Car - eco friendly fuel

barisax_al

I would suggest you have a good look at the motoring forums these have lots of info on green motoring.

Firstly, don't bother with a petrol/electric car unless you live in a big city and do most of your driving there. A small diesel car is more fuel efficient.

Get a diesel car. You should get 60-70+ miles per gallon, which is probably a third better than petrol alternatives.

You could then get your diesel converted to run on vegetable oil. You should get it converted to do this due to the more viscous nature of veg oil. https://www.vegoilmotoring.com is run by a friend of mine, and has plenty of useful links. https://www.dieselveg.com/ is also a very good site and has a calculator to see how quickly it will pay back on fuel saving!

Remember LPG is a fossil fuel so isn't actually that green!

gromituk

It's a shame that site descends to greenwash. It claims that vegetable oil is carbon neutral, which it is not. Just how much fossil fuel is used to plough the fields, fertilise the crops (and spread pesticide all over them), harvest them, process them, put them into plastic bottles and transport them in lorries (less efficient than tankers I'm sure) to the supermarket, before you even get your hands on the stuff? It may be more environmentally friendly than the alternatives, but provide a believable environmental audit, please.

redux

That is true gromit, but the rate of return on energy put in to the crop is a factor of between 2.5 and 4 depending what you do with the remaining straw.

gromituk

Thanks - that indeed sounds very promising.

caroline1973lefty

Whilst growing biofuels might seem a good use of fallow UK agricultural land, there is a danger that much needed forestry or food growing land, will be given over to produce fuels to export to us fuel-hungry westerners. Also, the costs needed to produce biofuels will themselves rise as the cost of petrochemical-based fertiliser rises.

One avenue that hasn't been mentioned on this site is recycled waste cooking oil. There are fledgling projects in Wales, Brighton, SE London, E London, and probably elsewhere, producing biodiesel from waste cooking oil, though it is mostly being sold to council and commercial fleets at the moment. Waste catering oil produced by UK businesses used to be made into animal feed, which the EU has now outlawed. So now a lot of it is shipped to Germany, where their government has supported the recycled biodiesel market much more than ours has. But if these kind of flegdling projects get our support, we could literally be making energy from waste here in the UK.

gibby

just found this and ordered one for my diesel car

current I run 30 - 50% of veg oil without any problems but this means I can safely run 90%
http://www.alternativesouls.com/oil/

G

gromituk

caroline1973lefty wrote:

One avenue that hasn't been mentioned on this site is recycled waste cooking oil.

I do wonder just how much waste cooking oil there really is!

Beverley

gromituk wrote:

I do wonder just how much waste cooking oil there really is!

Maybe it's because I'm a northern lass (though I don't recall any difference from when I lived on the south coast) but business seems to be brisk for the chip shops.

I don't think the supply of used cooking oil is a bottomless pit but then, for the immediate future, it's an underused resource.

In the long term, we'll have to come up with a way of fueling cars that is accessible to all and non damaging to the environment but for now, veg oil is better than diesel.

Beverley

caroline1973lefty

gromituk wrote:

I do wonder just how much waste cooking oil there really is!

on a government website somewhere i found a figure of 90,000 tonnes - not exactly enough to power the whole country's vehicles, granted, but an awful lot of litres (90million i think??) that is either being shipped abroad or (illegally) poured down drains at the moment.

Volcano

Waste cooking oil already goes to the (fairly small) biodiesel industry in this country, as well as to be burnt in power stations.

We use approx 1.3 million tonnes of diesel per month, so if all 90,000 tonnes (I assume this is produced per year?) of waste cooking oil was turned into biodiesel this would represent 0.6% of our total diesel needs for a year.