Biodiesel and Urban Life

I appreciate the vision expressed here by Ben Jordan:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/11/06/REGVTFJA041.DTL

They hang over every American's head like a storm cloud.

But I'd sure love to drive a Wesson car.

Anything that moves from a carbohydrate (cooking oil, starch, natural sugars) to something that's "burnble" - whether rendered by lye -- or fermented by yeast or digested by bacteria.

"Sewer gas" is partially digested sewage.

Bio's may be good for few but cannot and will not ever replace good ole gasoline!! You cannot make enough bio's to satisfy our wasteful ways!

BUT - peak oil is going to force us to change our energy habits - which broadly includes our selection of fuel sources for personal transportation, our vehicle choices for personal transportation, our actions toward transit and land use and and city planning.

BTW - as I defined earlier - in my chemical engineering technoid geek mind set (where I learned that "Smith and Van Ness" is not a street corner in San Francisco - it's a classic thermodynamics book) - bio is not just used wesson oil. It is any (processed or unprocessed) carbohydrate, starch, vegetable oil, sugar, long chain acid or ester etc., -- and any fermentation or enzymatic or digestion product thereof. Like swamp gas, sewer gas.

I will go a step further - don't buy into the "Texas A&M and Univ of Texas @ Austin and Rice and LSU" paradigms on how one has to process naturally occurring products (at elevated pressure and high temperature to get fuels - like petroleum refining and industrial alcohol). Most (I learned never say "all on DU) "bio-diesels" can be formed at "standard conditions of temperature and pressure" - 70 degrees F and atmospheric pressure.

That's how pharmaceuticals and processed foods and potable alcohol are made -- all within "human temperatures" - not "autoclave temperatures and pressures."

I didn't go to chemical engineering school in the oil patch -- I went to chemical engineering school in Appalachia where us hillbillies did the home brew thing and the home vintner thing and the moonshine thing in the old fraternity house.