My learned colleague Rohen explained this to me yesterday, and I recounted the episode of Mythbusters where they filled the tank of an old Mercedes diesel-engined car with off-the-shelf cooking oil and drove it round an airport perimeter until the engine conked out.
Only the engine didn't conk out, it drove perfectly normally all day (until they abandoned the attempt), miles per gallon weren't as good as with mineral oil, but apart from that, nothing unusual to report.
So it turns out that all this research into using vegetable oil as bio-diesel is over a century behind the times, Rudolf Diesel designed his first engine to run on pea-nut oil, which it did without problems.
It is true that vegetable oil is even worse than diesel oil at low temperatures, but that is easily fixed by chucking in some acid or something. Whether it is 'better' to run cars on vegetable oil and leave the mineral oil in the ground is another question, because of e.g. the resulting higher food prices, and I don't know whether it's cheaper manufacturing vegetable oil or extracting mineral oil. But hey.
The eternal generality
18 minutes ago
62 comments:
Whether it is 'better' to run cars on vegetable oil and leave the mineral oil in the ground is another question, because of e.g. the resulting higher food prices, and I don't know whether it's cheaper manufacturing vegetable oil or extracting mineral oil. But hey.
Better to use vegetable oil for niche uses, lubricants etc. Compare the yield of your feedstock to what you use in your car every year. With Rapeseed, my car would use around two hectares, which is a lot of land. Palm oil is pretty good yielding, but then you have to balance it with the unpopular idea of covering swathes of the tropics with oil-palms. Who knows about the economics, correct for subsidies, and for the likelyhood that food-prices will increase, and mineral oil will most likely be a winner.
A local chap fills up with Mazola in the supermarket carpark then chucks the bottles in the recycling bin - very green!
He finds it worth while doing a 50/50 mix in the winter.
His car is rather old, best not to try on your new Beemer.
Kj, I too suspect that on a pure cost basis, mineral oil is cheaper.
R, he's daft. Veg oil in the supermarket is >£1/litre. He ought to buy 20-gallon metal drums of oil from a catering supplies company for <£1/litre. A bit of a bugger lifting them, but nothing that can't be fixed. Plus he can set up a steel band with the empties.
Rudolph Diesel was an extremely
strange but intriguing bloke.There is a theory he was assassinated by German agents. ( He always insisted he was Thuringian).Henry Ford also wanted his cars to run on some product his ideal customer ,the American small farmer,could grow and process ; it might have been ethanol(can't remember).So neither of the two founding fathers of motorised transport were very keen on petrol.
It was ethanol.There is an interesting web-site called Henry Ford and Fuel Ethanol.
DBC, that's even more interesting, is there a link to that to save me tracking it down? Although excluding Mr Daimler from 'founding fathers' is a bit harsh.
Surely if the vegetable oil costs £1 a litre in the supermarket it is a much more expensive fuel because veg oil is not taxed at nearly the same rate that fuel oil is.
I expect that the American motorist was hamstrung by the oil trusts and forced to become addicted to their products. Or something.
That was BE. For some reason I am not allowed to log in using my Wordpress Open ID account.
BE, correct, you can't compare £1 tax free against £1,35 including 80 pence duty.
The other part of the theory says that the best source of oil was hemp/cannabis plants, which is why the oil monopolists got behind the anti-drugs prohibition movement.
I used to always run my car on cooking oil (rape), a 90/10 mix on a run,50/50 around town.
Unfortunately I think the powers that be cottoned onto this wheeze.
Hence oil prices in the supermarket are now on a par with pump prices.
However, it was a nice little way of saving a bit and cocking a snook at the tax man!
No wonder cannabis is banned: the plant can be used to make oil (upsets the oil producers), rope (upsets the chemical producers), cloth (upsets the cotton producers), needs no pesticides, fertilisers or weedkillers (upsets the agri-chemical producers) and doesn't need to be genetically modified (upsets Monsanto).
BB, good background info, what make/model/year was the car.
B, exactly. There are lots of reasons. The story also goes that cannabis oil is a could cure/palliative/prevention thing for cancer, which upsets big pharma no end.
