A question about Diesel

Also, the PR problems any strike could cause are likely bad.
Very bad.

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saber964 wrote:
A friend of mine got busted for making gasahol a few years back. He would make moonshine and mix it with gasoline to make either E-25 or E-50. He was busted for making untaxed alcohol but the case got tossed when it came out that he wasn't selling the alcohol but mixing it with gasoline. The state government went after him next for selling untaxed gasoline but that case got tossed when he pointed out that the state had recently passed a law encouraging the use of biofuels.

Hello Saber964. I just read this and I was wondering how economical this was for your friend? Was the money he saved on fuel actually enough to pay for his expenses in making the moonshine? Or was he doing it at a financial loss out of ecological concerns?

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On the other hand, as I was searching for this article in Google, I found a lot of articles on using cooking oil in a diesel vehicle, stories about converting it to biodiesel, including how-tos, conversion kits so your car runs properly on it (an former co-worker of mine moved to Germany and did this to his car) and story about Quantas doing a cooking oil/biodiesel flight.

There are a variety of ways in which one can convert vegetable oil to biodiesel. All of the ones I am aware of suitable for DIY operation use either acids or bases to crack the oil molecules. I've made biodiesel from used cooking oil and while biodiesel has a number of advantages, it does require a certain amount of care in it's preparation. The process I used required dry pure lye to be mixed with methanol; the resulting methoxide is highly toxic and can be absorbed through the skin, so proper protection is essential.

Properly processed and washed, biodiesel does make very good diesel fuel, with a high cetane rating, high lubricity, and no sulfur. There are two major pollutants resulting from ULS Diesel operation, NOX and particulates, and biodiesel burns at a lower temp than many petrodiesel, reducing nitrous oxides (NOX), and has a high cetane rating, keeping the particulate count lower. Processing oil into biodiesel renders the smell from cooking oil much less noticeable, and at least here in the USA, there is no requirement that you dye it. It does have one annoying characteristic; when used in a system that has had petrodiesel in it, it acts as a solvent and cleans the interior of all of the dirt and debris that typically builds up in a petrodiesel tank. When you first switch to biodiesel, you end up using a LOT of fuel filters.

WeberFan wrote:Now you're getting into MY business...

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And one last oh-by-the-way. I mentioned "air-free" environment. This is commonly done in a refining environment by flooding the piping and the equipment with superheated steam to drive out the air. No air means no fire and no explosions in the equipment.

Yep! Upper Flammability Limits are awesome.

One reason the current diesel process is 'complicated' is the quality. If you give up some on the quality aspect (blending), different chains, different (are you familiar with octane?) ratings to reduce pre-detonation, then you can accept a much wider fuel quality tolerance.

So essentially a crude distillation column can break things down- there's no reason they can't refine those materials further to better grades. It's just time. Recycled heat can do a lot to improve that too. Catalytic cracking might be way off, but they already have gold and silver and copper. Separating out platinum or rhodium might be impossible without electricity, but most of these metals were isolated with just chemicals.

I suppose any scientific journal that described the crude way people isolated elements could be reproduced in the technology constraints. Not a lot, and not fast, but doable.