I remember someone talked about vegetable oil as an alternative fuel to run a vehicle in earlier post. However, we doubted its actual appliation in the real world becasue of temperature issues. We believed that unlike the gas fuel, vegetable oil is sensitive to change at low and high temperature.
But I read news the other day that two adventurer drove their vehicle (diesel fire truck) from Alaska to the tip of South America (approximately 34000km) without using a drop of gas. This trip was recorded as the longest road trip in the world without using a drop of gas. More interestingly, they did not only use vegetable oil. They filled the car with native fuels such as fish oil from salmon in Alaska, pig lard in Mexico, and even unprocessed palm pul in Colombia. When the fats started to run low during their trip, they relied on leftover fast food grease. They said they never had problem on the car because of natural fuels that they use.
They have provided picture of modified fuel trunk that they used.
Indeed, as they commented, vegetable oil isn't the answer to all the world's problems, but it's definitely one of them.
http://www.oilandwaterproject.org/rig.html
1 comment:
I suppose I can see several benefits to using the fatty oil such as we would have a place to utilize all the greasy oil from places like fast food restaurants and we wouldn't have to destroy the earth in the process of trying to find more petroleum. But isn't it true that carbon dioxide would still be produced because these fish oils still use combustion reaction to release energy? In that sense we are still releasing green house gas into the air. I was thinking that out of all the alternatives to oil, my favorite is still the hydrogen cell method. The biproducts would just be water!
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