If you wonder where all this cooking oil comes from? Go to China. Regularly you see old, small trucks with open containers and a worker collecting the oil straight from the sewer. If you pass them you automatically go to the other side of the street because of the smell. (This probably exists everywhere, but the capture system used in my country is more or less invisible for the bystander)
Apparently there is a lot of oil produced by all the restaurants.
Dirty fact, when I lived in China, the scandal of the day was counterfeit oil (underground oil). The original idea was to use this oil for fuel. However these fuel converter factories went bankrupt because another industry found a higher value: refine the oil and distribute it as new in counterfeit containers.
Are you sure that’s the sewer? Even in China, the goal of sewer management is to keep things flowing at reasonable cost.
In the US, there are two widespread solutions:
1. The ultimate in cost reduction: a 55 gallon drum out back. When it’s full, someone collects it. It’s far more cost effective to dump your oil in a 55 gallon drum than to dump it in a sink and hope you don’t immediately have to call a plumber to clean up the mess.
2. A grease trap: a not-particularly-expensive device like this:
It are always grease traps, but it is the same pipe that is used by the toilet, so I would say it is technically just the sewer. And ss the saying goes: if it looks like sewer, smells like sewer, it probably is sewer :-)
Huh? Why on earth would anyone plumb their toilet into the grease trap? There’s probably some cross-contamination from sewage getting into the grease trap outlet, but that doesn’t mean that toilet waste flows through it. There’s also lots of contamination from people washing their hands, cleaning meat and fish, washing dirty vegetables [0], etc in the kitchen sink.
Certainly one ought not to eat anything extracted from the grease trap, but one also ought not to eat anything extracted from the grease collection barrel.
Grease traps are required in all commercial kitchens here in Michigan. AFAIK they're more intended to protect the sewer system rather than for day-to-day grease disposal.
In any case, there are multiple companies that will compete to collect your kitchen grease out of that 55 gallon drum, for free. Maybe they’ll even pay if the kitchen makes enough grease — that mess is valuable!
I suspect that most kitchens pay for grease trap service, as it’s more labor and equipment intensive and the resulting extracted crud may be more of a mess than a valuable commodity.
These containers are allll over the place, but you probably don't notice them. Most commonly, I see them as the tiny little dumpster next to the main dumpster. Can be hard to spot since most of them are in a dumpster corale.
Interesting. I've been running that for years in my diesel truck. A mechanical diesel will run basically whatever you can pump through its fuel system. I assume jet engines are roughly the same. However they have some major standards, and can't risk running recycled fryer oil from the Chinese restaurant down the street.
> A mechanical diesel will run basically whatever you can pump through its fuel system. I assume jet engines are roughly the same.
This is very much not the case. They run on kerosene which is highly refined and pure. It has a lower freezing point, higher flash point and lower viscosity, which are obviously positive characteristics when flying in -45C temps high in the atmosphere.
I ran my 1999 Nissan Primera 2.0 turbo diesel on virgin vegtable oil for a couple of years (I had about 400L in the back when taking the channel ferry to to drive around Europe). It cost 0.40p/l instead of 1.20/l in the UK. Bought it from a farmer from an ad on eBay. No modification needed, but you need to have a couple of fuel filters and a tool to change it handy, in case you have a blockage (more common when first starting to run on oil). In winter add 5-10% petrol to keep the viscosity down. You can always add diesel to the tank without issue.
I think many 90s indirect-injection diesels can run vegtable oil without modification, but some ppl add a fuel heating system or a dual-fuel switchover system.
There were newspaper stories of ppl going into Tescos and filling their trollies with 5L bottles of vegtable oil, then going to the parking and filling their tanks. Later (virgin) vegetable oil became more expensive than diesel, used oil is a different story.
Bonus: when reversing, or at the lights with a breeze, you often notice an odour like fried chips. :)
It probably wasn't more common because it was some hassle with the fuel filters and potential damage to fuel pump (some are built better than others). The Nissan had a license-built Bosch design that was solid.
Perhaps you need to consider when you want to buy a switchover system from eBay: If caught, obviously by police with a nose for chips. They will take your car milage multiply that by the amount of fuel tax you did not pay, double it as punishment and give you a set fine while they are at it.
Can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this vehicle was operated under illegal conditions for the entirety of that duration? What if it were imported? Used?
