Running a big rig on veggie oil
I have been researching veggie oil as fuel in diesels for years. Seems to have a few downsides and upsides but vegetable oil for fuel is actually what good ol' Rudolph Diesel had in mind for fuel when...
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Wholesale rapeseed price per metric ton (tonne) in May was almost a thousand dollars cdn. This assumes the most efficient extraction equipment.
40% of a tonne is 400 kilos, and canola oil weighs 4.3 kilos per imperial gallon. source You wind up with a bit less than 100 imperial gallons of fuel per tonne of seed.
So best case price of the finished product is a dollar a gallon, not the fifty cents you stated earlier. And that assumes you can buy seed at the wholesale price and factors in nothing at all for production machinery. Not to mention the real estate to store/process such large quantities of seed.
The .50/gallon I mentioned was actually the price that I found for used veggie oil in Oregon on craigslist. Some guys were selling their surplus and that was the going rate.
But thanks for the math on the canola. I hate to shoot myself in the foot, but 100 gallons from $1000 of canola? Wouldn't that make it $10 a gallon, not $1 a gallon?
