Biodiesel: What is the catch? It works in normal diesel cars yet it is half the price?

Question

Does anyone use biodiesel here and how efficient is it?

Answer 1

It's not necessarily half the price.  If you get biodiesel at a gas station that carries it, the biodiesel costs about the same as petroleum gas/diesel.  However, there are other cheaper options like getting waste vegetable oil (potentially for free from restaurants) and using it as fuel.

http://greenhome.huddler.com/wiki/eco-fr...

Biodiesel is approximately as energy efficient as petroleum diesel in that you get roughly the same miles per gallon.

Basically the catch is that you have to have a diesel car, you  have to find a source of biodiesel, and if you're going to use waste vegetable oil, you need to make a conversion to your car (see link above).

Answer 2

About 95% the power of petroleum diesel.  However, it most certainly is not half the price.  Currently in the US, the raw vegetable oil is around $.50/lb or almost $4/gallon.  Bio-diesel processing cost about $1/gallon and the US government gives a tax credit of $1/gallon if they use fresh oil and $.5/gallon for waste oil.  So, BioDiesel is $4/gallon to produce before profit.  I  can buy it in Charleston, SC for 4.25 and you can bet the price will follow regular diesel.

You may have to replace your fuel filter after you start using it as it is a solvent and releases/cleans the build up from your fuel system if you have any.  After that you should have no problems above freezing temperatures.

I use waste vegetable oil strait.

Leon

http://WVOdesigns.com

http://ForeignOilFreedom.com

Answer 3

h**l over here they charge 30 cents higher.Unless you make it yourself for 75 cents a gallon. I love b100.Better mpg,more power,clean my valves.

Answer 4

Its less polluting (CO2 cycle)

so, they reduce the tax to encourage people to switch.

use it as normal derv and pay less to travel.

Answer 5

blimey please tell me where it is cheaper! i have never seen it for sale on its own in england, and the blends are the same price or more than ordinary diesel. are you sure you are not confusing it with red (agricultural) diesel? this is indeed about half the price but if you are caught using it on your road vehicle you will get a hefty fine.

Answer 6

Well there is a bit of a debate going on at the moment about how much food growing land being used to grow the plant for Bio Diesel and some rain forest is being chopped to grow bio diesel plants (which I find a bit of a contradiction on what we are trying to achieve), but check out a site (belive its cyrnar plc) or type in Plastic to diesel in a search engine and see that you can make very high quality diesel from old plastic waste!! now I think this is the route we should be taking as it reduces amount going into landfill

Answer 7

You need to differentiate between Bio-diesel and Bio-fuel.  Bio-diesel is vegetable oil that is chemically altered using the process of transesterification.  It is almost identical to mineral diesel and thus can be used in any diesel engine without modification to the engine, although on older cars, it is advisable to change the fuel filter on old cars after using biodiesel for the first time because it will clean the fuel tank of all the gunk that had built up..

Bio-fuel is a generic term for any fuel that has been made from a biomass (plants), such as straight vegetable oil from rapeseed, corn and sunflower or ethanol from plant sugars.

Bio-diesel, is a little complicated to produce as it involves replacing the glycerides in oil with ethanol using a chemical reaction which requires a catalyst such as Potassium Hydroxide (highly corrosive to organic substances, like skin).

In the UK, biofuel production is taxed a lot less than mineral fuel and for personal use, it is duty free.  However, it is usually on sale at the same price as mineral diesel (sometimes it's more expensive as the sellers cash in on its "green" credentials).  All diesel cars, in the UK are warrantied to run on 5% bio-diesel, although Peugeot/Citroen run their company cars on 30% bio-diesel.

I run my old Citroen on 100% Waste Vegetable oil, which I get for nothing from a local restaurant (it saves them disposing of it).

The problem is, however, demand for fuel is high and there is only so much land available to grow stuff... do you grow crops for fuel or crops for food?

At current demand, you can't have both.... unless cars become much, much more efficient

Answer 8

false economy: tractor ploughs field=pollution tractor drills seed for fuel=pollution harvester brings in crop=pollution lorry take crop to be processed=pollution then theres the whole processing bit to go through  and the trip to the pump?

just use the land grow things we can eat even the world could eat.

the governments full of bad ideas