In my country the tax law has a reversed proof clause. Meaning, you are guilty until proven innocent. This clause is activated after you get caught, or even when you did not comply with administrative requirements. Other countries have similar clauses.
So in this case, if you have hard proof, meaning a proper administration, fuel tickets, etc. Which you all don't have, there is basically only a central milage database and ownership records that can hedge your damage.
1994 Toyota pickup with a Om617 swap. I bought a kit for the engine swap then did all the work to swap it.
I did nothing to handle the oil. It just works. You pour it in the tank and go. However, it doesn't work in the winter without a heater or additives.
It's not more common because a) mechanic diesels are old technology and means you'll be driving an old vehicle. b) WVO is a hit or miss in your area. Lots of restaurants will get paid for their old oil by recycling centers so most wont give it away. c) processing it is tough until you get a system in place
As well you can run on so many different fluids. Waste motor oil, waste transmission fluid, brake fluid, etc.
Motor oil burns more rapidly than diesel. You'll get more "power" but also less durability.
Burning motor oil happens when your turbo breaks down and puts all your oil via the air inlet to your engine. It's hard to stop that engine until all the oil is used.
You absolutely can and I have before. However, I blended it 70% WMO and 30% diesel. Used motor oil WILL carbon up everything. It's so full of ash that it'll pool up internally.
You need to used a centrifuge to pull out the carbon. Sounds intense but it's not.
You can pour it entirely in your tank without any filters but your fuel filters only go to about 10-30 which will not pull out the tar. Small amounts like that won't do any damage really.
The Caterpillar diesel engine manual says you can burn up to 5% used motor oil without affecting the warrantee. It does say to make sure you filter the used oil so as not to gunk up your fuel system.
For a large engine that produces many buckets of oil at each change, this is a good way to get rid of the stuff.
In Poland at least, people were doing it - mostly rural in their tractors - but just straight using cooking oil for your trucks&tractors is illegal - too much pollution.
Of course SAF is cleaned up to different standards. Also, SAF is not just cooking oil, they use various kinds of tech.
Running personal cars on cooking oil was legal in the UK up to a certain number of litres/year. I think it was more an issue of taxation, I'm not aware that it creates additional polution.
Just the other day I saw for the first time in my life, a "vetboer" (Dutch for fat farmer) truck parked outside the local bar/cafe, and as I turned the corner they were leaving the bar with a big blue barrel.
According to their website [1], the fats and oils they collect are recycled into biofuel for vehicles and green power for households.
Maybe in the future they'll mention aircraft as well...
If you've never watched a video on manufacturing jet engines, here's a video! The intersection of bleeding edge materials science and rigorous safety concerns is pretty interesting.
It may not scale, but it's not greenwashing - for it to be green washing, you'd need either claims of lower co2 to be false, or pretend that this solves the issue completely.
Lufthansa, at least - when I checked - made no such claim. I reviewed their compensaid site thoroughly (afraid it's just greenwashing), and their communication seems very honest.
My dictionary defines greenwashing as "misleading or deceptive publicity disseminated by an organization so as to present an environmentally responsible public image".
Here in the US, we have a corn-farming industry that has captured the Agriculture department and can block passage of essential legislation. To be expected: legislation proposed in Congress that all US jet fuel henceforth contain X% bio-product.
> Whereas fossil fuels add to the overall level of CO2 by emitting carbon that had been previously locked away, SAF recycles the CO2 which has been absorbed by the biomass used in the feedstock during the course of its life.
I guess it's reasonable to claim that it's sustainable if it's part of a cycle rather than just being a source of CO2 dug straight out of the ground. We still have a way to go with carbon capture but this feels like an improvement over the current fuels.
“Sustainable” as a marketing word was likely chosen to refer primarily to itself, i.e. the production of the fuel itself is sustainable compared to drilling for a known finite resource (crude oil). However, it is ecologically sustainable in that we are using material already making the rounds as opposed to unsequestering carbon sinks only to immediately burn.
There are other benefits, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas around, and conventional Jet-A releases non-CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. SAF has stricter requirements as to what sort additives are allowed based on each chemicals specific burn profile.
In theory, its sustainable, because the fuel is being created from CO2 captured from the air by photosynthesis - so burning it doesn't add to the overall atmospheric CO2. Unlike fossil fuels where you are digging up CO2 and adding it to the atmosphere.
