Cheaper Gasoline from Vegetable Oil?
By clrumfelt
@clrumfelt (5490)
United States
May 1, 2008 7:58am CST
I heard an item on my local news station about a man who is taking the used cooking oil from restaurants and making fuel from it in his garage! He adds a few chemicals to the cooking oil and it is as good as gasoline. It is cheaper than buying gas at the pump, to the extreme! A bunch of his friends are buying their gas from him, and he is unable to keep up with demand. You'd think someone would get his recipe and people could start recycling the used cooking oil instead of sending it to the landfills. If the vegetable oil gas was widely used I bet it would drive prices at the pump down a bit. What do you think?
1 response
@redyellowblackdog (10629)
• United States
1 May 08
While this idea certainly works, there simply is not enough used cooking oil to do much good or be a subsitute of gas.
Look at the parking lot of any busy restaurant. See how many cars are there and estimate each has 10 gals in its tank. Now, look at the deep fat fryers in the restaurant. How many times would they have to change that cooking oil, just to get enough to fill up the cars in the parking lot?
The cooking oil option is useful, but not a complete solution.
1 person likes this
@clrumfelt (5490)
• United States
2 May 08
Thinking about the millions of gallons of cooking oil used every day in restaruants, maybe it would be enough to make a dent in consumer usage of foriegn oil.
