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September 23, 2005
Vegetable Power: An Alternative to Gasoline Guzzling
With reports that the price of gasoline will hit $4.00 a gallon if the Texas refineries are closed very long because of Rita, I found this article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution quite interesting.
With very little modification, a local Gwinnett County fellow has converted his VW Jetta diesel to run on vegetable oil. Nothing fancy, just vegetable oil that is being discarded by an area Thai restaurant.
We certainly need to be heading this way, to far greater use of renewable fuels to run our engines.
The article is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the story is real. And it really does make one hopeful that there are alternatives to our dependence on fossil fuels.
Posted by Jim at September 23, 2005 09:46 PM
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Comments
Is vegetable oil less that $4 a gallon?
Posted by: Toasty Moe at September 24, 2005 10:38 AM
One must also consider how much energy goes into the production of
1) the vegetables
2) the oil
3) the transportation of the oil
On the plus side it is re-used vegetable oil, so you get a "two-fer" for all of 1, 2 and 3. And you leave the smell of french fries in your wake, which is pretty cool in its own right.
Posted by: eLarson at September 24, 2005 04:46 PM
What if LOTS of people did this? Think it would be cheap then?
Posted by: douglas at September 25, 2005 06:29 AM
I should elaborate. The Diesel engine was originally designed for vegetable oil- this is nothing new. If you are one of a very few people doing this, you can get used oil from fast food restaurants for free, and for a small cost, clean it and use it. Now here's the catch- if LOTS of people turned on to this, there wouldn't be enough waste oil to go around, and they wouldn't give it away anyhow.
Besides, if there were money to be made from this, don't you think Archer Daniels Midland would be flooding D.C. with lobbyists to lock it up for them?
Posted by: douglas at September 25, 2005 06:33 AM
On the other hand, my bicycle runs on all the veggies I eat at no additional cost. There's your alternative transportation.
Posted by: Dan Trabue at September 26, 2005 12:31 PM