Henry Ford designed a car actually made of hemp (stiffened with resin).> Google Marijuana Wikipedia Henry Ford Hemp Car.( I seem to remember an achingly unfunny Cheech and Chong film made on the same premise.)Ford also realised hemp was ideal for ethanol.Whatever happened to the artificial oil the Nazis developed when they got cut off from oil wells? The South Africans had another go at it when they were under sanctions I seem to remember. ( I am very old... but none the wiser.)
The other part of the theory says that the best source of oil was hemp/cannabis plants, which is why the oil monopolists got behind the anti-drugs prohibition movement.
That may have been part of the picture at the time, but it's not as unique as it's proponents claim sometimes.
It's an interesting plant, and there's probably loads of uses yet to be developed in the neutraceutical/pharmaceutical field. For oil, rapeseed outyields it with the current strains available, and the fibre isn't competitive with for example bamboo(for clothing).
A swift Google round shows that the South Africans produce 160,000 barrels a day of the synthetic stuff,using the same process that the Nazis used .(The Nazis did n't invent it.) Since coal is one basic ingredient why have n't we Brits had a go at it?
Whatever happened to the artificial oil the Nazis developed when they got cut off from oil wells? The South Africans had another go at it when they were under sanctions I seem to remember.
That would be Fischer-Tropsch synthesized fuel, from coal gas.
DBC. Kj, yes, that old Nazi "vehicle fuel from coal" thing seems to have died a death. Why do the South Africans do it? Is it cheaper than importing oil? I've been told that you can make it from actual coal, not coal gas.
MW: I think it's competitive at a high level of oil-price, but don't know exactly at what level, but there's a lot of technology development around it still, especially in Germany. Yes, you use coal, or biomass, or garbage, and gasify it - like they made town-gas before nat.gas was available - and then synthesize it to liquid.
Mark first started with a W reg Ford Escort TD estate.
The last one was an 06 reg Fiesta TDI.
Used to get about the same MPG as running on pure diesel. The only thing I did do was change the oil every 5000 miles. Which I used to do myself so only cost was filter and oil.
In fact on a run I used to reckon the engine sounded smoother?
The thing about synthetic fuel prices is that nationally you save a lot more money using them than you waste on wars preserving supplies of petroleum.Now that the Suez Canal is not a consideration, we would not be messing around in the Middle East if it was n't for petroleum (or in Afghanistan probably where there is a pipeline).If you factor in the wars and the guarding against wars ,almost any price for home-produced fuel would be worth paying.If you aggregated the Defence Budget in with the Balance of Payments ,things would look a lot different.
BB, aha, interesting, I heard or read that it only works with older cars made up to 2002-ish, but if it works with an 06 Ford (almost brand new, by my standards) then that's not an issue.
DBC, good. My energy policy is nuclear for electricity and we'll make our own petrol out of all the spare coal.
Googling around shows we did have a research establishment looking at creating synthetic fuel oils(synthetic lubricant oils are everywhere now).It was set up in 1931(not the best year) and in Greenwich (not the best place).
But becoming self-sufficient in energy to save on military spending threatens the basic premise of Liberal Free Trade,which takes a crude view of the lowest world price and ignores all the spending on navies and armies to ensure those cheap import prices are maintained.Maybe Malthus was right about the Corn Laws (which would be a major revision to my political outlook -he says pedantically).
DBC, you can have free trade without militarism or imperialism, whoever delivers the best value to our shores gets to sell their goods, and whoever's doing the delivering can pay for his own maritime protection.
Whereby running a navy would be a profitable business if ship owners paid for it via insurance, of which I am also in favour.
Mark another thing is unlike if you get caught with red diesel in your tank HMRC can confiscate it then and there.
If they find vegetable oil instead they can't.
Something to do with the way the tax is worked out for running on the stuff, as you sort of pay it in "arrears".
Whereas with red diesel you're actually avoiding paying any taxes.
BB, true, but I think you're making the legalities seem too complicated. Red diesel is sold strictly for use on farms, there's a law against using it on the road. Until and unless they pass a law making it illegal to run your car on cooking oil. then it's legal.
But becoming self-sufficient in energy to save on military spending threatens the basic premise of Liberal Free Trade,which takes a crude view of the lowest world price and ignores all the spending on navies and armies to ensure those cheap import prices are maintained.
There may be such a thing as too high military spending, but there's no inherent trait about liberalism that military spending needs to be high to ensure trade. Liberal countries with free trade are usually more at peace with their neighbours than protectionist countries.
