what happened to running cars on veg oil

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what happened to running cars on veg oil

As above... plastics, bitumen and many other products will become stupidly expensive as they’re cheap byproducts of refining fuels right now.

Nobody in a position of power has thought about the whole end to end process.

You even see calculations regarding energy released to the grid to charge electric cars if you close refineries... completely missing the fact that refineries produce gas which is burned to make them super efficient and negligible consumers.
 
Schumi2001: out of interest, what's going to happen to the oil industry as the demand for petrol and diesel starts to nosedive?

Britains richest man.. the one you've never heard of..
( wants to build the new version of the LandRoverDefender)

He owns the North Sea pipeline network..and has just announced that hes spending 'a tidy sum'
Ensuring it lasts past 2025..projected to 2040+ ..

so dont anticipate major change anytime soon.
 
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Mandating solar cells on new houses is nonsense. Apart from the whole life cycle financial and environmental cost, they are of little use without storage. People are pushing using electric cars as storage but the sun shines during the day and most cars are at work during the day..... Not many people will be fitting them from choice when the financial incentives end next month.
Two problems with hydrogen, it takes a lot of energy to make it and its hard to transport and store.

The only viable mid term answer to energy needs is next generation nuclear power plants. They can make hydrogen too when elecrical demand is low.


Robert G8RPI
 
From what I saw of Japanese hoising.

There is little in thr way of 'retrofitting'
They just build a new one next door.


Not really feasible for 80% of UK residents.

All our 'green push' tech is far from 'planet hugging'.

Making thebingots..before slicing into wafers : 1200' c.. for 36 hours..!!

Makes steel look cheap and easy..

And as for the Automotive world switching to Carbon Fiber: composite

For lightweight energy saving.. all a bit of a joke.
 
I have 6 solor panels on the front and 6 on the back of my house, oil for heating, and still used £50 of electric this month even with all the sun.
council made my daughter have this new airpump heating, its costing her £50 every 10 days in electric how they reckon that is green i don't know. she has 8 panels front and back too.
 
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council made my daughter have this new airpump heating, its costing her £50 every 10 days in electric how they reckon that is green i don't know.

Its not 'Green' but what it does it prevent the house directly producing CO2 from gas or oil fired boilers, It in essence reduces the CO2 emissions in the Council's area which is all they care about at the moment.

These heat pumps are notoriously expensive to run, I think Watchdog even covered it at one point.
 
Two problems with hydrogen, it takes a lot of energy to make it and its hard to transport and store.

The only viable mid term answer to energy needs is next generation nuclear power plants. They can make hydrogen too when elecrical demand is low.


Robert G8RPI

Part of the answer is that you don't transport the hydrogen. ITM (our partners) are constantly evolving on-site electrolysis. Storage still poses challenges - but only because you can see the above ground tanks. We build service stations with 3x63k litre tanks underground for liquid fuels - think what they'd look like stood on end above ground. They're massive!

I was talking to someone about small modular nuclear last year. Really interesting concept, especially when looking at hydrogen production.
 
Why are people still banging on about Nuclear being the only option?

There is absolutely no need for Nuclear energy theses days. Its not clean it definitely isn't cheap. Power Storage is a growing industry at the moment.

I believe the biggest battery is currently 130MWh and charged by a nearby wind farm and is used to stabilise the grid during peak demands in power which it can do in a fraction of a second, versus old technology like ICE generators or massive turbines which can take quite a while to get up to speed.

The Orkney Islands have such an abundance of power from Renewable resources that they are using the excess to make Hydrogen and in the coming years there ferry (ferries) are being replaced with ferries that run on hydrogen, so the entire local economy will run from renewable energy resources.

The New Hinkley point plant is going to cost £20Bn to build and produce 3200MW of power.

That £20bn could build enough wind turbines to produce 10,000Mw of power. or be divided between wind turbines, solar panels and power storage facilities like the one mentioned above.


If everyone had solar panels on their roof and a parking space at work for charging their car, the power feeding into the grid would be more than enough to charge the cars of those parked up at work. Its a stupid argument again to make comments about solar panels being no good if people are at work.
 
