Biodiesel is simply a fuel that can be run like diesel but is organic, or not refined from raw crude oil.

So what is diesel? I don’t want to get too technical on the subject. There are two great articles that explain how gas engines work, and how diesel engines work:

Gas Engine: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/engine.htm
Diesel Engine: http://auto.howstuffworks.com/diesel.htm

To sum it up, gas engines need a source to ignite the fuel in order for the gas to do work. That is usually in the form of a spark plug. Diesel engines need no spark to work. By simply compressing the air and fuel diesel does work. The work in both is transferred to the motion of your car.

Diesel has had a bad reputation in America because it is dirty. In the past diesel fuel used to be very smelly, it had a lot of black soot associated with it, and we always associated the diesel fuel to the heavy machinery trucks. We American’s love our fuel consumption but we have always been conscious of what we can smell, and see. It has been the perception of American’s the diesel was more pollutant than gasoline. In the long ago past that was true.

Diesel has really been cleaned up, especially in the last 10 years or so. The sooty exhaust is now a lot cleaner, the smell is not any worse than the smell you get from a gas exhaust, and fuel economy is much better. Europeans are beginning to rely more and more on diesel as their fuel source. In many cases it is cheaper than gasoline. In the US we are experiencing a shift in our prices. For a long time gas was much cheaper than diesel. Now they are pretty much the same depending on where you are in the country. But there is a free fuel out there for anyone.

Biodiesel is diesel that is made from organic materials. Soy is the most common right now but there is a lot of work being done on other sources that the fuel can be easily made from. An interesting fact is that the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolf Diesel, had thoughts of using vegetable oil for his engine and in the Worlds Fair showed how it could easily burn peanut oil with little modification.

So what about the free? For vegetable oil to be useful there is some processing that has to be made. Chemically speaking the glutens have to be removed. Fortunately used cooking oil is perfect for this application. You can actually pull up to the back of a restaurant that uses a lot of cooking oil and pump it directly into your diesel tank and you can run on it with little or no modification to the engine itself.

How about a boat fueled with cooking oil? That is what we are going to do, and going to prove.

Until then, happy boating, and happy recycling.

Coach Kip

Tags: Green //