How they accidentally discovered a 100 percent petroleum replacement

so.. simple pyrolysis?

a reply to: butcherguy

possible, but not a given. peanuts need very little fertilizer and actually improve soil fertility so they are a great plant for crop rotation. this would reduce the farmers cost. they grow best in sandy soil,and grown all over the world.

i could see many oil companies starting their own farms all over the world.

They put 18,000 gallons of diesel made using the same process into a test ship off California and ran it for 12 hours. They ran the same tests with the current standard Marine diesel and the only difference in performance was a significant drop in emissions.

Slow down, cowboys. It's not that easy. Unless it is significantly different than bio-diesel, which is made using the same exact ingredients, there's a lot going on here. I have a Silverado Duramax pickup truck that I ran on bio-diesel for a year. My truck ran on pure soybean oil, which is a whole lot cleaner and more refined than kitchen grease with all its contaminants.

1. It's cost-effective to run if diesel fuel costs $3.00-$4.00 or more per gallon. If diesel costs $2.25, like today, it is not cost-effective. You may see some volume reductions for large quantities, but it isn't free. If you're going to make it from soybean oil, that's going to take a lot of farmland to grow, taking away from food production. ALL the local suppliers of bio-diesel have gone out of business. The guy I bought my tank and fuel from lost his house in the process.

2. Bio-diesel starts to coagulate at 32*F. And it doesn't take long at all. I got caught in a snowstorm and it happened to me. The diesel turned into a mushy mess. I wound up replacing my fuel filter. It was ungodly in there. you can't imagine the mess. To overcome this you need some serious and expensive additives, or heat.

3. Kitchen grease? This is a backyard survivalist staple. Guys into this canvass every McDonald's restaurant in the country to buy up their old fry oil. As a result the price of this stuff has gone up. And it's already spoken for. Can you imagine a Navy tanker truck stopping by McDonald's; 'Hey, man! You got any used french fry oil?"

4. There's a lot of fantasy talk about this approach. For example, it was discovered a few years ago that you could grow a better crop with greater yields by using algae. All you have to do is convert some desert land into vast algae fields, pump in some water, and, oh, wait.....there's no water. So far as I know, there is ZERO bio-diesel being made with algae today and this idea is over ten years old.

5. If you managed to cost-effectively recycle all the grease from all the McDonalds in the country (consider transport costs here) and stick it in a huge tank you might have enough grease to power an F-18 for an hour or so. It's nice to know the nation produces so much grease, but most of it is in number 2 cans under the kitchen sink. It's not recoverable.

I'm all for the idea, but to promote this as a new idea (it's not) or that it's "indistinguishable from petroleum" (hardly) is not realistic at all. It's a nice theory that is very difficult to put into practice, particularly in volume quantities.

In other words, don't hold your breath.

a reply to: schuyler

Did you read the article and look into it, or just knee jerk? This is a new process discovered recently while trying to make sterile water. When tested against petroleum, unlike other biodiesel, it was found to have the same makeup as petroleum. This is the first drop in biofuel ever developed.

I would love to see ARA's hygroscopy and phase separation test data.
2nd.

a reply to: peck420

There are a few details at one of their pages.

www.ara.com...

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: schuyler

Did you read the article and look into it, or just knee jerk? This is a new process discovered recently while trying to make sterile water. When tested against petroleum, unlike other biodiesel, it was found to have the same makeup as petroleum. This is the first drop in biofuel ever developed.

The article is lightweight and has few details. They basically say "kitchen grease" + [insert magic here] = "instant perfect fuel." But they overtly said "kitchen grease" and that leads me to my comments. I have first-hand experience dealing with this stuff as well as its much cleaner and more pure equivalents. I provided quite a few more details than the article did. And I'm telling you, from my experience, that it isn't that easy. If anyone wants to believe our fuel issues are solved from this tidbit, feel free, but I'm thinking this is delusional. And given that this is a military contractor that has "developed this technique" I can't imagine the cost per gallon here.

a reply to: Zaphod58
If by few, you mean almost none and contradictory...yes, I already saw that.