When I looked at official published figures last year the cost of enough offshore wind capacity to match Hinkley C (allowing for availability but no storage) was actulally about the same as the nuclear plant but the wind farm had half the projected operational life.
The combined efect of "low energy" lighting and equipment with electronic power supplies and reduced number of conventional power generators (replaced by ellectronic converters fed by wind or solar) is creating concerns for the stability of the supply grid. Modern powersupplies are "constant power" which means they behave like negative resistors. With a conventional resistive load if the supply voltage goes down so does the curent demand so the voltage comes back up thi is self stabilising. With an electronic load if the supply voltage drops the current increases to maintain the load power. This causes the voltage to drop further (positive feedback) and can cause instability. The "iron" generators also stablise the grid as their inertia will absorb (technically integrate) surges and fluctuations. Yes storage sytems with batteries will be able to do this but at the expense of complex electronics (and lots of chemicals) to do somthing that is inherent in a iron generator. We don't have big storage yet.

Hundeds of of solar powered inveters injecting power into the grid when the sun shines and stopping suddenly when a cloud goes by is a serious challenge for local supply stability. It works at the minute because it's a tiny fraction of the total power in the network. Having any significant power input is another matter.

We will have to disagree on nuclear power being "clean"


Robert G8RPI.
 
We will have to disagree on nuclear power being "clean"


Robert G8RPI.

Of course, not being a nuclear boffin, I don't really understand the full implication of the dangers of nuclear waste products but it does, in my ignorance, worry me a lot! There seem to be so many advantages and conveniences with nuclear - pity it can kill you so horribly if it all goes belly up!
 
Of course, not being a nuclear boffin, I don't really understand the full implication of the dangers of nuclear waste products but it does, in my ignorance, worry me a lot! There seem to be so many advantages and conveniences with nuclear - pity it can kill you so horribly if it all goes belly up!

There is an image issue with nuclear. A gas explosion (inc. Hydrogen) will kill you pretty horribly too. A typical coal fried power station releases far more radioactive material and toxic heavy metals to the environment pre MWh than a nuclear plant.

I think you are near Sellafield. There is an on-going issue with radioactive contamination at Dalgety Bay. It was surveyed as part of a power/reprocessing contamination study and radiation was discovered, but not from nuclear power or weapons production. It was caused by the burning of old aircraft parts including instruments with Radium luminised paint. Its only a small amount, but they want to clean it up anyway.

Robert G8RPI.
 
I think you are near Sellafield. There is an on-going issue with radioactive contamination at Dalgety Bay. It was surveyed as part of a power/reprocessing contamination study and radiation was discovered, but not from nuclear power or weapons production. It was caused by the burning of old aircraft parts including instruments with Radium luminised paint. Its only a small amount, but they want to clean it up anyway.

Robert G8RPI.

Torness is just down the coast from us. I'm in Edinburgh. I seem to remember the local news featuring something about radiation from WW2 aircraft instrumentation but I think it was on the north side of the Firth of Forth so Dalgetty bay would fit the bill. We are on the south side - could drift with the currents I suppose though?
 
The “official” published figures on the cost of hinkley are in constant flux, every few months they add another couple of billion to the cost of building it, and quick look around the web will quickly tell you the cost of the of the plant could have been half what it now is going to cost if the government had just built it rather than putting our nuclear power in the hands of French companies and Chinese governments. Even then the U.K. government had to guarantee nearly double the current unit price of of electricity to get the French to agree to being involved. There is still no guarantee that the cost of electricity will match what the government have promised so we could end up having to subsidise our own electricity costs to a foreign government...... but ya know, nuclear is such a great option for us. :rolleyes:
 
The problem with 'renewables' is that you are reliant on unpredictable conditions to generate your power. They can't adapt to demand and therefore require secondary backup (currently gas which can come online at short notice) or storage.

Problem with storage is that batteries consume huge amounts of rare earth metals - a relatively finite resource that are hard to mine, hard to recycle and relatively energy intensive to manufacture into usable batteries.

Depending on calculations, a Tesla takes between 10 and 20 years to pull ahead on end to end environmental impact vs a similar diesel car.

Then you're also introducing an extra inefficiency in charging a battery to charge a battery in many cases. Or charging a large 'power wall' to give you domestic power during the hours of darkness.

