Not to mention that most of the vegetable oil is already used for transportation - it's burned inside human beings to provide the energy for walking. Oh, and half of the veg oil you consume is imported, too...

[Ready4Change]

8. Thanks for the numbers.

I was wondering what they were. I knew there wasn't enough to match petroleum consumption, but had no estimate of edible oil numbers.

[sinkingfeeling]

6. Some people are using it. A quick google search will give you instructions on how to convert diesel

engines to use SVO.

[Kennah]

11. There is a difference between SVO and biodiesel ...

... even if both come from fry oil.

You are correct that it can be done, but does not one almost need to be a gear head to keep an SVO engine reliably operating?

[K8-EEE]

15. Well one problem is it voids the warranty so

All the people I know who do it, they buy these old beat up diesel cars like 1982 cars and jimmy them up -- I don't know if that's really a fair comparison to compare the reliability of the average re-fitted jalopy with a new car running on gas. What if the production standards for biodiesel were the same consistency of gas and oil production now?

[Kennah]

20. Maybe a biodiesel compliant federal mandate and some federal money to produce biodiesel

[K8-EEE]

21. Yes just like they had to support telephone and highways nt

[Javaman]

9. You need to ask yourself, "how does that grease come to be?"

it's probably corn oil. Which means it was from an industrial farm.

The amount of energy that went into that grease is way more to off set any "benefit" from using it as a means of energy.

Any energy carrier has to be looked at in terms of EROEI (energy returned on energy invested).

I can say, with out a doubt, that the energy return on that grease wouldn't come anywhere near what is required to make it cost effective.

While I have no problem with recycling it, if the price of oil spikes, that means the cost to produce that same grease will go up.

Thus defeating any cost benefit it once had as a recycled material.

If the price goes up, fast food outfits will not be paying people to suck up their grease, they will be selling it at a premium.

[K8-EEE]

10. But are we really looking at ALL the costs of oil?

Like are we factoring in the costs propping up dictatorships and that type of thing? Look at the billions funnelled into these regimes, if they weren't sitting on a pile of oil that would not have been part of our foreign policy.

We will not need a trillion dollar war to secure access to soybeans or hemp oil. We don't have to "frack" to get them.

[GliderGuider]

12. It depends on what you want to do, society-wise.

The USA uses 900 million tonnes of oil a year. You produce about 300 million. So from somewhere you have to come up with 600 million tonnes of oil a year to keep things ticking along. Right now you import it - from dictatorships like Canada and Mexico (the top 2) as well as friendlier nations like Saudi Arabia and Russia. By the way, did you know the USA gets as much oil from Canada and Mexico as it does from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria and Iraq combined?

So what about replacing all that imported oil with hemp, soybeans and ethanol from corn chips? Well, there's a little problem with scale.

If you converted all the suitable vegetable food in the USA to either ethanol or biodiesel - all the corn, wheat, potatoes, rice, canola, soybeans, sugar beets and sugar cane - you would end up with the equivalent of about 150 million tonnes of oil per year - about a quarter of what you need to replace. If you use all the oil you produce and turn all your food into fuel, you would only have half the fuel you currently use. And then what would you eat while you were driving?

People truly don't understand the scale of oil use in the USA, or how little help burning your food would be.

[Javaman]

13. You pour all the money want into corn oil production but...

it won't increase the yield.

If we were to farm every single acre for corn and nothing else, the amount of corn oil produced wouldn't cover a 5th of the US needs.

In the mean time, the soil would be destroyed due to mono-cropping, erosion and nutrient sapping.

Everything is a trade off.

The US could cut it's use of fossil fuels by up to 1/3 via conservation without noticing a difference.

The real issue isn't switching over to alt fuels, the issue is having leadership with foresight and guts to make the hard choices.

the last President that was like that was Carter.

Today, not so much.

[K8-EEE]

14. Yes it would definitely have to be WITH serious conservation

The only time 'Mair-kins ever think of using less gas is when it goes up.

It reminds me of the 2008 campaign when Obama stated (correctly) that if everyone just had their tires inflated properly it would save tons of oil. Immediately it was ridiculed, like everything but the status quo is ridiculed, but one thing they don't mention....status quo is environmentally and geo-politically not sustainable in the long run.

I just don't understand how in Brazil people drive up to a fueling station and have a choice what type to buy while in our LOL "Free Market Economy" it's petro-only.

[Javaman]

17. we are petrol only because...

the oil industry is basically a monopoly.

But none of the "powers that be" want to deal with that elephant in the room.

[K8-EEE]

18. So true, nobody wants to deal with the problems of the status quo

now and in the future -- the oil company's influence just precludes any rational discussion of it.

[kristopher]

19. There is a great deal of discussion and action underway

The problem with biofuels isn't biofuels themselves, it is the demand created by depending on internal combustion engines for personal transportation. The ICE offers between 12-18% efficiency for transportation applications; that means that 82-88 cents of every dollar you pump into the tank is wasted (as heat).

The answer is to move to more public transport (long range) and to move our personal transportation fleet to electric drive.

In the past there was considerable debate on how best to address the problems of petroleum with battery electric, fuel cells (they are the force behind the talk about hydrogen) and biofuels. The development of lithium batteries over the past decade has settled the discussion and we are moving full speed to a world where battery electric vehicles are fully compatible with our needs.

There are alot of bonuses for renewable energy associated with the transition to battery electric also. We will have cheap batteries for home storage (see company called BYD for example) and the entire vehicle fleet will operate as a reservoir for smoothing the variability associated with wind. This path is what is behind the move to the "Smart Grid" you might have heard about.

Try the National Renewable Energy Lab for some insights into what is happening on the front lines.

[txlibdem]

16. Short answer: you can burn it in any diesel engine vehicle

as long as you carefully strain all the food bits out before putting it into your tank.

Lots of people are doing this. Google diesel fry oil.
example: http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html