> its sustainable, because the fuel is being created from CO2 captured from the air by photosynthesis
An essential detail: the CO2 would have been back in the atmosphere soon, regardless of its use. We need less CO2 in the atmosphere, regardless of who, what, when, or how it got there or how it's removed.
The method of capture doesn't matter. Atmospheric carbon capture devices would be just as good, if they worked efficiently.
If you capture CO2 in a way that would keep it from the atmosphere long-term, then releasing it again is obviously not a good idea.
If you grow corn, you capture CO2. But the corn will soon die and (if I understand correctly) release the CO2 again, so you might as well use the corn for your fuel and release the CO2 that way.
However: If you plant a field with corn for fuel instead of with longer term carbon capture options (e.g., certain types of trees), it seems like a loss. It's better than digging up CO2 that's already stored long term (fossil fuels) and adding it to the atmosphere, but that's not good enough. We need to get CO2 out of the atmosphere.
Climate change isn't a simple product of CO2 emission. It's a result of fossil carbon that was outside of the earth's carbon cycle for millions of years being reintroduced to the system.
Biofuels made from plants are rereleasing carbon that the plants collected. They're more or less carbon neutral, assuming the existence of more plants growing. Biofuels won't help remove the excess carbon from the atmosphere, but they certainly can help mitigate the rapid bleeding by cutting down on fossil fuel use.
This is especially important for aviation, where the usage of batteries is almost certainly impossible for practical use.
Of course, the ideal thing to do is remove carbon from the atmosphere and not use it. But getting to net zero first is necessary.
It’s not - you can switch a small portion of fuel demand in a sustainable manner. The SAF plants are built purely on economics underpinned by tax credits. The larger issue is that once you get past a certain volume number, the marginal feedstock is soybeans (in the US at least) which for a variety of reasons is structurally more expensive than oil - this is never going to be economic and is a taxpayer funded boondoggle, I wish that weren’t the case
> Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited is a British luxury automobile maker which has operated as a wholly owned subsidiary of BMW AG since 2003
...
> The Rolls-Royce Motor Cars subsidiary of BMW AG has no direct relationship to Rolls-Royce-branded vehicles produced before 2003, other than having briefly supplied components and engines. The Bentley Motors Limited subsidiary of Volkswagen AG is the direct successor to Rolls-Royce Motors and various other predecessor entities that produced Rolls-Royce and Bentley branded cars between the foundation of each company and 2003, when the BMW-controlled entity started producing cars under the Rolls-Royce brand.
The "actual" Rolls-Royce company with a lineage going back to the beginning of the brand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Holdings ) has exited the car business, and nowadays makes jet engines, gas turbines, and nuclear reactors.
There's always the guy who put a Rolls-Royce Meteor V-12 aircraft engine into a road car. The city council decided it was a Rolls-Royce and let him register it that way, whereupon he attached a Rolls-Royce grille and got himself sued for trademark infringement:
VW's history with corporate structure and brands is a clusterfuck in general, haha, the ownership structure between Volkswagen AG, Porsche SE and Porsche AG is pretty convoluted, then you add other VW-owned brands: Audi which has Lamborghini, Ducati, and Bentley as subsidiaries, Bentley itself has been owner and subsidiary of Rolls-Royce through its history, ending up owning the brand for cars lately.
If anyone has ever seen a timeline diagram of their corporate structure I'd be very interested to see, just to get a sense of how much more of a clusterfuck it is than the tidbits I know about.
Volkswagen group has been said to have slated the sell-off of Ferdinand Piëch's "favorite toy" since his death in 2019. . . . The complicated corporate ownership structure of Bugatti-Rimac places Rimac Group as the majority stakeholder of the endeavor with 55 percent of the control. Volkswagen-owned Porsche retains the other 45 percent of ownership. Above Rimac Group sits another number of shareholders, beginning with CEO Mate Rimac who controls 37 percent of the company. Porsche controls 24 percent of Rimac Group, Hyundai has 12 percent, and "other investors" amass the remaining 27 percent.
> ... just to get a sense of how much more of a clusterfuck it is than the tidbits I know about.
And it all goes back to the Porsche and Piech families, which still own a majority share in VW.
But to me the most fascinating of them all is when Porsche tried a short-squeeze on VW stocks to both acquire VW and make countless billions in the process but that failed due to the... 2008 financial crisis. Without the crisis hitting, Porsche (the company, not the family) was acquiring VW.
