Your Questions About Biodiesel

admin answers:

I don’t think you can use diesel in a kerosene heater. If some device cannot use regular diesel then it cannot use biodiesel.

admin answers:

Corporate biodiesel producers have access to further refining techniques to produce marketable products and may polymerize it, hydro crack or whatever to get high value hydrocarbons again. In a worse case situation, they could gasifier it to syngas and synthesize high value products like gasoline and diesel. Home brewers use what they can to pressure wash their driveways and home exteriors, their neighbors driveways, their decks, and then try to find a micro refinery or waste disposal facility to take the rest. Pouring it down the drain may keep your pipes clean but is probably illegal.

admin answers:

I would imagine the regular diesel because they get better mpgs than the gasoline counterpart in the same car and because biodiesel produces less energy (btu). Hard numbers i don’t know, sorry.

admin answers:

I remember reading about a distillery you can buy, it was around £2000, and yes the chemicals involved if you try yourself are hard to get, you need knowledge of titration to make sure that you get the right fuel properties, and you must declare it (UK Government at least). All in all it’s a bit long winded.

Just use pure vegetable oil, some manufacturers warrant this in thier cars.

The best one is a VW TDI engine (VW, Seat, Skoda and Audi – all modern diesels), all warranted for use with pure plant oil.

admin answers:

Hmmm…. Watermelon juice is essentially sugar-water. Diesel fuels are oil-based. Tough proposition.

You’d be better off fermenting the sugar to ethanol (like they do with corn and sugar cane) and powering vehicles with ethanol.

For very large-scale use, growing sugar cane in the tropics seems to be a good option. Brazil is powering much of their country this way. Turns out, using corn to do this is horribly inefficient and a terrible idea. I can’t imagine watermelon would work better than using corn. But maybe if you have thousands of gallons of spare watermelon juice, you might be able to make a small ethanol factory worthwhile.

Of course, you’d be running an alcohol distillery. The taxes/licenses/legal restrictions would probably be prohibitive.

admin answers:

Any diesel engine should run on biodiesel, however, it is not a good idea to put ethanol into your diesel engine because it won’t run and if mixed with diesel it will substantially reduce the flashpoint of the fuel which creates a significant safety hazard (think boom

For ethanol in a gasoline powered vehicle, you are probably already using E10 (gasoline blended with up to 10 percent ethanol by volume). If you would like to use higher blend levels or E85 (85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline), then you are going to need to purchase a flexable-fuel vehicle (or FFVs). Most domestic car companies produce a number of models that are FFVs, but foreign manufacturers do not really produce many models in the US (for example, Toyota only has two models, the Tundra and Sequoia). Most FFVs are clearly marked that they are FFVs and have yellow gas caps that explicitly say you can use E85 in the vehicle. The vehicle manufacturers have lists of models that you can buy as FFVs, and this should be available on their website. Also try here:

http://www.e85fuel.com/e85101/flexfuelvehicles.php

Using ethanol-gasoline blends of higher than 10 percent will generally void any warranty on a non-FFV so don’t do it unless you’re ok with that.

Cheers

admin answers:

You would buy corn or wheat for this.
Depends on what your plant is made for.

admin answers:

You could always try to make your own biodiesel:

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html

US Dept of Energy, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/altfuel/fuel_properties.html

Related pricing articles:

http://www.agmanager.info/agribus/energy/Risk%20&%20Profit%208-02.pdf

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2004-11-07-alternative-fuel_x.htm

http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/resources/pricereport/pdfs/afpr_3_23_04.pdf

http://news.com.com/Biodiesel+to+drive+up+the+price+of+cooking+oil/2100-11389_3-6114425.html

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2003470213_biodiesel10.html

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2005/04/from_the_trench.html