Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jan van Eck, director of D.J. Engineering, manufacturers of technical engineering assemblies including aircraft landing gear components.
Advocacy groups have argued, some heatedly, for major taxes on transportation and heating fuels in order to lower their use and thus, hopefully, reduce the production of greenhouse gases. Other schools of thought tend to rapid development and deployment of electric cars and trucks. What seems to be overlooked is that there are direct-replacement, or “drop-in,” liquid fuels that can be substituted for diesel and home heating oil. Such fuels hold the promise of a 90% reduction in greenhouse gases and without the crushing burden of new taxes for transport fuels levied on the working rural poor. Let’s take a look.
The current stock of diesel is a middle-distillate refined crude oil, manufactured in refineries where the crude is heated and various components are drawn off the distillation column as the gasified material condenses. This distillation process is energy-intensive and by its nature tends to be both risky (refinery fires and explosions make them unattractive neighbors) and smelly. But if you run a different feedstock and eliminate the heating process, you can craft a liquid fuel oil that is benign, not smelly, not risky to handle, yet can be used directly into existing diesel engines and home oil-heating machinery without modification.
Some such products are being offered, albeit blended in with existing diesel stocks; these are called “bio-diesel” and are, as the name implies, based on plants such as soybean oil or corn oil. Yet another source is waste cooking oil, the fat that is left over after use in a deep-frying kitchen (and called “French-fry oil”). They are sold in various grades, typically B-05, B-10, and B-20, where the numbers represent the amount of plant material being blended into the diesel stock. There are these low limits to the blending due to traditional biodiesel oils having flow and gelling problems in cold weather, which makes them less attractive in cold places such as Vermont.
But what if there were a plant-based oil that had great cold-flow characteristics, burned just fine in existing diesel engines without modification, could use existing retailer tanks and nozzle dispensers (the “pumps”), developed no sludge or gel and needed no anti-gel additive in winter, was harmless to the environment in case of spills – and produced 90% less greenhouse gases when burned? And how about if it could be retailed for even less than conventional diesel? Do such fuels exist? Yep, they do.
Such biomass fuels hold great promise because there is so much of the plant material out there, and thus the feedstock is so cheap. Processing the material into liquid fuel is done through a refining process, but that is quite benign and can be done inside any industrial-type building.
This is not particularly scary stuff. You have a conventional building and some stainless-steel vats and pipes inside, the raw material is introduced into a hopper, and it gets processed through various stages in the refinery and the pure distillate bio-material comes out the other end. You can scale these refineries up or down to meet local needs, and could even be downsized to the level of an individual user, such as a large trucking company or railroad. When burned, the material comes out as a clean gas, not the dangerous particulate matter from petroleum diesel that in turn is a trigger for asthma.Â
Can this be done cheaply enough? Of course it can. The federal government issues a $1 per gallon tax credit for bio-fuels blenders. The industry is trying to get that tax credit available to bio-refiners also, and if successful then there is an additional $1/gallon incentive to operate such an installation. The real hit is in the feedstock material, and as long as there is enough of it and the price remains depressed, the retail fuel is near $1/gallon to the final customer. Even without the investment tax credit from Washington, it is still priced below petroleum fuels.
Being able to save a dollar a gallon on your home heating-oil bill is an attractive proposition to the rural poor. Being able to save a dollar a gallon is a big plus to a commercial trucker, a rail operator, and, when directly substituted for kero jet-fuel, the aviation user. Get enough of it out there in commercial use and you obtain your greenhouse gases targets without further pain to ordinary Vermonters. And your environmental risks from spills goes away. The machinery parts are off-the-shelf, buy it, plug it in, and you are up and running.