Their short squeeze failed and Porsche lost an insane amount of money on their temporarily worthless VW stocks (the VW stock lost 75% of its value between 2008 and 2009, something insane like that) and then... VW had to rescue Porsche by acquiring Porsche.
But then as of late Porsche spun off out of VW again.
It's mindboggling stuff.
The best description I've read about Porsche (the company) is: "The hedge fund that happened to also sell cars".
Actually, it wouldn't, kerosene and diesel are pretty similar, so it would not be surprising if a diesel car engine can run on SAF.
That being said, it's by no means a given, modern diesel engines are highly optimized and might have trouble with kerosene/SAF, especially given the different lubrication qualitities. Old diesel engines, however, should be fine, they can run on pretty much anything.
Some Cold War era fighter engines were able to run diesel for a while, tge reasoning was to allow quick re-location of the aircraft to safety. They needed basically a full rebuild if run on diesel for too long.
And all multi-fuel engines the military tried, e.g. in the Chieftain (if memory serves well), were rather underwhelming and ran mostly on diesel anyway.
Old disel engines are fine with all kinds of stuff, modern ones a lot less.
> Some Cold War era fighter engines were able to run diesel for a while, tge reasoning was to allow quick re-location of the aircraft to safety. They needed basically a full rebuild if run on diesel for too long.
Interesting, haven't heard of that. But yes, I can imagine with diesel containing heavier hydrocarbons than kerosene, there could be a buildup of soot deposits on the hot parts of the engine. Might also be some certification issue, that if you operate with out-of-spec fuel then you need to overhaul the engine before it's considered flight worthy again (even if there might be no problem with the engine per se).
Then again, don't these naval ships with gas turbine engines run on something like standard light marine diesel oil?
> And all multi-fuel engines the military tried, e.g. in the Chieftain (if memory serves well), were rather underwhelming and ran mostly on diesel anyway.
The Chieftain engine was designed to be "truly" multi-fuel, being in principle capable of running on both diesel, petrol, and anything in between like kerosene.
If you limit the multi-fuelness to diesel and the current day narrow cut kerosenes that are used as jet fuel, it's a much simpler problem.
E.g. Western military diesel vehicles tend to be specced to run on diesel or JP-8 (the military variant of standard Jet A-1 jet fuel, with a few additives). And aviation diesel engines used in some GA aircraft tend to be certified for Jet A-1 (and they are often modified versions of standard automotive diesel engines).
Diesels are mostly cheaper to run because european governments artificially reduced the taxing on diesel comparative to gasoline as an help for the economy since most trucks were running diesel for the best low-end torque.
They tend to have a bit better economy but an higher price, so in the end it depends on how long you keep them and the difference is not that positive in countries that tax both fuel the same, like Switzerland.
Diesel engines run at higher compression ratios, 20:1 vs. 10:1 IIRC, resulting in higher thermal efficiency, and they also don't need a throttle valve, meaning there is no pumping loss at partial loads. The higher compression ratio also means they must be stronger (heavier and more expensive).
Modern gasoline engines have a few more tricks though and reduce the gap (like very high top gear, direct injection etc.).
> no throttle valve, meaning there is no pumping loss at partial loads
I believe this effect is small compared to the alternative, which is that partial loads have dramatically excess air. That excess air isn't involved in the combustion, but still gets heated and pumped through the exhaust. That energy loss exceeds the pumping loss through a throttle on a part loaded engine.
Obviously the ideal case for both engine types is that you run it at a lower RPM whenever you need less power out. Unfortunately, that has other downsides (mostly slower response when you floor-it). Luckily, hybrid electric systems mitigate much of that downside by providing rapid response with electricity and allowing your engine to sit at 1000 rpm and 80% throttle in a super high gear while cruising 70mph on the freeway.
It's super common here in Sweden. Hell, we have a diesel car! The used car market was full of diesel cars. All petrol stations here have diesel tanks. It's diesel all the way down!
They need less fuel than petrol, but one issue is that they don't lend themselves well to 100% city driving because this can lead to costly diesel particulate filter repairs as they clog up. Diesel cars automatically regenerate the filters (burn the muck to ash) as you drive e.g. over 40 mph for >25 minutes or so. (depends on car model) You should drive like that at least once a month.
