surely, burning vegetable oil in place of diesel is dirt to the environment?

I have had my current car for 3 weeks now and I burn about £50 a week minimum on diesel, when I had my petrol car I would burn £70 petrol a week.

People keep suggesting filling my car up with vegetable oil, I can't help but wonder how devastating it would be to the environment to burn vegetable oil from my car exhaust?

Reply 1

jamesthehustler

Original post by Member1822915

you can use a 50:50 mixture (veg oil /diesel) cleans the engine out in the process and is better than diese for the environment as its carbon neutral its the functional ingredient in biodiesel

Reply 2

Nuffles

In terms of emissions it's actually better for the environment, but that's offset somewhat by the environmental damage caused by growing it. Using waste veg oil is the best solution. I wouldn't just dump it in your tank though, your car will almost certainly need a couple of modifications to run on vegetable oil reliably. Old, fully mechanical diesels love the stuff though.

Reply 3

Member1822915

Original post by Nuffles

My car is actually oldish anyway. Its a late 2003 model, 4 days away from being a 2004 car.
Would it take kindly to drinking vegetable oil?

Reply 4

JC.

You'll need to add a drop of petrol in the winter to stop it emulsifying.

Personally I don't bother. I'd rather stick with proper diesel as it can bugger up certain systems.

Reply 5

CurlyBen

Original post by Member1822915

My car is actually oldish anyway. Its a late 2003 model, 4 days away from being a 2004 car.
Would it take kindly to drinking vegetable oil?

There's a reasonable chance you've got a common rail engine then, in which case stick to the mineral diesel.

Reply 6

Friggerpants

You'll still create nox and sox!

What car is it? If it is common rail, don't.

Reply 7

jamesthehustler

my dad ran his focus estate on this for 11 years and it was i quote the mechanic when he open the bonnet at it's last mot before it was sold he'd seen that cars with worst engines less than 6 months old

Reply 8

Camoxide

Original post by Member1822915

My car is actually oldish anyway. Its a late 2003 model, 4 days away from being a 2004 car.
Would it take kindly to drinking vegetable oil?

Probably too new.

Reply 9

Nuffles

Original post by Member1822915

My car is actually oldish anyway. Its a late 2003 model, 4 days away from being a 2004 car.
Would it take kindly to drinking vegetable oil?

2003 is new! We're talking about 90's and older here.

Reply 10

jamesthehustler

Original post by Nuffles

2003 is new! We're talking about 90's and older here.

could work...my dad's estate was a 2001 that lasted 11 years until he crashed it

Reply 11

Coo Juice

Vegetable oil is carbon offset because all of the CO2 produced by burning it, has been absorbed by the plants that grew it.

Reply 12

CurlyBen

Original post by Coo Juice

Vegetable oil is carbon offset because all of the CO2 produced by burning it, has been absorbed by the plants that grew it.

... but not the CO2 of the diesel burned growing it, which is often close to a litre for every useable litre of bio-diesel.

Reply 13

Coo Juice

Original post by CurlyBen

... but not the CO2 of the diesel burned growing it, which is often close to a litre for every useable litre of bio-diesel.

Vegetable oil is carbon offset.

Vegetable oil is not bio-diesel (unless it is made in to bio-diesel) and some energy (not always diesel) is used to do that.

WIKIPASTA!!!!!!!!!!

[h="3"]Biodiesel feedstocks[edit][/h]

Plant oils
Soybeans are used as a source of biodiesel
Types
• Vegetable oil (list) • Macerated oil (list) • Essential oil (list)
Uses
• Drying oil • Oil paint • Cooking oil • Fuel • Biodiesel
Components
• Saturated fat • Monounsaturated fat • Polyunsaturated fat • Trans fat
• v • t • e

A variety of oils can be used to produce biodiesel. These include:

•

Virgin oil feedstock – rapeseed and soybean oils are most commonly used, soybean oil accounting for about half of U.S. production.^[75] It also can be obtained from Pongamia, field pennycress and jatropha and other crops such as mustard, jojoba, flax, sunflower, palm oil, coconut and hemp (see list of vegetable oils for biofuel for more information);

•

Waste vegetable oil (WVO);

•

Animal fats including tallow, lard, yellow grease, chicken fat,^[76] and the by-products of the production of Omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil.

•

Algae, which can be grown using waste materials such as sewage^[77] and without displacing land currently used for food production.

•

Oil from halophytes such as Salicornia bigelovii, which can be grown using saltwater in coastal areas where conventional crops cannot be grown, with yields equal to the yields of soybeans and other oilseeds grown using freshwater irrigation^[78]

•

Sewage Sludge - The sewage-to-biofuel field is attracting interest from major companies like Waste Management and startups like InfoSpi, which are betting that renewable sewage biodiesel can become competitive with petroleum diesel on price.^[79]

Reply 14

CurlyBen

Original post by Coo Juice

Vegetable oil is carbon offset.

Vegetable oil is not bio-diesel (unless it is made in to bio-diesel) and some energy (not always diesel) is used to do that.

That's splitting hairs a little isn't it? In any case it's only carbon neutral (carbon offset is when you e.g. plant trees or reduce emissions elsewhere to compensate for emissions that are made) if you ignore the energy used in growing it in the first place. I did some cultivations for rapeseed a few years back and was going through nearly 500 litres of mineral diesel a day. As I said previously, to grow enough feedstock to produce a certain amount of biodiesel nearly the same quantity of diesel had to be burned in the first place. Yes, if you don't convert it to biodiesel the numbers will be a little better, but there's still a huge energy expenditure to get vegetable oil in the first place.

Reply 15

Coo Juice

Original post by CurlyBen

I don't think so, you tried to correct what was a perfectly correct statement. So read to make sure I was right and thought I would let you know.

It does seem a bit unlikely to me though that this could be true; you were saying almost 1 litre of diesel is used to produce every litre of bio-diesel? Are you a farmer or was this a project you worked on? Out of interest could you quote a source

Reply 16

CurlyBen

Original post by Coo Juice

It's not a correct statement though. When you burn vegetable oil (or biodiesel, it doesn't matter) the carbon released is only that which was captured when it was grown. So far so good. However, you haven't taken into account the amount of carbon burned to grow (and process) it in the first place, which is additional to the carbon released when the vegetable oil was burned. Therefore the net effect is more carbon emitted than captured.

That's what I was told. I was working on a farm at the time and that's what one of the permanent farm hands told me, and he'd been quite closely involved I think. The rape hadn't been grown with the intention of using it for biodiesel but there had been a glut and it was the best way they could get rid of it. Biodiesel is a good way of using surplus crops which would potentially would otherwise be wasted, but you can't grow a crop and turn it into biofuel and claim it's carbon neutral. The only way that claim would be valid is if the energy used (diesel burned) in growing it was carbon neutral. You could argue that if you grew a crop for biodiesel and then used that to grow the next crop and so on you could produce carbon neutral fuel (other than the initial carbon investment for the first crop) but realistically the net amount of fuel produced wouldn't be sufficient to make it worthwhile.

Reply 17

Member1822915

Original post by CurlyBen

Original post by Coo Juice

Oh for **** sake!

I was only asking a question. You don't need to argue with each other and make me feel like an argument starter, grow up the pair of you !