Bio-fuels
I have, unintentionally, become somewhat of an expert on the use of bio-fuels in diesel vehicles. I have converted many vehicles to run directly on vegetable oil, built biodiesel reactors, make my own biodiesel, process waste oil into fuel, and am constantly asked for informal advise and run informal tutorials on the subject of running engines on vegetable oil and biodiesel.
I have written a book on biofuels, biodiesel and vegetable oil for McGraw-Hill, it will be published in late 2008 - read more about it here - and buy it by clicking the image below.
There seems to be a lot of confusion with regard to vegetable oil and biodiesel, I will attempt to explain here:
Biodiesel is vegetable oil, usually used cooking oil, chemically modified to make it more diesel like. This is suitable for almost all diesel vehicles and is the simple way to run on bio-fuels because it requires no conversion of the vehicle.
Vegetable Oil is just that, vegetable oil. Instead of the fuel being modified to make it more compatible with the engine, the engine is modified to make it more compatible with the fuel. Sometimes new cooking oil is used (often referred to as SVO) and sometimes used cooking oil is used (often referred to as UCO or WVO).
Other Solutions exist to make the fuel and/or engine more compatible such as mixing the vegetable oil in other compounds to make it less viscous, I’d treat these as more experimental.
Please read my Words Of Caution for more information.
