Episode 21 - EcoSystm: Biodiesel! [Discussion]

[travislopes]

Diesels get better mileage than gas engines. Biodiesel has a lower carbon footprint and supports farmers. Great reasons to dump a gas engine and run biodiesel. Want a better reason? Exxon made 36 Billion last year... you don't have to buy gasoline.

[masherscf]

Since plants get their CO2 out of the atmosphere. Bio-diesel is considered carbon neutral. The only real issue with bio-diesel is the cost of production. Modern farming techniques are energy intensive and expensive in comparison to fossil oils. Not to mention the vast amount of land needed to produce the vegetable sources.

I don't know if you've priced out a gallon of soy bean oil lately, but it's way more expensive than regular diesel.

Bio-diesel is a fun option for tinkers and those with access to vast amounts of waste cooking oil. But, it is far from a solution for everyone.

[blofeld07]

Great episode, this and tekzilla are tied for most improved of the last week.
My mechanical engineer senior project was a biodiesel hybrid Ford Explorer. The stock gas engine was replaced with a Diesel one and we geared an electric motor in parallel with it for regenerative braking. We received extra points in the Future Truck competition because carbon dioxide was removed from the air in production of the biodiesel. NOx emissions are one of the nasties from using diesel, but those were reduced through the use of Urea injection(an ammonia derivative we called cow piss).

[scienceking]

Originally Posted by masherscf

Modern farming techniques are energy intensive

Give it time. It took thousands of years of eugenics to make farmed plants that were efficient for human and animal consumption. Over the past several hundred years, we made plants that were no good for human consumption but more efficient for animal consumption. A big part of the problem is that no one has ever cared about the energy efficiency of crops before in all this history. A long way can be reached by just designing plants that are very good as acting like proxy solar power plants, and there is much ground to be made here. Its a little known fact that plants actually evolved to be fairly inefficient at photosynthesis so as to prevent them from overstraining their environment; changes to such mechanisms through genetic engineering could really help make super-plants that do more of what we want in terms of energy efficiency.

Sadly, farmers do not like this idea, because they are more interested in being able to sell more of the crops they grow now, and not specializing...but thats a political matter.

I don't think biodiesel will ever be as energy efficient or cost effective as fossil fuels, but you can't rule out the economic benefits of independence of non-renewable resources...especially when said resources are geographically scarce.

[vincent12234]

Yeah I have to say very awesome episode, Their were a couple of things that I learned from this, so thank you guys very much, always nice.

[wizmaster]

Originally Posted by masherscf

Since plants get their CO2 out of the atmosphere. Bio-diesel is considered carbon neutral. The only real issue with bio-diesel is the cost of production. Modern farming techniques are energy intensive and expensive in comparison to fossil oils. Not to mention the vast amount of land needed to produce the vegetable sources.

I don't know if you've priced out a gallon of soy bean oil lately, but it's way more expensive than regular diesel.

Bio-diesel is a fun option for tinkers and those with access to vast amounts of waste cooking oil. But, it is far from a solution for everyone.

Yea, but it can easily be solved by "buying" all the waste oil from restaurants and fast food joints. Recycling all that oil would actually offset the amount needed from farms enough to make it cheap (I believe).

Nice episode. Getting better I admit but I was hoping they would actually show us how to make biodiesel when I saw the name. Oh well, still good and I like how they got interviews for it.

IMO, they should have an episode on making a biodiesel plugin hybrid. That's enough ecosystm for a while.

They really should have made some biodiesel.

[kdepasquale]

This was definitely the most interesting episode of Systm since Patrick and Dave started hosting. It would be pretty cool to actually see the process of refining used cooking oil for use as biodiesel in a future episode.

[tempesta]

Extracting the oil for this is pretty hard, so I'm told (by a friend at a more prestigious uni than mine, doing Agricultral Science, so he knows far more than I). He tells me one of the big reasons for the push for Biodiesel in the US is because of the large subsidies for farmers.

Theres a guy who makes it up back where I grew up, and apparently, due to the different viscosity, wont burn as cleanly.

Also, kdepasquale, I thought that was what we we're going to get as part of this episode...


Interesting stuff though.

[hadees]

That was the most disappointing episode of Systm I have watched thus far and that is saying something considering the tail spin Systm seems to have taken recently. It was way too short and they never showed us how to make biodiesel. I don't watch Systm so I can hear people talk about vague ideas, I am here for practical diy projects.

I understand producing complicated and technical diy projects isn't easy but thats what Systm was and i think that is what the viewers want. So if you can't do it every week then fine give me it every other week but I don't want to see anymore Systms that don't show me the steps to actually do something.

Even though I am a huge Patrick Norton fan there is only so much more I can take.

[marclcharles]

I think this was a good episode because it discussed in depth a modern issue, as opposed to some bad science project (no offense guys).

I still don't think biodiesel, just like corn ethanol, is a viable option. This is based solely on how much can be produced a year. We use about 100 Billion gallons of gasoline a year. If we took out entire national stock of corn to create ethanol, we get 8 billion gallons. Anyone see the problem there. Oh not to mention, if we replant all of it, we have to wait another 8 months or so just to harvest it...

I'd love to see an episode on ethanol. Please investigate companies like Algaenon out of Florida that are researching ethanol based on Algae (replaces its self over night).