Making Biodiesel for Small Towns

If a local city truck is watering down your street this summer, you might detect a smell of barbeque, popcorn, or French fries coming from its exhaust pipe.

This aroma is associated with many city vehicle’s use of B99 – or 99.9% biodiesel – in their vehicles during the warmer months. During colder months, more petroleum-based fuel is mixed in to prevent solidifying.

Making your own biodiesel has caught on in many towns across America. Besides being eco-friendly, making biodiesel is financially a smart decision as well for many local businesses.

Biodiesel is not to be confused with ethanol, which is a gasoline replacement, distilled mainly from corn. Biodiesel is a replacement for traditional diesel fuel, and is extracted from vegetable oil.

Many people may not realize that their local community can be a good source of vegetable oil for the production of biodiesel. In many neighborhoods across the country, restaurants sell their used cooking oil to a local Biodiesel company for processing.

What is cool, is to take something that is considered waste, and make it into fuel that is cleaner burning – and have all of the money stay in the community.

Using Biodiesel in Your Car

What other impact does using biodiesel have on a local community? How about air quality. Using biofuel in your car cuts down on green house gas emissions by 78%! Running your car on biodiesel is healthy for your car’s engine as well. It will actually clean out your fuel intake system. The sludge and dirt that builds up from using petroleum diesel is removed by using biodiesel. If you have a high blend in your car engine, it is a good idea to have an extra fuel filter on hand. It also has higher lubricity than petroleum diesel, which reduces wear and tear on engines.

Using Biodiesel at Home

Individual households can also recycle their cooking oil. In these days of health consciousness, many households avoid making the deep-fat-fried donuts and French fries that once were family favorites, but deep-frying turkeys has become a choice for many, though a sometimes-hazardous one for those new to the process.

To learn more about vegetable oil conversion to biodiesel, or how to recycle used cooking oil, check out Biodiesel Recipesfrom David Sieg. Also, check out the Biodiesel Encyclopediato get a better understanding of the terms and methods used in making your own biodiesel.