do you think this would work as an atenative fuel?

Question

I saw on mythbusters once that they used cooking oil (filtered) with no alters and it ran a disel car. Cheap if every mc donalds in the USA filtered the cooking oil or sent it somewhere to be filtered and not have to waste it and replace disel.

Answer 1

Sure. People already do this. Not a lot however because there are some complications to using it. First you have to collect it from restaurants that are willing to give it away. It then needs to be filtered. It doesn't burn quite as easily as diesel which makes it hard to start a cold engine using it. To get around this you add a second fuel tank to your vehicle. You have one tank is for regular diesel and the other for veg. oil with a valve that lets you switch between the two. With this setup you start out burning diesel until the engine gets warm then you flip the valve to switch over to veg. oil. There is also a problem in cold climates with veg. oil getting to thick when it's cold. People have added heaters to their fuel tanks to work around this. Another solution to these problems is to use the veg. oil to make your own bio-diesel. There is enough info on the web to learn how to do it. Sounds a bit messy to me, involves some hazardous chemicals, and requires you to learn a little chemistry, but it's defiantly doable.

Answer 2

What macchien said above is right on the nose. But I'd like to add this:

In order for a fuel to be a successful one, it has to be economically viable. In other words, someone has to either make money by using it or save money by using it. The supply must be guaranteed to meet a particular number of gallons/barrels per unit time. And it must meet consistent standards of purity and chemical quality.

Materials handling and transportation will need to be factored in, too. A good startup company would be involved in the collection and transportation of used oil from restaurants or collection points and deliver it to a processing facility. At the processing facility (refinery), it would be purified and analyzed so that the end product could meet certain performance standards. Perhaps perform engine testing, too.

I worked for a big name oil company in the early 80s in a research department. We were looking for alternative fuels. Remember, this was less than a decade after the oil crisis of the early 70s. Our work was abruptly cut off when the price of oil dropped severely--so much so that it was no longer necessary to pursue this research goal...

Short sighted thinking, it seems, because if we had continued, nowadays, 20 years afterwards, we'd have the alternative fuels already developed in the face of today's high price of gasoline. Sigh.

Answer 3

What you describe is already being done.

Unfortunately there is not enough used cooking oil to replace fossil fuels. But it is a good use for the used cooking oils that we have.

Answer 4

The farmers are trying to get these plants all over just in case the Arabs try to use as a weapon against us. There are all kinds that are available ,like cotton seed oil and the solids are good feed for cattle.

Answer 5

What you are describing is Bio diesel. McDonald's is already implementing plans to recycle their waste oil and use it to run their truck fleet.

Answer 6

i would love to drive around in a car that smells like twice burnt fries and chicken mcnuggets

Answer 7

There is only one problem with biodiesel: less BTUs/kg at a higher price.

Answer 8

yes

Answer 9

What is "Atenative fuel?" I've never heard of that before.