It's Tuesday - Motoring day in the Independent. Nothing from LJK though.
But Sean O'Grady has a piece featuring Josh Tickell, who has crusaded across the States publicising biodiesel (there must be oodles of second-hand veggie oil available there). There is one superb sentence: "Biodiesel lowers diesel emissions, especially the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which is reduced by up to 100 per cent, ..". Now that really would be a miracle! Is the exhaust only water?
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If you argue that the second hand oil would be oxidised into CO2 and water anyway, then putting it into a car means that there is no net increase in creation of CO2. With diesel, however, as it is dug out of the ground it is generating CO2 which was otherwise locked away.
To the extent that ordinary diesel is mixed in, then you get net increased CO2 emissions, which is why they state it is reduced by UP TO 100%.
Or maybe it's a load of nonsense.
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Growing rapeseed for say a litre of vegetable oil, uses 250% of the CO2 from the air which is given off as exhaust when burned in an engine, As biodiesel uses energy and chemicals in it's production from vegetable oil, that 250% is probably reduced somewhat, but still much better than fossil fuel.
Incidently, the carbon in fossil fuel all started in the atmosphere anyway, so burning fossil fuel is just partly completion of the carbon cycle, it could even be argues it is a large scale environment reparation.
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ST,
I understand that 100% bio-diesel will not add any C02 to the environment, I'm struggling with the 250% in a litre of vegetable oil - do you mean 25% of that litre is derived from atmospheric CO2?
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When you grow the oil crops, they absorb CO2 from the air (plants don't take carbon with their roots) When the plant is harvested and pressed for oil, around 30% of that carbon the plant absorbed is in the oil, the rest is in the leaves and stalks and roots. This resultant 'mash' is used in animal feed. Which then ends up as manure,
So the production and burning of vegetable oil is a process which mops up CO2 from the atmosphere and deposits much of it as organic matter in the ground, or meat on your dinner plate.
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Yes, Sooty, I suppose if you integrate over the global picture you can argue a possible reduction of 100%. But the article didn't really explain that - it just looked like a throwaway error.
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Spilling it is a lot less harmful as well - 90% biodegraded within a few weeks. Try telling that to people in northern Spain. Just don't spill it on a tarmac driveway, or if you do then get at it immediately with hot water (to float it up) and sand (to absorb it), otherwise that bit of tarmac will end up like chewing gum. I spilled some on the tarmac footpath outside my house one day last year and you can still see the splash mark. Funnily enough, it didn't affect the tarmac on the road at all, probably because it's a different compound or something.
andymc
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veggie oil.
It\'s green and sustainable.
And can be run in a diesel engine.
Conspiracy theory anyone?
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Blair said during the fuel protests - "It's a carbon tax"
So we find a fuel which is at least carbon neutral and it's now something else? If we could make a car run on weewee, there would be a bladder tax,
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a bladder tax,
And I thought the Inland Revenue were already intrusive!
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Hmmm ... careful now!
(Seriously, don't read this and eat at the same time)
www.bio-petrol.com/
In fairness, the most optimistic forecasts I've seen are that up to 20% of current diesel fuel use could be replaced by biodiesel made from both fresh and waste vegetable oil. At the same time, that doesn't include biodiesel made from algae, which would require far less land area to produce than the likes of rapeseed or soy.
www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html
andymc
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