Biodiesel now cheaper than fossil diesel

[central scrutinizer]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OR_BIODIESEL_PRICES_OROL-?SITE=OREUG&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Biodiesel now cheaper than regular diesel

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- While soaring fuel costs are the bane of most businesses, Oregon makers of biodiesel are celebrating. Their product now is cheaper than the stuff that comes out of the ground.

"We're selling our biodiesel for less than petroleum diesel out of the rack," said Tyson Keever of SeQuential Biofuels, the state's largest biodiesel producer. "Our phone is ringing off the hook as the (oil) price goes up," he told Portland's Daily Journal of Commerce newspaper.

Biodiesel sold for 20 to 30 cents a gallon more than regular diesel as recently as March. It is made from vegetable oil, including used oil from fast-food restaurants.

The blend B99, of 99 percent biodiesel with 1 percent diesel fuel, was $2.77 a gallon, two cents cheaper than regular low-sulfur diesel, Monday at Carson Oil in Portland.

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. Time to legalize Industrial Hemp

Then biodiesel will be even cheaper and cleaner source of fuel.

[phusion]

5. amen! n/t

[Maat]

2. Yes, but it is hard to get out here in California.

I heard a report on Stacey Taylor today taht one of the local Ford dealers had it available (I'm checking it out).

[dipsydoodle]

3. What's hard to get

Hemp or diesel ? :)

[Maat]

42. HeeHee.

No comment.
:evilgrin:

Just joking, Agent Mike. I have never inhaled.

[dipsydoodle]

4. Is it true

that biodiesel is better suited to older cars without engine management systems or is that just the homemade stuff ?

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

10. There are a number of considerations

First of all, if the car was built before 1993, it may have natural rubber seals. Biodiesel degrades them. If that happens, they have to be replaced with artificial rubber.

Secondly, if the biodiesel is made well and meets commercial standards, like the product referred to in this article, it should not hurt your fuel injectors. Home made biodiesel may have residual lye in it and that would be bad for engines in general and fuel injector systems in particular.

Also, biodiesel will gel at higher temperatures than regular diesel. That may be why the biodiesel 99 mix, with one percent dino-diesel.

[dipsydoodle]

15. The reason I asked

was that we had tv program here in the UK about making it at home. The guy they interviewed, who by coincidence was local to me, was actually using it of run engine of a 30 year old canal barge/ narrow boat but he said there may be problems using it in in modern day cars. I think that pump diesel here contains about 6% bio anyway - that's an EEC requirement.

I suppose anything is better than what I mangaged to put in my diesel Nissan X-Trail last year - I put petrol in twice !

[phusion]

6. Does anyone know...

Why they can't market 100 percent biodiesel? What's up with the 99/1 mix?

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

12. It may be because biodiesel gels at higher temperatures than dino

The one percent may keep it from gelling as easily.

[BiggJawn]

7. What happens when they have to start paying for old french fry oil?

All these tales of "I run my car on homemade diesel, it's CHEAP!"
always seem to be based on the availability of throw-away fry-vat oil from McCoronary's.

What happens when:

a. The greasy spoons start charging for the shit,

or

b. You have 30 people lined up for 5 gallons of old oil?

[patcox2]

11. The fans ignore economics.

They fail to see that biodiesel is a parasite, it is succesful only because almost noone does it, and will fail utterly once more try to do it.

[Lance_Boyle]

13. a symbiote, not a parasite.

Why the gloom on biodiesel? This is what diesel engines were originally designed to burn.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

16. Precisely.

The original diesel engine prototype ran on vegetable oil.

What we call diesel fuel is a gasoline refining by-product that would run in a diesel engine.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

14. What economics are you talking about?

How is a partial energy solution parasitic?

[patcox2]

27. Its a good solution for a fringe few.

But as I explain below, its parasitic like a remora feeding on the scraps left when the shark feeds.

If every person in america suddenly started buying 20 gallons of corn oil a week, its availability and price would change somewhat, there is a field of study that goes into that stuff, supply, demand, oh, yeah, its called economics. Thats the economics I am talking about.