Maybe Malthus was right about the Corn Laws (which would be a major revision to my political outlook -he says pedantically).
I don't really see the point in "making sure Malthus was right" by protectionism. I haven't taken you for a liberal, but anti-humanist as well eh?
Kj, steady on, DBC has often said he'd like to see the military being privately funded, i.e. ships which want protection of UK Navy pay their insurance premiums direct to the UK Navy, or some international consortium of navies which will protect their ships on their long journeys around the globe (or from the Arab Gulf to Europe).
"Corn" is not really the sort of thing which pirates fight over, and by and large we get this from North America across the fairly safe North Atlantic.
Kj, for further discussion see Ralph's letter here.
MW: That's fine, but he didn't say that. Nowhere in the liberalist "manifesto" does it says that government shall protect free of charge the cargo from the port with the cheapest goods. And bringing in Malthus and the Corn Law as alternative paradigm is a bit fresh isn't it?
I can't remember saying that I'd like the military privately funded,but who knows? I've always a bit anti standing army on straightforward 18th cent 19th cent radical grounds.
As to Malthus , I was simply saying that he stood up for the Corn Laws because they encouraged agriculture in the UK .(This aspect of his philosophy is mentioned on Wikipedia I believe but I have n't checked). If we had encouraged agriculture a bit (this is me not Malthus)the UK might not have developed the sewage strewn urban housing described by Engels in the Condition of the Working Class or left workers on the starvation wages laissez- faire supporters could get away with because they got subsidised grain imports (subsidised by military protection which, when it did n't work in WW1 and WW2 left people starving,saved by some very un-laissez faire State interventions).
(This anti international Free Trade scepticism is a new one on me .I've only been thinking about it for the last week: I have been a land taxer since 1970 by contrast. Henry George was big Free Trader.)
kj " A bit fresh"?What a magnificent turn of phrase! I am quite disarmed (really).
PS Getting back to the subject (petrol),it is clear that we are spending a ridiculous amount of money protecting supplies of the stuff from some of the most politically difficult places on earth. I don't think the oil companies are footing the bill for this .(Even George V was shocked to find that the Vestey family hardly paid any tax although its access to its Argentinian cattle ranches on its own ships to its own butchers' shops in the UK was ensured by torpedoed Royal Navy sailors drowning in the Atlantic).
DBC, oil companies pay a colossal amount of tax. Yes, they are evil monopolists despoiling the environment etc blah blah blah but even the UK has a fairly Georgist approach to North Sea Oil taxation.
And UK fuel duty alone would cover the entire UK defence budget (although fuel duty is rent for roads and largely borne by the motorist, it's not borne by oil extractors).
And free trade is completely excellent - however, a business which relies on taxpayer funded State protection to succeed is clearly not free trade, is it?
PS, LVT (and a citizen's dividend)would have sorted out agriculture far better than Corn Laws and would have meant that the evil early industrialists did not have all that slave labour to exploit, they would have had to pay proper wages and the economy would have done all the better for it.
DBC
If we had encouraged agriculture a bit (this is me not Malthus)the UK might not have developed the sewage strewn urban housing described by Engels...
Corn Laws benefitted primarily land-owners, at the expense of those people living in the sewage strewn urban housing you talk of, and by your theory, also at the expense of industrialists, who by your account would have to increase wages just enough to cover the increase in grain-rent to the land-owners. So that's 1-0-0 for the landowners.
MW:
And UK fuel duty alone would cover the entire UK defence budget (although fuel duty is rent for roads and largely borne by the motorist, it's not borne by oil extractors).
Largely, but that's because of inelasticity of demand isn't it? In a situation where oil-price+fuel duty would start reducing demand significantly, that'd be the extractors and extraction country who would bear it, right?
@MW You'd need to have the Oil companies taxation contribution on one side of the double entry system and our total costs for the various middle East conflicts on the other.My guess is that they would n't balance.You'd also have to factor in NY 9/11 London 7/7 as costs for meddling about in Muslim countries ,which, not surprisingly, they don't like.
You mention North Sea Oil.Its all the other far flung oil production sites that cause the trouble and involve us in idioti and expensive alliances.
I don't think LVT would have sorted out British Agriculture.Foreign competition had pretty well k o'd British agriculture by 1939 ,when 66% of British food was imported,and we had given up most farming except dairy.Ah the miracle of the markets.