It is the standard, we aren't going to show you a thing until we have it so patented and copy written that we are 100% certain nobody else can even think about it without our permission, splash page.

a reply to: schuyler

Kitchen grease was cited as ONE possible material to use. If you look farther than just the article there are a few more details.

This is a straight drop in replacement, unlike every other type of biofuel so far. Yes, they're a defense contractor, but this came from one of their civilian projects not the military side.

Of course it won't solve our fuel problems. They're not trying to right away. They're looking at up to 50% being biofuel by 2020, not a total replacement.

a reply to: peck420

Not that I blame them. They're already talking about producing several hundred thousand pounds a day for Navy use.

originally posted by: Zaphod58
Not that I blame them. They're already talking about producing several hundred thousand pounds a day for Navy use.

I don't blame them either, I am just greedy in wanting to know if this is an actual viable alternative for petroleum based products.

originally posted by: hounddoghowlie
a reply to: butcherguy

possible, but not a given. peanuts need very little fertilizer and actually improve soil fertility so they are a great plant for crop rotation. this would reduce the farmers cost. they grow best in sandy soil,and grown all over the world.

i could see many oil companies starting their own farms all over the world.

I am glad that the technology is being developed.
But food prices did increase due to the government mandate of alcohol being blended into our gasoline.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Ain't it nifty that it's actually tax-payer funding behind this keep the death marchers alive scenario?

Kinda says something when it's only good for the goose-egg on our heads, huh?

We amidst the gander?

originally posted by: butcherguy

originally posted by: Zaphod58
a reply to: butcherguy

They haven't released much about the process yet, but there's plenty of materials that can be used to create enough fuel to power the entire Navy. They can use almost any type of grease, or several other materials.

I am curious. It would be nice to get some numbers. If we find out that it takes a block of kichen grease the size of a house to make enough fuel to fly an hour, it would make this idea of flying all the Navy planes on it seem silly.

Think BACON and Pork Grease... How lovely the exhaust would smell and how politically disturbing in some areas of the world a simple fly over could be ! (sorry couldn't resist the fantasy)

a reply to: Zaphod58

From what I can gather it is a propritary method of producing biodiesel (an analogue to sweet crude petroleum oil) by pyrolisis. This 'crude oil' can then be further refined with standard petroleum refinery processes to produce petrol and diesel fuel products.

Biodiesel production (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

I don't think that that the headline is much more than marketing speak for the process. Sorry for the cynicism.

But it is good to see that we are putting money and science into alternative sources of energy, we'll need it and more cudos to those who are able to also turn a profit from the process.

originally posted by: loveguy
a reply to: Zaphod58

Ain't it nifty that it's actually tax-payer funding behind this keep the death marchers alive scenario?

Kinda says something when it's only good for the goose-egg on our heads, huh?

We amidst the gander?

Well without those funds going to the MIC alot of the advances never would had came about.

originally posted by: yuppa

originally posted by: loveguy
a reply to: Zaphod58

Ain't it nifty that it's actually tax-payer funding behind this keep the death marchers alive scenario?

Kinda says something when it's only good for the goose-egg on our heads, huh?

We amidst the gander?

Well without those funds going to the MIC alot of the advances never would had came about.

So we as tax-payers have a choice, we can continue to watch our funds getting used to bring about the death of those who have as much right to life as we do, or we can put the tech to better use, like healing the planet and it's inhabitants?

All of this hooray for me and you can find a gutter to sleep in is nauseating....

You got to wonder why those jets take such expensive fuel. I think someone is getting very rich selling that fuel to the government. I think that there is some very bad price gouging going on with the price of that fuel.

a reply to: rickymouse

Fuel isn't cheap. The Air Force just changed to Jet-A with JP-8 additives, which will save them $25.5M a year in fuel costs. They spent almost $7B on JP-8 alone in 2013. JP-8, which was the backbone of the Air Force fuel system until 2009, required the refineries that made it to make it in a separate area, with separate transportation for it. It was a completely different fuel than anybody else used. On average the Air Force alone buys a billion gallons of fuel a year.