What would be the environmental effect of growing sufficient crops to replace the billions of gallons of gasoline with vegetable oil? Oh, right, hemp hemp, the magical hemp, each plant produces like a gushing oil well, requires no water or fertilizer. Right.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

34. So demand drives the price of vegetable oils up

Making biodiesel will either make sense at that point or it won't, based on market forces.

I don't know if you can grow enough soybeans per acre to fuel the tractor or not, but pooh-poohing the entire concept is premature. If the price of gasoline gets to $10 per gallon, then I think the economics of many alternative energy sources will make sense.

When oil becomes truly scarce, we will have to get energy elsewhere. It will be too valuable to burn.

Please keep an open mind. If you have an alternative energy strategy, let's hear about it instead of taking broadsides at the "biodiesel fans" whoever they are.

[MadHound]

17. Got anything to base that on?

The base ingredients for biodiesel, oil, lye and methanol are cheap. The refining process is cheap, and as more and more refineries come on line it will get cheaper. Oh, and at the back end of biodiesel refining, the refiner has two products to sell, biodiesel and glycerin with which to make soap.

So, any facts to back up your blanket attacks?

[populistdriven]

18. I can buy corn oil at costco for $3.50 a gallon

check out this site

http://www.bulkoil.com

[Kolesar]

20. lol! I priced oil at Costco and ran the numbers a few months ago

I was standing there in the aisle, and somehow could not resist checking the price.

[patcox2]

25. If 250 million americans were buying corn oil at costco daily,

The price and availability would rise dramatically. That is the "economics" that is being ignored.

The small number of biodiesel fans have discovered a brilliant solution that will work so long as it remains a small number.

Getting free oil is what I mean by parasitizing, its like a remora eating the scraps left when the shark feeds, like the cattle egret eating the worms and insects disturbed by the feeding cattle.

The sheer overwhelming volume of gasoline that would have to be replaced by vegetable oil is such that it would not work.

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

37. Every hear of recycling ? That's what people do with waste oil.

Scavenging, if you like, but it is not parasitic.

[Kolesar]

21. The net-energy-return needs to be considered also

if the biodiesel product is to be made from sources other than a waste stream.

[BiggJawn]

26. That's why I'm scratching my head over Ethanol.

Takes something like 131,000 BTU's of heat to distill ONE gallon of Ethanol, which has around 77,000 BTUs.
Unless you're burning something that's a scrap material, like corncobs, or Tom DeLay's campaign signs, that's a big freakin' net LOSS.

That's my problem with fry-vat oil. Either it's going to become in demand enough that some kid managing a McHeartAttack's is going to say "Uhhh....I could SELL this shit, and make money to buy Megadeath tickets with!" or you're going to have people getting knifed or clubbed over 5 gallons of junk.

[TreasonousBastard]

23. It's worse than that-- see...

my post below.

[corporate_mike]

8. We need cars that run on biodiesel and many more bio gas stations

[EVDebs]

9. Link under 'retail of biodiesel' (scroll down) shows sellers by state

http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/biodiesel.htm

[Coastie for Truth]

19. Petroleum based liquid fuel more expensive then alternatives

It now surpasses in cost at least all of:


* bio-diesel,

* ethanol (the pharmaceutical-beverage-food processing paradigm pathway, not the high pressure, high temperature petroleum refinery paradigm pathway-- for what I mean by "pharmaceutical-beverage-food processing paradigm" see "Bioprocess Engineering: Basic Concepts" by Michael L. Shuler and Fikret Kargi). Pimentel and Patzek are using the "high pressure, high temperature petroleum refinery paradigm pathway" for comparison)

* Fischer-Tropsch Coal-> Liquid Fuels.

[TreasonousBastard]

22. Several problems with that...

First, it takes 7.7 gallons of corn oil to make a gallon of biodiesel, so if corn oil is selling at around 20 cents a pound (wholesale), that's $1.54 a gallon before processing and retailing it. OK, that sounds cheap, but it's ONLY if you can get the oil for that price and control costs to the pump. And, half a buck or so of the price of fuel at the pump is taxes, so if they tax biodiesel...

Free oil from the local fry pots is great, as long as it lasts.

