Saturday, February 26, 2005

If this were an idea

Someone would have already thought of it.

Everyone ought to glance at the article that was posted in the comments on the Hybrid Hysteria post a couple of days ago:

It is a lovely piece, fraught with possibilities.

The thing really got me thinking about the idea of little collectives of drivers partnering with fast food restaurants to use their discarded fry oil as motor fuel. Its a lovely thought.

Then I started thinking like this: you will want a regular source of oil, and the restaurant will want a regular source of disposal, and this stuff likely spoils doesn't it? So you don't want to stockpile the stuff yourself in your garage or you are just deferring the disposal problem the restaurant had in the first place. Ok, well what if you had a bio-diesel generator at your house, and you took your surplus oil and converted it into electricity for your home. You could either use it immediately, store it in a battery, or if my recollection is correct in a lot of cases the electric company has to credit you for any surplus energy you contribute to the grid.

So, problem solved.

Except, if this works, why doesn't every McDonald's and Hooters and the rest, why doesn't every place that has to dispose of waste vegetable oil have their own bio-diesel generator? The savings to a large corporation like McDonald's would have to be impressive. I mean, why aren't the people in the fry-o-lator business not in the bio-diesel generator business?

It must not really be that simple.

Plus, don't you have the nagging feeling that as soon as some critical mass of people wanted the waste oil that the people that had it would start to sell it to you rather than give it to you for nothing? I think that the appeal of this thing isn't just that its green, but rather that since it essentially uses garbage that at the moment the fuel is practically free. Does it remain as attractive when the fuel becomes a commodity?

I wonder.

1 comment:

Peg said...

Wow is this conversation really giving me a kick! I could write a blog's-worth of comments but I'll restrain myself to the following and see what others have to say too. Scotty is helping me write this. 1) FYI shelf life of veggie oil is minimum of 3 months, maximum of 1 year depending on storage conditions; 2) The utility companies, by and large, are bastards. They are SUPPOSED to pay you for your "net metering" (excess generation of electricity that you send back to the grid), but they make it very difficult for you to do it, throwing up a lot of red tape including requiring you to have excessive amounts of liability insurance. There's a radio station that we volunteer for, WJFF in Jeffersonville NY that has a hydroelectric power generator. They only generate what they can use (although their capacity for generation is substantially higher) because they CAN'T sell the excess. Their local utility wants them to carry $1M in liability insurance. For a small non-profit radio station it's cost-prohibitive. The premiums would outweigh the monies generated by the net-metering. The utility keeps their monopoly. 3) Most major fast-food chains, including McDonald's, pay a service to pick up their oil -- that then refines it and turns it into an ingredient in cattle feed. Feeding the cows a product made from waste fryer oil keeps the cost of the beef down. This is a big topic of discussion -- why doesn't McD's just refine their oil themselves? But that's for another day. Thanks again for this discussion.