My car often smells of chips, because I sometimes run it on vegetable oil. Sometimes fresh from the shops, occasionally filtered waste oil, sometimes a mix of either of these with a bit of diesel.
Well, the poor old banger just about manages to splutter its way around Europe....
Truth be told, it runs better on a mix of diesel and veg oil than on pure mineral-diesel fuel! The engine known as the diesel engine, after its inventor Rudolf Diesel, was originally designed to be run on peanut oil, which was a pretty cheap fuel before petrochemicals became so plentiful. Mineral fuel for the diesel engine was actually developed as a cheap (and slightly inferior) alternative. Of course the balance has now swung the other way, since the govt takes 75p of every pound's worth of fuel bought at the pump, and fuel prices are rocketing (Jan 2008 edit: UK diesel now over £1 a litre!)
PLEASE NOTE - IF YOU HAVE A MODERN 'COMMON-RAIL' DIESEL ENGINE, DO NOT TRY THIS! THESE WORK ON A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT PRINCIPLE TO TRADITIONAL DIESEL ENGINES (but there's nothing to stop you using eco-diesel..) |
The irony of it is, that in other countries with a more enlightened approach to this kind of thing, diesel cars are being built which need no conversion at all to run on straight vegetable oil (SVO). Mercedes reckon that one of their traditional diesels run on SVO from new will last three times as long as one run on mineral diesel oil.
Further irony is that it is very easy to filter and treat waste vegetable oil (WVO) and use that instead. Currently, in the UK, if you own a restaurant or anywhere else that uses cooking oil, you are supposed to pay somebody to take away your used oil and dispose of it 'properly', ie not down the drain or frozen into lumps and put in the bin just before the binmen arrive (I have yet to discover how things stand in Poland). The trouble is that all of these options are environmental nightmares. Down the drain means it has to be taken as sludge out of the sewage at great expense, and dumped into landfill sites where it rots to produce methane, a worse greenhouse gas than CO2.
Put in the bin, it melts, clags up all the rubbish, and is put into landfill sites where.....
Pay someone to dispose of it 'properly', and it is taken to landfill sites where.....
Alternatively, why not take waste oils away from restaurants for no charge at all, and convert it all into fuel oil. This means it will be burnt, producing only the same CO2 that was taken out of the atmosphere by the vegetables from which it was produced.
If someone could wade through the incredible amounts of red tape involved, and maybe get an MP on their side, they might be able to start commercial production, and who knows.....
Of course, if the public mind and the political masters could be swayed sufficiently, then a large amount of Britain's highly subsidized, nett loss-making arable land could be turned over to growing oil-crop specifically for the purpose of making fuel. We could dispense with the idiotic Common Agricultural Policy at a stroke, saving the taxpayer billions a year. We could meet our Agenda21 targets 5 years in advance, as opposed to never (which is the way things are going at the minute). We could save vast amounts of petrochemicals for the plastics and pharmaceutical industries which need them, instead of breathing them in and out all the time. Restaurateurs and fast-fooders could be paid a small premium to save their oil for the council to collect and run the public transport on. Public transport could be cheaper and smell sweeter, making town centres more pleasant.
So, what are the chances? Well, DERV has just gone up again....