Why hasnt vegetable oil become the new fuel for our cars?

Question

Ive heard about biodiesel fuel and how it is renewable and how cars can actually run on them. Why havnt we adopted this yet in our cars? Is it more expensive? Or do the oil companies making money off of gasoline making sure this doesnt happen? If thats true, then we should boycott gas stations and picket the governments of the WORLD so that they can incorparate vegetable oil from now on!

http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/savinganddebt/saveonacar/p115218.asp

Answer 1

it should lets boycut all gas stations

Answer 2

Sure it is cheap when just a handful of people do it.  h**l the fuel is even free in some cases but just wait until everyone uses it then it will cost $60 per gallon.

Answer 3

There have already been a lot of great answers on this thread, and I only want to point out the fact that we are currently in the middle of a global food crisis, and other nations are extremely upset when  they hear news of American's extravengance with both food and fossil fuels.  At current production rates, and grain surpluses being lower that they have been in the last decade, it is hard to classify the use of crop lands for fuels to "Replace" fossil fuels.  I believe that biofuels are a step in the right direction, however we must be able to adapt to regional fuels.  No one fuel for the world is going to work in the long run.

Answer 4

We're on our way.  The corn crop is going to this alt. fuel. We have to rd ourselves of this whoe Midde East  mess.

Answer 5

Look at first it sounds like a great idea. Until you learn more about the many flaws of biofuels. We are putting our food in the gas tank. People are straving because of rising food prices. Why are food prices rising? Because of the demend for biofuels, more farmers are growing biofuels instead of food. In other countries there are food roits going because people cannot pay for basic foods! Solar and wind are the oly rue renewable sources of power.

Answer 6

To answer your question I do believe that the oil company's are keeping This technology from going mainstream. But there are some problems with it to. The big problem people talk about is the source of oil used cooking oil is great but there isn't enough to go around for every car out there and if you use crop land to grow soy beans or any crop for that matter you are cutting into the food supply. If you interested though search green-fuel and valcent these company's are making oil for bio diesel from algae, and I believe this is the way to go. They are making over 10,000 gallons of oil per acre from algae and using this as the source of oil we can supply enough oil for everyone. Valcent has a research and development plant near where I live and they are making bio diesel for about 25 cents a gallon of course they aren't selling it since they are just RD but the technology is there and I think when we get a oil baron president out of office we might see a change.

Answer 7

There's a good discussion on this subject here:

http://greenhome.huddler.com/forum/threa...

Basically in order to produce biodiesel or other biofuels, you need to grow crops for it.  This increases demand for agricultural land, which causes forests and other CO2-absorbing land to be replaced by cropland.  Land use change is the #1 largest single contributor to man-made global warming.  So in many cases, biofuels do more harm than good.

http://cait.wri.org/figures.php?page=Wor...

That being said, there are certainly some cases where biofuels are good.  For example, using waste vegetable oil (for example, from restaurants) as fuel is great, because that oil would have otherwise been wasted.  There's also the potential to use algae oil as a biofuel, which would also do a lot of good.

As for biodiesel, it just depends where it came from, and on a small scale it might be good.  It won't work on a large scale until we have a biodiesel source that can supply our needs without requiring large land use changes.

Answer 8

We need more than vegetable oil.  We need Investment in Alternative Energy.

Answer 9

Because it is more expensive to produce than conventional diesel fuel.

Answer 10

If we used that vegatable oil for our fuel we would use up a lot of land to grow it.  It would also raise the cost of food.  Instead we should use algae biofuel.

Algae Biofuel

-With our current biodiesel feedstocks, like soy and palm, there’s no way we could grow enough to supply all of our transportation needs.  In fact, it would actually require twice the land area of the US devoted to soybean production to meet current heating and transportation needs.

-Algae, on the other hand, could supply all U.S. diesel power using a mere 0.2% of the nation’s land.

-Enough algae can be grown to replace all transportation fuels in the U.S. on only 15,000 square miles or 4.5 million acres of land.

- Algae is the highest yielding feedstock for biodiesel, producing 24 times more oil per acre, on average, than the next leading feedstock--palm oil at 635 gallons/acre/year.

-One company can produce 180,000 gallons of biodiesel every year from just one acre of algae. That comes to about 4,000 barrels, at a cost of $25 per barrel or $.59 per gallon.

-To put that in perspective, it takes 3,750 acres of soy to make the same amount of biodiesel at a cost of about $2.50 per barrel for 4,000 barrels.

-It is possible to use human sewage and wastewater from agricultural endeavors to enhance the growth of algae.  In fact, when done right, algae can double and even triple overnight with the addition of these fertilizers.

-Plus, as algae grows it absorbs C02 from the air.

-In addition, fertilizer for other food crops can be produced by using the leftover nutrients that aren’t used to make the biofuel.

http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles...

Answer 11

DON'T put veg- oil in your gasoline motor. It will destroy it.

Answer 12

Olive oil costs 10 bucks per liter. Vegetable oil is only somewhat cheaper than olive oil but burns more poorly.

Diesel costs about a dollar per liter.

Bio diesel is only really economical when a source of waste oil such as oil used to make french fries is available. The main benefit is that the oil is burned instead of poured into the sewer where the pipes get clogged solid.

The amount of used fat available from a deep fryer is limited.

Oh yeah. Boycott the gas stations. More for me.

Answer 13

Vegetable oil available can not begin to replace all the petroleum we use. Just too little of it.

We could not produce enough even if we devoted all food producing farm land to the task. That is, we can not do it. Next, the attempt to do so will cause widespread starvation, even in America.

There is an option, harvest vegetable material from the dead zones of the oceans. But who owns that?

Next, very little of North America's vehicle fleet can run on bio-diesel fuel. It would require replacement of engines in most vehicles.

So, which of these reasons makes it least likely that we will see a major change to bio-diesel any time soon.

Answer 14

Veggie oil is even more expensive than gas!

Answer 15

i use vegetable oil as lubrication