I have seen estimates that worldwide annual petroleum use is the the equivalent of 400 years of plant growth. Remember that whatever coal or oil is in the ground is the result of millions of years of animals and plants dying and being converted to black stuff. If we are using it at 400 times the rate at which it was created, it's fairly obvious we can't replace it by growing stuff. Even if that number is way off, it still gives pause to the idea that we can "grow renewable fuel" with any great success.

Already, Borneo is seeing huge tracts of forests cleared for palm oil production. More biofuels simply means the reduction of the total wordlwide biomass, with very bad results. If anyone thought the Amazon was being ruined for food production, wait till they get the idea of planting palm trees, soybeans, or oil grasses.

Burning biofuels merely replaces some inefficient gasoline engines with slightly less inefficient diesels. It might even replace some more efficient fuel uses if the price drops enough at some point. At any rate, it's still burning stuff, and does little or nothing to reduce excessive CO2 production. CO2 production that will be more of a problem with fewer forests around as a carbon sink.

So, the answer is that biofuels are a small part of the solution, but we still have to reduce our energy consumption drastically.

[TX-RAT]

28. Great answer, now a question.

Is the octane rating on Bio-diesel the same as standard diesel?

[TreasonousBastard]

29. That would be "cetane" rating...

and it would have to be close for the engine to run.

More to the point might be the energy density of each-- meaning whether one gives you better gas mileage than the other. I don't know for sure, but I imagine there are various types of "biodiesel" that might give different mileages.

[TX-RAT]

30. thank you

[TreasonousBastard]

40. You're welcome, but just a quick clarification...

'cause I didn't explain something.

"Octane rating" in gasoline simply refers to the engine temperature at which it ignites. Higher octane gas is more difficult to ignite, so it's used in higher compression engines. Octane is the chemical name for gasoline, and the octane rating originally came from the amount of iso-octane (wierdly shaped molecules) in it.

Cetane rating for is for diesel and works pretty much the same way.

[amandabeech]

31. Brazil is a major, major soybean exporter.

Land formerly used as pasture is now planted in soybeans, and land formerly supporting tropical rainforest growth is now pasture.

Sugar cane plantings are also way up, with the same results as soybeans.

[Gold Metal Flake]

33. 7.7:1?

Where are you getting that estimate, and how does it break down?

[TreasonousBastard]

36. From here...

http://www.fsa.usda.gov/DACO/bioenergy/2002/2002FactorsNFormulas.pdf

It popped up on a search for something else and didn't check any further to see if this is absolutely accurate or just a set of assumptions for the program they're talking about, but I don't see any reason to dig deeper into these factors for this kind of discussion. I'm assuming everything in here is at least close.

[Gold Metal Flake]

39. I'll look at it later but people making biodiesel generally report...

...80-95% yield. BTW, corn oil is not the way to go. There are plants with better oil yields, like rapeseed, jatropha and industrial hemp. Hamp has the attractive plus of being able to provide fiber for paper as well.

[TreasonousBastard]

41. Yeah, but the corn is in pounds, not gallons, soo...

7.7 pounds of corn oil is pretty close to a gallon.

[Gold Metal Flake]

43. When discussing ratios, it is important to remember that it is a 2:1 ratio

of Canadian whiskey to dry Italian vermouth and a dash of bitters, shaken with ice, strained into a chilled glass with a cherry or a lemon garnish to make a Perfect Manhattan.

:D

[ItsTheMediaStupid]

35. 7.7 gallons or 7.7 pounds?

That is a big difference. I don't believe that it takes 7.7 gallons of oil, in fact the yield is almost 1:1 on the oil in versus biodiesel out, IIRC.

What bothers me is using methanol, which is currently made from natural gas.

[TreasonousBastard]

38. Pounds-- corn oil is traded in pounds, or...

hundredweights. It's not difficult to convert pounds to gallons if you have a conversion factor. Here's one site I use, but, alas, linseed is the only vegetable oil it lists:

http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm

I got the 7.7 pounds from here:

http://www.fsa.usda.gov/DACO/bioenergy/2002/2002FactorsNFormulas.pdf

[The Stranger]

24. Have people forgotten how to recommend posts?

[Gold Metal Flake]

32. Work for Ind. Hemp legalization LINK>>>

http://www.votehemp.com/index.html