Economists have predicted that 2005 is the year of the "global oil- production peak," when the world produces the most oil it will ever produce, after which yearly production will decline. Already the effects of this, coupled with the growing demand throughout Asia, have been immediate and dramatic: In 10 months, oil has risen to more than $50 a barrel -- $20 more than it was a year ago. Goldman Sachs has warned of a future "super spike" to $100 a barrel.
Jordan lays out the numbers and the shaggy heads nod: San Francisco produces 500,000 gallons of waste oil a year; the Bay Area produces a staggering 3,000,000 gallons. This oil is picked up at a cost to the restaurant of $45 per 55-gallon jug and later processed into "yellow grease," a primary ingredient in dog food, animal feed and cosmetics. Jordan's proposal for Health Fuels is to gather this oil free of charge from the restaurants and recycle it into biodiesel. He predicts that with $250,000 in start-up money, Health Fuels could produce 20,000 gallons of locally made biodiesel per month. With more money and support, they could quadruple that.
As eccentric as Health Fuel's proposal sounds, using vegetable oil as fuel isn't new; in fact, it's what the diesel engine was originally intended to run on. When Rudolf Diesel first showcased his engine at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, he used peanut oil. Diesel engines -- operating solely on vegetable oils -- got an average of 30 percent more miles per gallon than traditional combustion engines, and soon became the standard for buses, trucks, freightliners and marine craft. In the 1920s, impressed by the efficiency of the engine and eager to control the diesel market, oil companies forced car manufacturers to modify diesel engines to run off their huge supplies of cheap, low-grade petroleum diesel. And the world's cities have been clogged with sooty, black, highly polluting diesel exhaust ever since.
The biodiesel refining process also creates a fuel significantly less polluting than petrol diesel. A recent EPA study found that when compared to petrol diesel, biodiesel reduced emissions of carbon monoxide by 48 percent, carbon dioxide by 78 percent and particulate matter (soot) by 47 percent ... Biodiesel can run on any diesel engine and can be implemented immediately at little or no cost.
These farmers, freight operators and businessmen realize that as petroleum fuel continues to rise in price, biodiesel becomes a more vital reality, because it allows them to them to make fuel from leftover crops, to support locally made fuel, to be more self-reliant. This is what inspired Willie Nelson to create BioWillie Diesel Fuel, his own line of biodiesel directed at truckers.
While biodiesel production is well suited to a local scale, it's the national scale production benefits that have sparked government interest. The most staggering fact is that every vehicle in the United States could be fueled by biodiesel -- 140.8 billion gallons of it -- grown in a 15,000- square-mile chunk of unused desert. (To put this in perspective, the Sonora Desert in Arizona alone is 120,000 square miles.) And at a cost of 46.2 billion a year, this mega-facility would save the United States more than $100 billion a year on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries, all that money instead remaining in the United States economy.
However, one thing Nelson, Hannah and Bush haven't mentioned is just how hard biodiesel is on the pocketbook. In California, the fuel averages more than $3.50 a gallon. As use of biodiesel increases, Radke insists that the price will come in line with that of petrol diesel. That's what has happened in Germany. As the leading producer of biodiesel in the world, Germany produces more than 750 million gallons a year and boasts more than 1,700 public pumps. Biodiesel there is cheaper than petrol diesel.
Full text of the article here: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f ... 01&sc=1000
-Arlos
