President Obama, please:
|
White House 2 is a multi-partisan network of 10557 citizens imagining how the White House might work if it was run completely democratically by thousands of people over the internet. It's free and all U.S. citizens can join.
 We're setting priorities, collaborating on policy, and creating a massive database of 2867 talking points covering all sides of every important issue facing our country. Watch the video intro. Getting involved is easy and fun. Just join and start setting your priorities, like a todo list. The more people who endorse a priority, the higher it rises in the charts. The more people who join the network, the more clout we will have with the President and the media. |
What you neglected to mention about biodiesel is the properties that are not exactly so simiarly to petroleum-derived diesel fuel, in particular, its cold flow properties. Biodiesel is similar to diesel fuel, but it’s molecular weight is on the very high end of #2 diesel fuel. Diesel fuel is a blend of hundreds of hydrocarbon molecules (mostly parrafins, but some aromatics and olefins as well) that boil in the range of 300 – 700 F. Biodiesel, on the other hand, is a mixture of 5 different methyl esters that boil in the mid 600s F. What’s noteworthy about the boiling range of the fuel is that the higher the boiling point, the higher the freezing point. Diesel fuel “freezing” is measure by multiple parameters, but the primary amongst them is the cloud point of the fuel. If you cool diesel fuel down at a specified rate (degrees/hour), then use an optical sensor to detect the first formation of crystals, this temperature is known as the cloud point. As long as diesel fuel stays above the cloud point, it will not solidify and thus will flow properly. Your “typical” #2 diesel fuel will have a winter time cloud point of ~15 F. For northern lattitudes, #2 diesel can be blended to lower clouds points perhaps around 0 F. #1 diesel fuel has a cloud point around -50 F. #1 diesel is often blended into #2 diesel to make highway diesel for extreme northern lattitudes in the US (ND, SD, MN, etc). Can you guess where I’m going here?
The cloud point of biodiesel varies based on the feedstock used to make the biodiesel, but as the US uses soy oil primarily, the cloud point of soy derived biodiesel is 32 F; that’s right, soy biodiesel starts freezing at the same temperature as water. I guess it’s not so bad so long as you don’t live anywhere where the temperature gets below freezing. Soy also happens to be one of the better feedstocks for biodiesel. If you use tallow (animal fat), the cloud point is above 50 F. So, everyone should at least understand that biodiesel for use straight as a compression ignition fuel just isn’t going to happen. What about blends though? Sure, dilution is the solution to most problems. You can blend biodiesel into petro diesel and get something that’s operable, but you’re still limited by cold flow. The State of IL offers 100% sales tax exemption for fuel retailers if they use at least 10% biodiesel in their fuel. Needless to say, the roughly 25 cpg incentive has got nearly everyone blending B11 (just over 10% bio) diesel. However, with such a strong incentive, you’d assume retailers do it year-round, correct? Well, that’s not the case as most IL retailers back off to 5% or less, sometimes even no biodiesel, from November to March due to cold flow issues. If 5% biodiesel from Nov to Mar in IL is pushing it on the biodiesel even with such a strong financial incentive, how do we expect biodiesel to replace diesel as a compression ignition engine fuel?
Further, biodiesel isn’t even economically viable. Wholesale biodiesel sells for roughly $3/gal, while petro diesel sells for roughly $1.50/gal as of time of this post. We have to offer a $1/gal incentive as well as impose biodiesel mandates via RFS2 (the 2007 Energy independence and Security Act) just to make it competitive. Now, think about this. The US gov’t is subsidizing biodiesel so that farmers will sell soy oil to biodiesel producers instead of food producers. Our gov’t is subsidizing the removal of food from the food pool so we can stick it in our cars. If we remove 1 gal of soy oil from the food pool, what do you think happens to the price of food? It goes up. What happens when people around the world who make less than $1/day try to buy food only to find out it’s too expensive for them? Our gov’t is LITERALLY SUBSIDIZING STARVATION around the world by removing food from the market through various incentives and mandates. Is starving a bunch of foreigners the way we’re going to get to energy independence?? If so, I want no part of it.
Oh, I just checked out the link you provided on biodiesel. The cloud and pour point values are bogus, but otherwise, the data’s ballpark. Again, it’s hard to say exactly what biodiesel’s properties are as it depends on the feedstock. I say “otherwise”, but they got it wrong where it counts with biodiesel. Pour point of biodiesel is a complete misnomer, because pour point is a parameter used to determine whether or not a diesel fuel will be pumpable in a pipeline; since biodiesel is trucked around the country (not pipelined), there’s no point in even talking about biodiesel pour point. On the cloud point, they show -11 C (16 F) as the lower end of cloud point. I suspect this number is too low, though I don’t have my cloud points on hand; however, for the US, that’s just not a realistic number to put. Rapeseed biodiesel (used in Europe) might have a cloud that low, but fact is that they use their own biodiesel and do not have spare capacity to export to us. In the US, our options are soy, corn (not really since it all goes to ethanol), palm, used vegetable oil (think McDonald’s friers), or tallow (animal fat). Corn might have a lower cloud point than soy, but it doesn’t matter, because there’s no room to use corn oil for biodiesel production, because ethanol and that pesky stuff we like to call food use up the corn at higher prices than biodiesel plants can afford to pay. Of the rest, soy is the best and its cloud is 32 F. If it’s snowing outside, your biodiesel has turned into a bio-candle.