Oil From Dinner Last Night is Fuel of Tomorrow

Move over Centerpoint, here comes McDonalds.

Carbon neutral

carbon neutral??? What will be done with all the excess CO2??? Last time I checked that was a green house gas.

The CO2 comes from the plants, which they absorbed previously while growing. The CO2 added back into the air was in the air last year anyways.

Nice . I like this.

And how much energy is required to make the oil in the first place?

These people are the ones that will drive the innovations of tomorrow. Kudos to the researchers for the discovery!

"The helicopter crashed into the landing pad!!"

"They weren't holding the landing pad right"

Average american should leave, at least 15 litres of cooking oli every day to be carbon - neutral.

It's nice that they've come up with a better way to extract biofuel from used cooking oil. But that still doesn't address the root of the problem. The United States alone uses 20 MILLION BARRELS OF OIL PER DAY. Sorry for the caps, but people seem to have a real problem with scale. Researchers are getting excited about the possibility of producing a few million gallons of biofuel per year when we are consuming 840 million gallons PER DAY. Sorry, guys, but those extra zeroes make a big difference. That's why they're called orders of magnitude.

The only way we're going to break our addiction to fossil fuels is if scientists come up with a REVOLUTIONARY new technology. A merely evolutionary technology just won't cut it. Our only other choice is to roll back the clock and party like it's 1799. Personally, I don't want to live an 18th century lifestyle. And I'm pretty certain countries like China and India aren't going to go for that either.

People in the Czech Republic already use this. They simpy filter the used oil and add it to diesel fuel (20 or even more per cent).
But you either have to have an older diesel engine or you have to install stuff which pre-heats the fuel before injecting.
Use at your own risk!

Now we can get rid of BP once in for all. Of course, we might end up making people fatter. D'oh!

this concept has been around for years, yet has not been used commercially, why I got no clue other than the goverment and the oil companies will do anything to make this a reallity.

and by "this" I mean any alt source of energy.

Air is blasted onto a nickel catalyst to form nickel
oxide, to start the exothermic (heat-giving) process. A fuel-steam mixture is then added, causing it to react with the hot nickel oxide to produce hydrogen gas (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2). The produced CO2 is then trapped, leaving pure H2 and forcing the reaction to keep running, increasing the amount of hydrogen made.
All that to convert a couple of gallons of french fry oil? Seems really cost effective to me. How much are they paying the scientists? How much does the research equipment cost [tax dollars?]. That's right tax dollars DON'T COUNT.

I might go back to leeds Uni now and get involved in this! did atmospheric sciences and meteorology there, and did fuel studies...this looks kinda cool!
As for how much are they paying, its Leeds Uni, gets its money from research companies, energy companies, and my tuition fees.
It's all about finding more energy efficient ways to get Hydrogen, for fuel cells. Since the oil has been processed once and is a waste product, it has a low carbon foot print, but also takes less energy to get hydrogen from hydrocarbons than water, which you get at the end. Plug the reactor into a wind turbine (plenty of wind in Leeds) and you're good to go, less waste, more fuel.
And yeah, get rid of BP, the oil company that has spent more on clean and reusable fuel sources (after Shell, another british oil giant) than all the American oil companies put together. fuck off bashing BP, it was a halliburton well and a trans ocean rig!

I had a friend trying that. It blew his engine. Dangerous stuff to experiment with. And in any case it reduces the life of your engine.

You can use old cooking oil as fuel in a diesel engine. Three things, though: 1) It MUST be a diesel engine (a lot of people don't realize that diesel and gasoline engines work on two totally different principles of combustion), 2) You MUST filter the old oil thoroughly to remove all particulate matter, 3) You SHOULD only run about 1/4 of a tank of cooking oil and 3/4 of a tank of regular diesel fuel (or 3 gallons diesel to every 1 gallon of cooking oil). The cooking oil is very viscous stuff. The regular diesel will thin it out so it doesn't clog the fuel lines (this is especially important in cold weather).

filter and blend, look it up. it does NOT "blow your engine".

Now if it's a newer Diesel engine you can run (with a little tweaking of the injectors and fuel pumps) 100% Bio Diesel (which is basically filtered French-fry oil, and a little ethanol.) The older engines "suffer" from a much lower fuel pressure system, which is why Direct injection Diesel's can get away with this.


Interesting fact. Rudolf Diesel ran his Diesel engine on Peanut oil!


Ok, now back on topic. Unless this is purely a recovery type system for fuel this is a joke. I can see it being used as a way to clean a already used product that has no further use we're just doing one thing, wasting chemical energy by converting it into heat (which happens a lot with conversion processes. internal combustion engines are a prime example)

Eventough it is not the same study conducted in the article, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, already has an industrial process running to convert used-cooking-oil into bio-diesel 5% (5% of the mix is from this converted oil and 95% of regular diesel), which is running in 3500 buses (50% of the amount of buses in the town). At the end of last year, a few buses started testing bio-diesel 20% and if all goes well, before the end of this year, the whole fleet will start the convertion to this new fuel.

