RV Processes Own Fuel on Cross-Country Trip 165
An anonymous reader writes "Frybrid has realized the dream of Dr. Emmet Brown's Delorean: putting garbage directly into your vehicle, and have it be turned into directly into fuel. This past fall, Frybrid installed a system into a 40' luxury RV that sucked up waste vegetable oil from the back of restaurants, removed the water and filtered it, and then burned the dry and cleaned vegetable oil as fuel. The family drove their converted RV from Seattle to Rhode Island on $47 worth of diesel fuel. Plans are underway for a smaller version of the system to fit in the bed of a pickup truck."
Mr Fusion (Score:1, Informative)
Only in the USA (Score:4, Informative)
(by the way, they've been doing exactly this for years in other places, like Germany...)
This is nothing new... (Score:5, Informative)
In fact my own car has been adapted to run on vegetable oil, (either used or fresh) I collect used oil and filter it in my back yard, down to 5 microns. My car runs just great on it, absolutely no difference in performance, and I'm sill getting the same mileage, around 45mpg (US) or 55mpg(UK). My car's exhaust smells a LOT nicer (sort of a popcorn, or hot oil 'flavor'), and vegetable oil is a cleaner burning fuel, so emissions are lower. And of course, it's carbon neutral
A friend of mine is doing the same, at his place of work, they have a canteen, and they're getting through more oil than he needs. the places that we're getting it from, are more than happy for us to take it away, because they have to pay to have it taken away, and we'll do it for free...
now that I've gone veggie, I won't be going back. The heat exchanger kit that is installed in my car can easily be taken out and fitted into my next car. It's a win win situation:
We're using a waste product that was grown locally
It's cheaper (as in free!)
We're not funding Big Oil, who are themselves supporting dodgy, corrupt, undemocratic and/or unstable regimes.
There are some strong economic, political and ethical reasons to run on vegetable oil. For me, it's a no-brainer :o)
Re:Supply chain costs (Score:5, Informative)
If petroleum goes up in price a bunch more, biodiesel gets to break even.
The unmapped territory is that although it burns a hydrocarbon, 100% biodiesel
doesn't increase atmospheric CO2, because that CO2 was removed from the atmosphere
less than a year prior. It is cyclic in the short-term. Biodiesel could be a
near drop-in replacement for gasoline in cars and solve greenhouse gas
problems from automobiles. Of course, if you use peanuts instead of soybeans, and
oil costs stay high....people bet billions on shifts like this, the shift
to biodiesel would become reality if regular diesel wholesale prices get too
high and we have a strong need to minimize emissions...both of which are
very real scenarios. Both factors have shifted a lot since this white paper
in 2002.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/analysispaper/biodies
this ain't news.... (Score:3, Informative)
i had some friends who were traveling across the country on tour, in a rock band. they had converted their diesel van (a 15 passenger ford, if memory serves) for around 1500 bucks. the conversion tank/filter/box took up all the cargo space in the van, so they had to tow a trailer in which to put their amps, instruments, etc. the mileage still came out in their favor.
i would not have believed it if i hadn't seen them pouring filthy used oil into the tank inside the van.
some things they shared:
american fast food is about the worst place to get used oil, as they use the shit out of the oil before tossing it. asian, and middle eastern restaurants were the best, cleanest oil they had seen so far.
they got better gas mileage on the greasel than on the diesel.
the van had a switch up front, with which to change the lines from the greasel to the diesel. apparently the veg oil doesn't burn hot enough, and it was bad news to leave the van overnight with the veg oil in the lines. so before shutting it down for the night, they'd switch back to diesel, and let it run for 10 minutes. then in the morning, they'd switch it back to veggie oil after it warmed up.
the box in the back of the van did three things: it was a tank, in which to store the oil as it was processed, it floated out the water from the oil, (a sort of inline spit valve, not unlike on many wood instruments) and it filtered out the particulates. burnt fries, crispy shrimp tails, etc.
the filter was at the front of the line, so it was basically a big thick sock (they got them at home depot, and had to change them about 1000 miles. it was designed for some other use, but someone figured out it's capability to clean oil, and put it in there) turned inside out. they had also bought some ordinary kitchen strainers, which fit over the hole in the tank, and would grab the huge particles before they made it to the filter. once the strainers clogged, they could lift them out and tap them on the ground to get the particles out. much easier than changing the sock like filter.
they usually would go and ask for oil, but sometimes would need to refill after a show, which could be 2 or 3 am, so they'd just go poach it. most places paid to have the stuff taken away, so wouldn't care if you got caught taking it, but would generally assume you're up to no good if you were behind their restaurant in the middle of the night acting shady.