@kj
Malthus's argument was with Adam Smith who said that the corn laws put up the agricultural labourers' wages.Owners of agricultural land had a terrible time of it in late 19th cent following suspension of the Corn Laws ,so even more workless would have wandered into the hellhole overcrowded cities. They would n't have ended up in the sewage strewn urban housing in the first place if a prosperous agriculture had kept them in the country.( I expect this motivation is partly the impetus behind the European CAP)
Kj, oil taxation is three separate things:
1. Extraction. A tax on/a higher charge for the value of the licences is paid by the landowner/the extractor. This cost cannot be passed downstream to refiners or motorists.
2. Refining, transport etc. Perfectly ordinary business, if taxed too highly will go out of business pushing up prices etc. So the tax is partly passed on (upstream or downstream).
3. The motorist. He pays fuel duty, which is rent for roads, it's a user charge on something fairly inelastic, so the tax is largely borne by motorists (and a small part is borne upstream, i.e. by refiners having lower output).
DBC, I'm out of my depth even trying to reply to that, so I shall gracefully give in.
DBC: I'm not familiar with Malthus musings on the Corn Laws. But the fact is that an analysis of the effect of tariffs and subsidies enacted since the 60s (in my country), shows that full-time farmers currently have an income on average 60% of that of industrial workers, which they incidentally had in the 60s as well. The number of agricultural workers has plummeted (tech has pretty much eliminated the need for farmworkers), and the only thing that has increased is the difference between domestic and foreign food-prices (oh, and land has maintained it's value). We'll never know what had happened had the Corn Laws not been repealed, but we know very well that this and that scheme to help just the one favoured group of the year, usually just postpones the inevitable rearrangement of resources and labour to a better use. Had we had a proper land-tax regime, the benefits of this economic growth would have been the property of it's rightful producers, not landowners. Should the UK put tariffs on oil and produce synthetic oil instead? Why not try to untax the productive economy, and maybe someone will find it more profitable to do so then?
At the time that Malthus was active the UK had a tax system which was much closer to LVT than our current system. However the big thing that it did not have was a citizen's dividend to redistribute the LVT revenue. Hence the urban poverty, sewage-strewn streets, etc. The rate of tax on property was also far too low and based on assessments done in the 17th century which didn't help.
If the Corn Laws had been left in place or the tariff increased, this would have stopped money "leaking" abroad and made it recirculate at home instead which would probably have helped to reduce poverty as Malthus suggested. However a good high LVT+CI would have had much the same effect without raising the cost of food.
@Kj
It was not just Malthus musing on the Corn Laws.Engels was exerting his influence against the Anti-Corn Law League see The Labour Standard July 1881 "what was aimed at by the repeal of the Corn Laws was to reduce the price of bread and thereby the money rate of wages".He goes on to say that the more working-class Chartists disrupted Anti Corn Law League meetings in and around Manchester and demanded votes on the People's Charter instead.
I admit I have begun to have a bit of a thing about the Corn Laws.
Fatty acid methyl Ester eg FAME eg b100 Diesel Is a cleaner fuel than mineral diesel. It burns better.
DBC: It's an interesting piece of history. But fast forward to today, is it better to apply targeted interventions to increase the workforce in your sector of choice, or give labour bargaining power by taxing land and giving out a citizen's income?
About the synthetic fuel thing. If you're worried about supply, build some FT plants near strategic coal-reserves, mothball them until the oil-price reaches a level where the finished product before taxes is equal to the marginal cost of ramping up the FT plants and churn out synthetic fuels. Maybe refineries can chip in for it as an insurance against high input costs.
Stand-by Fischer Tropsch plants sound like a good idea.Don't get the insurance angle though.
As for the historical dimension,you are probably right to imply a preference for LVT plus Citizen's Income (though I favour the old National Dividend which envisaged money being created by the State to make up the shortfall between how much money was in circulation (demand) and how much the country could produce working at full capacity (supply).This is the old Social Credit idea but the new idea of Quantitative Easing for the people espoused by Anatole Kaletsky,Robert Skidelsky and Steve Keen ,working independently of each other ,looks similar in essence.
RK, yes, but how much does it cost to produce, is it cheaper than diesel oil, ignoring taxes?