All this drive to electric is doing is kicking the environmental and social impact down the road to the developing world. But we don't care about that, do we? - what we can't see doesn't actually happen.
 
years ago people were happily running diesel cars on chip fat. then car manafactures changed all the seals on diesel cars to ones veg oil would destroy, was this just to stop people using cheap fuel with no govenment control over it?
So why has reserch into running cars on veg oil stopped but billions being spent on electic cars, most electric is still coming from fossil fuel.
is there really more Emissions and Health Risks from Vegetable Oil Burning or is it because the worlds rich wont have control over it?

Biodiesel could not be used on older engines because they contained rubber seals that would be damaged. Anything sold after 1995 was safe to run on methyl esters as pump fuels were required to have at least 5% non fossil content.

Some manufacturers loved the stuff - WV for example. Others hated the need to homologate their fuel systems so refused to allow it - Merc/Benz for example.

Vegetable oils are tryglycerides - that's three hydrocarbon chains attached to a glycerol molecule. Glycerol is a type of alcohol but it will char before it burns so its not good as a diesel fuel. Poor combustion is both toxic and clogs up the engine.

Biodiesel is a methyl ester made by reacting caustic soda (NaOH) with methanol (CH3OH) and mixing that with vegetable oil. The result is a sort of soap sludge (glycerol and sodium soap) with the esters capped by OH molecules. The soap has to be separated and washed form the ester but its not spectacularly hard to make.

The glycerol soap is excellent stuff as industrial soap but is better preheated and used as boiler fuel.

Biodiesel is a really great diesel fuel it has much better lubricating properties than even the old sulphide containing fuels and it burns more cleanly due to it's oxygen content. Plain vegetable oil has to be preheated to at least 80C and even then it really needs a precombustion chamber engine to burn cleanly.

Now the problems: The UK has enough waste vege oil to make about million tonnes of diesel fuel absolute max. 75% of that is more likely if every user recycled the stuff. Most tip it down the drains. But the country burns best part of 20 million tonnes per year so it's never going to get over 5% of the total. Petrol is the same again on top! When you add the effect biodiesel had on food prices (vege oils costs shot up) and land usage it's really not a great idea.

We need cheap energy. The world needs cheap energy. It's really not fair that we can use machines to wash our clothes, clean our water and treat our sewerage when those in poor countries have to do all that by hand. When you add up the labour wasted on drudgery its no surprise they stay poor.

The world desperately needs clean, safe, non CO2 emitting energy that's cheaper than coal. Biodiesel most certainly is not cheap. Neither are solar or wind power. And - none of them can do the job. They all need fossil fuels to fill in the gaps. When we promote clean energy that costs more than coal, all we achieve is self satisfaction. The cheap/dirty stuff gets displaced to those who cannot afford anything better. Look at China and India who are now scrambling to sort out their mess while still building coal fired power plants. The world coal burn is going up and shows no signs of slowing.

This explains the costs issues.


Moltex a UK company offers a solution. Thorium sounds great but it's got no chance of getting regulatory approval even in the next 20 years. But meantime we can burn waste nuclear fuel and the stocks of uranium that we already have.

Moltex Energy (a UK company) are building a new power plant in Canada which will beat the lowest cost gas fired plants on build costs, has next to no fuel costs and can burn the high level waste fuel chucked out by existing nuke plants. When they go to factory production they expect to be undercutting coal on costs. AND they can go to breeding new reactor fuel from thorium when its eventually given regulatory approval.

The New Brunswick, Canada plant is low cost to build because the safety issues of existing designs have been designed out. The list of things which make UK's Hinkley Point PWR so disgustingly costly is very long but a quick Google search will find them.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLzfCBCnyZLzr9OQ3ZE9vqQ

 
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The question is, what will happen when fossil fuels eventually run out? The world will be utterly screwed.

Hence my support for new nuclear and absolutely not more of the same expensive PWR nuclear. We don't need another Fukushima. Chernobyl is a special case but same there as well.

The Moltex is especially clever. They have a 1000MW reactor running 24/7 connected to large thermal stores containing molten salt. Everything except the heat source is outside nuclear regs - keeps costs down.

The molten salt heat stores are well proven by solar thermal plants that use the same tech. The heat demand follows the grid load - low output at night but high during daytime peaks. The generator is probably 2x the reactor output takes more or less power from the stores as required. The reactor runs 100% all of the time, but its very controllable so could load follow directly if required.
 
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