However, where I live, longer distance driving is pretty common.
They're falling out of favor with rising diesel prices since covid and of course EV's. Companies here go full EV nowadays for several reasons, public image only one of them.
I'd also like to go electrical but seems like we're still stuck for yet a few years because they still don't offer charging poles in apartment garages very liberally, and for any kind of convenient EV use, it honestly builds upon the fact that you can charge it overnight close to home.
Why should the type of car matter? It's just an engine, you make it a bit more compact and it will fit in a sedan. Voila, you have a diesel sedan. Sales of diesel sedans have been slowly decreasing in most European countries Inn recent years, but it wasn't that long ago that more than half of all passenger cars (in some countries) were diesel. Of the 4 cars I've owned, 2 were diesel.
Yeah, 11 million diesel vehicles were recalled by VW -- nearly all were ordinary cars (they don't even make a heavy truck). Mercedes, BMW, Audi, VW all sell (or used to sell) diesel cars in the USA. They all certainly do in Europe, where they're joined by all the European brands like Renault and Seat.
Post-scandal, fewer manufacturers are selling them in the US, but there are millions sold every year worldwide in plain old passenger cars.
My car is diesel (in the UK) it was popular a few years ago because CO2 emissions are reduced. Unfortunately particulate emissions are problematic. Hence modern diesel cars need Ad Blu to help catalyse their destruction.
I've mostly owned European diesel passenger cars (in USA). It's lower maintenance, more efficient, I like the way they drive (more torque/cool sound), and a fun hobby with a great community of hobbyists that help each other out.
It's rare enough that I often get very concerned gas station attendees warning me that I'm "accidentally" putting diesel in my car.
Up until the VW scandal GM was pushing diesel in most of their fleet - from the Chevy Cruze, Equinox to the Colorado all had strait 4 diesels as a premium tier option.
16% of personal vehicles in the Netherlands are currently diesel cars. About 20% of all vehicles sold here last year were diesel vehicles. So at least here, it's very common for people to drive a diesel car. They come in all sizes.
Modern Ultra-Low Sulphur Diesel (ULSD) is the standard road diesel in both the EU and USA since many years now. And with modern common-rail engines with electronically controlled direct injection, you no longer get the big black clouds of soot when you push down the pedal either (unless you're one of those "rolling coal" morons that mod their trucks to intentionally produce more of it). And further, modern diesel cars tend to have particulate filters and urea catalysts etc.
So all in all, a modern diesel is pretty clean. Not as good as a modern gasoline car, but still reasonably ok and massively better than old diesels.
Many of the car-buying Americans have the idea of "diesel car" from old Mercedes 240Ds and such, which had the acceleration of a dead snail against a headwind on a good day.
There is nothing inherently requiring diesel cars to be slow.
Nice, though since the entire point of SAF is to be a drop-in replacement for fossil jet fuel, this news is a bit of a nothingburger. (Of course, since this is aviation, best to test it so you don't end up with the engine(s) conking out up in the air in case the SAF isn't quite the drop-in replacement it's ostensibly supposed to be.)
What are the downsides of Aviation SAF? In Brazil we have cars that work with ethanol. Ethanol increases the engine power, but the car has just 70% of autonomy.
ethanol fuel, by itself, doesn't increase engine power. Ethanol allows the use of higher compression-ratios/increased ignition-timing/higher air-density than typical petroleum tunes due to lessened chance of detonation.
If they want clean aviation, they can just do it. But please, could they make sure they let the customers pay for that through their ticket price ? I don't want my tax money to be used for that.
Being part of a global reponse to save the world from catastrophic climate change by changing industrial infrastructure sounds like just the kind of thing that tax money should go on.
Your cynicism might be warranted, but it's now always true.
The airline I fly for domestic travel (Air New Zealand) has - in the past - donated some of the money from customers selecting to offset emissions, to the Native Forest Restoration Trust [0], a charity that buys strategic parcels of land, re-plants, and then maintains the land after protecting it forever for the public using the QE II trust. I don't consider that to be greenwashing - that's real and useful.
Indulgences became increasingly popular in the Middle Ages as a reward for displaying piety and doing good deeds . . . . With the permission of the church, indulgences also became a way for Catholic rulers to fund expensive projects, such as Crusades and cathedrals, by keeping a significant portion of the money raised from indulgences in their lands.