DBC, it's insurance. Oil price fluctuates between $50 and £120 a barrel. If Nazi oil costs $75 a barrel to make and oil price is $50, then the factory is left idle. Once oil price goes over $75, the factory is started up again.
So this costs money on a non-productive factory when oil price is low (your insurance premium) and pays out when oil price is high (you cash in the insurance and get money out of it).
Further, citizen's dividend, social credit, QE for the people, Friedman's Negative Income Tax, etc is all the same thing really.
I'd rebrand it Freedom Oil or Aunty's Homegrown Oil or something, Nazi Oil is probably trademarked.
Kj, and 'Nazi Oil' is very bad marketing.
As is Apartheid Oil (with reference to SAs venture into the same thing). Isolationist oil is the common denominator.
Much cheaper. All the waste vegetable oil and methanol need a simple reaction. Its just organic chemistry at work. But for duty of 80p a litre most places sell it for 35p above that.
As I said in the car I filled up my diesel tank with 54 litres and paid 57.50
kj OK, let's call it "Aunty's Homegrown Oil" :-)
RK, that's still not a fair comparison. You can get used cokking oil more or less free, but there isn't enough for everybody to drive their car. We need to know how much new, fresh stuff costs, from field via refinery to tank.
: US $1200-1385 / Metric Ton
For Rapeseed oil
http://www.alibaba.com/countrysearch/UK/bulk-rapeseed-oil.html
RK, that's about $1 per litre, which is one-and-a-half times as much as crude oil pre-refinery.
So maybe it levels out at much the same price, give or take refining costs, fluctuations in farm and commodity prices.
This is why hemp would completely flatten the market, It grows like wildfire and it produces tons of oil, from a relatively smaller acreage,
RK, aha yes, if hemp oil can be reliably made for 50 cents a litre it might be worth looking into.
BUT... we also have to factor in that if you use land for hemp instead of food, that pushes up food prices, so we might end up losing on food what we gain on cheaper fuel.
You dont need much land for hemp. Just 1-2% of the American landmass would cover that country's needs. Therefore all those rapeseed oil fields could be hemp and you wouldnt notice a difference in food production.
RK, USA area = about 8 acres per capita, assuming one car per two people, is a third of an acre litres enough to grow (say) 750 litres of hemp oil a year? That's about two tons per acre, five tons per hectare?
(Perhaps it is, you can grow four tons of wheat on one hectare of good farmland)
I like NASA's machine for making methanol from (Martian) air and sunlight. Should work on Earth too.
Sure the machine may be expensive but the raw materials don't cost anything. Don't see why they couldn't make a model that sits in the back garden quietly making fuel. I suppose it all comes down to how much the machine costs.
Hemp is Earth's number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months.
RK: I like hemp as an alternative crop, but it's not that big of a oil-producer. Sure, it grows biomass like there was no tomorrow, but it's the fatty seed you need to produce biodiesel. Where hempseed is grown commercially, in Saskatchewan the average yield is 4-500 kg/acre, and half of that is oil. They can defend a yield like that with high-prices received in the health-food market. With enough variety development you could probably double that under good conditions in Britain, but oil-production would still not be at par with rapeseed. To exploit the biomass potential for fuel you'd have to use pyrolysis/gasification and conversion to liquids, and that also entails energy-losses in the process.
Hemp production in Saskatchewan
Hemp however even after the seed has been processed to oil can be fed to cows, pigs chickens etc. Its not like rape seed which is just oil.
However I take your point that it is less yielding than rapeseed. And of course Saskatchewan doesnt use Schlicten decorticators.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/indust/indhmpfr.htm
Hemp however even after the seed has been processed to oil can be fed to cows, pigs chickens etc. Its not like rape seed which is just oil.
Seedcake from rape is also used for feed, but hemp probably has better feed value for the non-ruminants.
However I take your point that it is less yielding than rapeseed. And of course Saskatchewan doesnt use Schlicten decorticators.
With expensive seed like hemp, I doubt they skimp too much on the harvesting efficiency. Anyway, if hemp can increase oilseed production, that's a good thing, but it's still a blip on the radar on energy needs. Best use of ag-fats is high-value uses like food, and after my onion-rings are fried, biodiesel is a good use of the waste.
BTW decorticators are used for fibre-processing, hempseed is harvested by combines.
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