As I said, go fill your car up tomorrow with tabasco sauce and then we can
compare the prices.

Less than 10% of gasoline is ethanol. E85 engines use 85% ethanol... and the
engines are built to handle ethanol... Problem is that ethanol is just a tad
less expensive to produce than mostly fosil oil.

It's still a stupid list, and you are a moron for attempting to assign any
validity to it.

Is that spelled poof?

Of course, we are all environmentalist in that we do not want to "$#it" were
we "eat," the environuts on the other hand do not want us to "eat" so we do
not need to deal with the "$#it."

What ever is going to replace gasoline is not yet, or even close to being,
available in the amount needed.  Until it is, we MUST drill our own oil or
we MUST import that which we can not produce.   The ONLY option is a
factoring economy and if the US goes down so will the rest of the world.
The fact is there is more oil leaking naturally out of the ground than has
ever leaked out of any of the hundreds of thousand of oil wells in water
around the world.  thousands of our wells in the Gulf were damage during
Katarina but not ONE leaked oil into the Gulf,   Many of those wells in the
Gulf near the end of the area where drilling is permitted, could be
producing NEW oil in a year with the new slant drilling technology in use
today.

There are TWO things that can take us away from the need to import.   Diesel
vehicles that are already in the pipe line that can be run on our own diesel
fuel made for our own 250 year supply of clean burning coal and nuclear
power for plug in electric cars.   The environuts are apposed to both and so
is Obama.   We need a change but not one that is worse, that will kill our
economy.

If one owns a diesel powered vehicle and buy a cleaning system for around
$5,000 they can use McDonalds' waist oil but the environuts  will soon be
screaming about the McDonalds' of the world for killing people with heart
attacks just to get enough to replace 2% of the 400,000,00 gallons of gas we
use daily.   By the way make sure you pay the fed and yours states the road
use taxes on that waist fuel or you will go to jail

We are:

http://www.greasecar.com/

There are a whole bunch of them around here, since the company is ~12 from
my home.

Interesting. Smell french-fries? Look for a VW with a GREASECAR sticker.

I have a friend who runs veggie oil in his F-350, unmodified. Says it
costs about $1 a gallon, but you know that will change.

The only real reason you need to modify the car is to keep the grease from
solidifying. Once the temp gets above 75 degrees, that's not an issue.
Below 75 degrees you can mix it with diesel fuel, but only down to about
70.

I think you are missing the point. When a barrel (42 gallons) of oil is
refined, and it produces 21 gallons of gasoline, it also produces 21 gallons
of other refined hydrocarbons with a fairly substantial economic value. So
the economic value of the output of the refining process needs to be
distributed among the products produced.

So if you want to stick with 21 gallons of refined gasoline per barrel of
crude, then you need to cost the barrel of crude at about $68 (about one
half the current price of $136 per barrel). Otherwise you are assuming that
the raw material cost of the other refined products  in a barrel of oil
(including jet fuel, fuel oil, etc) is zero (which might surprise a lot of
airlines and homeowners).

 Okay, I have to call you on this one.

 Natural gas for mobile applications is not practical, except for
fleet uses like city buses or trash trucks where they can have
refueling stations at the fleet yard - a miniscule fraction of overall
transportation fuel use.

 The energy density is not there with CNG, the vehicles are literally
built around huge fuel tanks and they still have to be refueled every
night with a compressor station that takes energy to run.  And LNG is
hazardous to handle without special training - and you have to expend
energy to refrigerate and liquefy the gas.

 And coal is unheard of for transportation - the steam railroad
locomotive is the only practical transportation prime mover that can
burn coal, and they are long extinct.

 And the EPA and State AQMD's will not let the steam locomotive come
back burning coal or wood - the survivors still operating in museums
and excursion duty are mostly converted to oil burners.

 And if you add up all the various uses of crude oil to make all the
raw materials that go into the finished goods you buy or eat or use
every day, and transport them through the manufacturing chain to you,
two 42-gallon barrels a day per person is not out of the question.

 Train Locomotives run on "red diesel" (plain diesel that is dyed red
to quickly show the road-use taxes were not paid if it is put in a
road car or truck), not natural gas or coal.

 Almost all farm tractors and powered implements run on red diesel,
not natural gas or coal.  Steam tractors and stationary engine "Steam
Jenny's" are extinct too.

 Virtually all over-the-road cargo trucking is done with diesel
powered tractors, not natural gas or coal.

 Much of the northeast US is not piped for natural gas for heating
and cooking energy, even though the population density is there to
support it.  They use "Distillate #2" heating oil (which is basically
red diesel) or Propane, not natural gas or coal.  

 Much of rural America outside heavily populated cities isn't piped
for natural gas for heat, so they have to use either heating oil or
Propane - which is an oil byproduct - and not natural gas or coal.

 And that fuel delivery truck is burning diesel or propane to get the
fuel to your home tank.

 The only time it is practical to use coal-fired furnaces or boilers
is large industrial or educational sites or electricity generating
plants, where the wages of stationary engineer(s) can be justified to
fire and monitor the system.  It can only be made semi-automatic, it
still needs a person to monitor it.  And the pollution control
equipment (fluidized bed combustion, stack scrubbers) is too large and
heavy to be made mobile.

 Electricity is too inefficient for resistance space heating and only
marginally better running a heat pump, so electricity is usually not
the primary choice for heating.  If nuclear electric generation had
caught on and truly made electricity "too cheap to meter" as they
promised in the 1950's we wouldn't worry about efficiency.  But it
didn't, so we do.

 Electricity generation and stationary large boiler plants are about
the only place that coal and natural gas is still a large prime-mover
energy source.

SOLUTIONS:

 If we are going to work our way out of this corner, cranking up to
mass production levels of biodiesel from canola or rapeseed, and mass
production levels of ethanol from sugar cane or switchgrass or
cornstalks (and other non-foodstuff agricultural wastes) is going to
be a critical factor.

 We MUST abandon corn as a primary ethanol source - we're removing
edible food and food-growing acreage from the food supply stream,
choosing between eating or moving.  And if we have floods droughts or
other crop failures, energy and food both take a hit.

 There are too many mobile uses where you need the energy density and
ease of use and fueling of a diesel fuel or E-85 Gasohol.  Hydrogen is
way too far out on the horizon and has severe safety problems, and
both pure ethanol and hydrogen are unsafe (invisible fires).

 But Biodiesel and E-85 "Flex Fuel" Gasohol we can do with current
technology, and we need to start NOW.  With a "Manhattan Project" or
"Apollo Project" level of urgency.

 And we also need to start drilling and putting new oil wells into
production NOW.  A postage-stamp sized plot in ANWR, deep water off
the coasts, deep water in the Gulf.  We can do it, quickly, without
oil spills and disruption - but we need a unified will and shove the
NIMBY whiners off the nearest cliff....

 The platforms will be at or over the horizon, so the Hollywood
Glitterati can complain that those few platforms will spoil their
million-dollar views from Malibu or Monterrey or Key West or
Hyannisport - but we all know it's a load of unexpurgated bullshit.  

 Make it a goal for the US to be energy self-sufficient and not
import a drop of crude oil inside 10 years unless we choose to, and
tell OPEC they can eat sand and drink crude oil if they don't like it.

--<< Bruce >>--