They could go straight to b-50 or higher if they didn't mind changing a few filters in the middle of traffic lol.

you only have to change filters in the beginning because biodiesel cleans out your fuel tank, once all the crude is out, the change rate is the same as petro-diesel.You can run B-100 all day long.

1. Bio fuel won't scale to the "needs" of the US (as pointed out by jellico).
2. Huge tracks of forests are currently being destroyed to make room for crops that are used in making bio fuel.
3. There will come a point where enough people will be wanting the used cooking oil that it will stop being free.
4. We don't have a global resource issue, we have a global population issue.

Get ready for WW3....eventually. All of these problems will come to a head unless some smart people come up with a totally new energy generation method.

adaman2576

carbon neutral??? What will be done with all the excess CO2??? Last time I checked that was a green house gas.
i will take it, i still use some CO2 powered paintball guns XD
you can also use it to carbonate drinks, like BEER, which all the people in wisconsin will easily use up the entire supply of C02 they can produce, cheers & wtg cheesers.

my main questions is this "A fuel-steam mixture is then added, causing it to react with the hot nickel oxide to produce hydrogen gas..."
what fuel are they using with the steam, how much, and is the expense worthwhile or is it still an equal negative impact as using a petroleum product instead of Hydrogen?

also, last i learned from 7th grade sceince class, plants burn CO2 during the day and produce oxygen, at night they burn oxygen.

as far as all you "scale modelers go" if everybody was a pc.. what would jobs do? hehehe
horses used to dominate the market before cars, cars were very noisy, very ineffcient, and cost more. how ever cars didn't spew poo onto the ground and didn't need to be saddled up, or rubbed down and were ready to go and put away in a fraction of the time horses took. simply amazing the automobile took off in the first place don't you think?
marketing & PR, if people buy apple products, there are alot more tree huggers that will jump all over this with the right PR!
i'm sure alot of you say the same thing about rechargeable batteries, and most of you haven't stopped to think about the rechargeable battery in your automobile because you use it every day and only have to replace it every 3-5-7 years at the least. the closer to $5 a gallon of petroleum fuel, the more screaming there will be for competitive alternative fuels. scientists already gave the world a long lasting alternative fuel in 1940, nuclear power. the technology to control it wasn't there. we have the means to make use of it decades later, how ever we do not have the safety that is required to keep some jihadi or idiot from turning it into a dirty bomb or causing an environmental hazzard or toxic spill. until then your stuck with petroleum, so starting thinking about more brilliant means and methods fast!

oh also, compressed CO2 turns to liquid and is very cold..you guys might want to jump on coolermaster and zalaman and thermaltake and the lot; to start using it in heat pipes for your over clocked CPU's. just a thought, enjoy.

Care to enlighten us as to where in the UNITED STATES of AMERICE (a country so full of tree huggers that we can't even cut down a diseased tree to save a forest, letalone selective cutting to help prevent wildfires. Without having to arrest at least 10 members of some odd band of eco terrorists) that we are cutting down forests to make room for farm lands?

People seem to think that corn based ethanol is as good as it will get and that the byproduct is just wase, which it isn't, its used to feed cattle, exactly as it waaas before it was used to before it was being used to make ethanol. Sorgum based ethanol is a much better sourse, and farmers are beginning to, reluctantly move over to swichgrass, whicch has the highest yield for fuel.

I'm not saying this is the perfect solution, but its better than trying to pull hydrogen from water, ehich is super inneficient.

Now as foor aanother piece of the solution there is the "hot air" engine a man developed back in the 80s. It didn't catch on because the tmps in the engine are extremely hot and puts any engine on the verge of meltdown. Letalone running the engine causes detonation which will instantly damage the internals. That tech right there needs reserched. Ots there, it just needs further refinemant.

It also seems to me like you can get 2 stages of energy right there!
The more stages you have, the more energy you'd be able to get out of each conversion; and convert the freed (heat) energy to power something.

Is the catalyst consumed by the reaction? If it is then we need a lot of H2 from the reaction to make replacing the catalyst worthwhile. Producing the nickel for the catalyst should be considered in the equation for how environmentally friendly and carbon neutral this method of producing hydrogen is. I am not against what they are doing - I just want to know the total cost of each system so that we can get behind the one that offers the best efficiency.

you cnat trap co2 for ever, this is a failed attempt

Sure you could run cars on cooking oil for years and with supermarkets doing it so cheap its would save you a fortune. Only problem is the government doesn't like it with their love of fuel taxes so its heavily frowned upon =/