Oil From Dinner Last Night is Fuel of Tomorrow

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frye

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[citation][nom]adaman2576[/nom]carbon neutral??? What will be done with all the excess CO2??? Last time I checked that was a green house gas.[/citation]

The CO2 comes from the plants, which they absorbed previously while growing. The CO2 added back into the air was in the air last year anyways.
 

jellico

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It's nice that they've come up with a better way to extract biofuel from used cooking oil. But that still doesn't address the root of the problem. The United States alone uses 20 MILLION BARRELS OF OIL PER DAY. Sorry for the caps, but people seem to have a real problem with scale. Researchers are getting excited about the possibility of producing a few million gallons of biofuel per year when we are consuming 840 million gallons PER DAY. Sorry, guys, but those extra zeroes make a big difference. That's why they're called orders of magnitude.

The only way we're going to break our addiction to fossil fuels is if scientists come up with a REVOLUTIONARY new technology. A merely evolutionary technology just won't cut it. Our only other choice is to roll back the clock and party like it's 1799. Personally, I don't want to live an 18th century lifestyle. And I'm pretty certain countries like China and India aren't going to go for that either.
 

martel80

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People in the Czech Republic already use this. They simpy filter the used oil and add it to diesel fuel (20 or even more per cent).
But you either have to have an older diesel engine or you have to install stuff which pre-heats the fuel before injecting.
Use at your own risk! :)
 

drwho1

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this concept has been around for years, yet has not been used commercially, why I got no clue other than the goverment and the oil companies will do anything to make this a reallity.

and by "this" I mean any alt source of energy.
 

garyshome

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Air is blasted onto a nickel catalyst to form nickel
oxide, to start the exothermic (heat-giving) process. A fuel-steam mixture is then added, causing it to react with the hot nickel oxide to produce hydrogen gas (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The produced CO2 is then trapped, leaving pure H2 and forcing the reaction to keep running, increasing the amount of hydrogen made.
All that to convert a couple of gallons of french fry oil? Seems really cost effective to me. How much are they paying the scientists? How much does the research equipment cost [tax dollars?]. That's right tax dollars DON'T COUNT.
 

baldinie

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I might go back to leeds Uni now and get involved in this! did atmospheric sciences and meteorology there, and did fuel studies...this looks kinda cool!
As for how much are they paying, its Leeds Uni, gets its money from research companies, energy companies, and my tuition fees.
It's all about finding more energy efficient ways to get Hydrogen, for fuel cells. Since the oil has been processed once and is a waste product, it has a low carbon foot print, but also takes less energy to get hydrogen from hydrocarbons than water, which you get at the end. Plug the reactor into a wind turbine (plenty of wind in Leeds) and you're good to go, less waste, more fuel.
And yeah, get rid of BP, the oil company that has spent more on clean and reusable fuel sources (after Shell, another british oil giant) than all the American oil companies put together. fuck off bashing BP, it was a halliburton well and a trans ocean rig!
 

mjello

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[citation][nom]martel80[/nom]People in the Czech Republic already use this. They simpy filter the used oil and add it to diesel fuel (20 or even more per cent).But you either have to have an older diesel engine or you have to install stuff which pre-heats the fuel before injecting.Use at your own risk![/citation]

I had a friend trying that. It blew his engine. Dangerous stuff to experiment with. And in any case it reduces the life of your engine.
 

sentinelcomputers

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[citation][nom]mjello[/nom]I had a friend trying that. It blew his engine. Dangerous stuff to experiment with. And in any case it reduces the life of your engine.[/citation]
You can use old cooking oil as fuel in a diesel engine. Three things, though: 1) It MUST be a diesel engine (a lot of people don't realize that diesel and gasoline engines work on two totally different principles of combustion), 2) You MUST filter the old oil thoroughly to remove all particulate matter, 3) You SHOULD only run about 1/4 of a tank of cooking oil and 3/4 of a tank of regular diesel fuel (or 3 gallons diesel to every 1 gallon of cooking oil). The cooking oil is very viscous stuff. The regular diesel will thin it out so it doesn't clog the fuel lines (this is especially important in cold weather).
 

BulkZerker

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[citation][nom]sentinelcomputers[/nom]You can use old cooking oil as fuel in a diesel engine. Three things, though: 1) It MUST be a diesel engine (a lot of people don't realize that diesel and gasoline engines work on two totally different principles of combustion), 2) You MUST filter the old oil thoroughly to remove all particulate matter, 3) You SHOULD only run about 1/4 of a tank of cooking oil and 3/4 of a tank of regular diesel fuel (or 3 gallons diesel to every 1 gallon of cooking oil). The cooking oil is very viscous stuff. The regular diesel will thin it out so it doesn't clog the fuel lines (this is especially important in cold weather).[/citation]

Now if it's a newer Diesel engine you can run (with a little tweaking of the injectors and fuel pumps) 100% Bio Diesel (which is basically filtered French-fry oil, and a little ethanol.) The older engines "suffer" from a much lower fuel pressure system, which is why Direct injection Diesel's can get away with this.


Interesting fact. Rudolf Diesel ran his Diesel engine on Peanut oil!


Ok, now back on topic. Unless this is purely a recovery type system for fuel this is a joke. I can see it being used as a way to clean a already used product that has no further use we're just doing one thing, wasting chemical energy by converting it into heat (which happens a lot with conversion processes. internal combustion engines are a prime example)
 
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