with 4 guys in the band, they had a system down. some places kept the used oil in a 55 gallon drum. for this, one would scoop, one would prep the empty 5 gallon plastic tubs, one would lift the tubs into the van, and one would pour the oil into the tank.
sometimes the places had the oil just sitting in the tubs they came in. one would either nab the full 5 gallon tubs, and put them in the van to be poured later, while another put empties in their place.
the back of the van was messy/oily, but this was their first trip with the conversion, so were still dialing in their storage system/process. next time i see them, i predict the van'll be much cleaner. as clean as a touring rock band's van can be, anyway....
i live in denver. they live in l.a. they drove from their home, up to vancouver, canada, and then over to denver, when i saw them. so far, on that tour, when i saw them, they had put one tank of gas in the van, and not even used the entire tank. this even includes a few hours running on diesel, as the water trap had some issues, and they had to drive around portland looking for someone who could fix it.
i was totally impressed. i haven't driven in almost a year, but i was convinced that if/when i do buy my next car, it'll be a diesel.
if anyone's interested in the conversion, and able to get to l.a., let me know, and i can put you in touch with the guy who did theirs.
Good for recycling, but not a huge source of oil (Score:3, Informative)
However the problem is that there's not enough vegetable oil coming from restaurants to impact even slightly our national oil usage. So it is a cheap fuel source for a few people. That's all. What we really need is a way to create organic oils on a large scale from algae, plants, or some other way using only energy from the sun. If we could immediately replace all our fossil fuels with organic (as it carbon-neutral) oils, we could stop our carbon emissions completely, having an immediate, dramatic, and hopefully non-warming effect on our environment.
Re:IF (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad about the misinformed Northerners. Every place with cold weather that sells diesel fuel switches to "winter blend" when it gets cold. There's other technology to keep fuel from gelling as well.
The reason the diesel has a bad reputation falls squarely on the shoulders of GM, who converted their small block Chevy engine to run on diesel back in the 70's. To say it was a steaming pile of crap would be unfair to the piles of crap. People hated them for good reason, and that's what people remember (as well as a handful of French diesels that sucked almost as much).
If you get away from cities, the use of diesel is far more common. People who drive trucks for work, rather than show, have figured out that diesel is the way to go. My 7,200 pound 4x4 diesel powered work truck gets better mileage than my girlfriend's V-6 gas powered 2 wheel drive Ford Explorer. Better in town and better on the highway. My mileage drops by 2 to 3 mpg (down to 15-16 mpg) if I'm towing 5,000 pounds - but my friends with gas trucks get 6 to 10 mpg with the same load. Gas engines make great horsepower, but Diesels make great torque - and torque is what gets work done.
Now that the US is changing the sulfur content of diesel fuel, we'll be able to get small, diesel powered Euro cars again, and it will be a good thing. A great thing. A friend of mine has a (roughly) 5 year old VW Jetta, and he gets 49 mpg at 70 mph. Better than a hybred, without the hassle of throwing away a bunch of batteries in a handful of years.
Bring on the diesel!
Re:Mythbusters (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IF (Score:4, Informative)
We paid the disposal company $35 a month for rental of the grease dumpster. In return, they hauled the it away. We got nothing for the oil itself. That's just the way it is around here.
That said, earlier this year, we had a guy ask us if we'd fill his 2.5 gallon buckets with our leftover oil... and we said yes... for a while. Instead of just taking the bucket oil, flipping the lid on the dumpster open, quick pour and closing the lid, we had to spend 5 minutes prying lids off buckets, dumping a little here and a little there, resealing the buckets, etc. It went from a 60 second job to a 10 minute job so we stopped doing it. Figure 4.5 hours of pay a month wasted in messing around with his buckets at about $16/hr by the time you figure in taxes and other hidden fees with the wages and you're looking at it having a cost of $72 a month to fill up his buckets. To top it off, we'd supply him with oil faster than he could use it, which meant we had to keep that $35 dumpster around anyway. He refused to pay anything for the oil, stating that he was doing us a favor by getting rid of it...
I'd estimate that our one little restaurant probably went through... 6-7 gallons of oil per day. Having managed the sole (old, large style) McDonalds in a college town 10 years ago (ie, they probably had the highest oil usage of anyone in the area at the time), I'd guess on memory that we went through about 10 gallons a day there. There isn't enough used oil to fill up the cars of the employees every day, much less have any kind of impact on large scale use.