Biodiesel - a real-life example

Andrew Read posted a comment on one of my posts a couple of weeks back.  I visited his website link in the comment and was fascinated to find a whole new area of interest.  Basically, he's converted his car diesel engine to run on cooking oil. 

This isn't a new principle, and there's been a lot of discussion about it in some waterways forums over the past few years, for instance assorted threads on uk.rec.waterways.   Bargemeister Adrian Stott is mad-keen on it.

But Andrew Read has got a very interesting page showing his own real-life experience of Converting a Diesel Engine to Run on Vegetable Oil and The Problems Running a Modern Car Diesel Engine on Vegetable Oil.

He makes it sound easy:

I'm a fairly wimpish veg-oil user in that I buy it at Tesco (£1.32 for 3l). After I've paid fuel duty to HM Customs and Excise it's 71p per litre (I'm a registered producer of a fuel substitute, my production process consists of going to Tesco and buying their cheapest oil).

If I were more of a hard-core veg-oiler I'd collect used oil from a restaurant and likely pay just the 27p duty, but I'd need to filter everything to 10 microns or better and as I'm as green as I'm going to get right now (i.e. much reduced fossil fuel use) I don't want the extra hassle.

If I were really keen I'd have a biodiesel plant in my shed (It's a simple reaction: you just need caustic soda and methanol. The products are 2/3 biodiesel 1/3 glycerol which you can make into soap), but again that's a lot of effort. I have a 90 percent solution.

What's odd is that the motor industry seems to have missed the whole veg-oil thing entirely, choosing to focus on electric/hybrid and hydrogen fuel cells, both of which still derive their input from fossil fuels.

I love that quote:  "If I were really keen I'd have a biodiesel plant in my shed".  Well, a man's gotta have a hobby, after all, eh? 

Comments

The nice thing about the D-I-Y (Do It Yourself) Electric Vehcile Conversion - is that you know what is in it, and if you bought the parts new - you can get support on them when there is a question about something!