Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Ok but is processing, transportation and profit already included in the cost of a barel of petro oil? I thought I was comparing unprocessed with unprocessed.
Joined: Oct 27, 2004 Posts: 674 Location: Salt Spring Island, Cascadia
Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 5:21 am Post subject: Wrong Question!
I can't help thinking we're trying to answer the wrong question.
Converting any oil to biodiesel is necessary ONLY because of the massive petro-diesel infrastructure already in place.
Rudolph Diesel designed his engine to run on a variety of fuels, including coal dust and natural plant oil. It was the availability of cheap diesel fuel that caused engines to be designed specifically for it, not some inherent need of the technology for petro-diesel.
Thus we have now come full-circle, expending energy to make vegetable oil have the characteristics of diesel fuel to burn in an engine that was originally designed to burn unaltered vegetable oil!
If the auto makers devoted 10% of the resources they're pouring into gas hybrids into what I'll call "versatile-fuel diesels" instead, you could buy a car that you could back up to any restaurant and pump their waste grease right in. Or perhaps you'd buy a sack of coal dust instead.
The problem is not the basic combustion-ignition technology, it's in the injection pumps and injectors that have been optimized for diesel fuel. A German company called Elsbet created a diesel engine that would burn unaltered vegetable oil, but it was produced in such small quantities that it was very expensive.
Which brings up another point: biodiesel today is a "niche" market in North America, so economy of scale doesn't function. In Germany, where a certain percentage of biodiesel is nearly unavoidable, it's price has come down.
So I appreciate that starm is frustrated in not getting the answer he'd like to get, but it might be better to work on some other question. _________________ :::: Jan Steinman, Communication Steward, EcoReality, a forming sustainable community. Be the change! ::::
Yeah running on SVO is neat. And with soy oil selling at 21cents a liter = 80 cents a gallon on the futures market maybe it could be cheap at the pump.
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