The Evening Chronicle has an article on a teen-turned-fuel baron… sorta –
He happily admits he’s hopeless at school – but Steven Henderson is Tyneside’s very own oil baron.
Northumberland’s answer to JR Ewing has built his own oil refinery in the shed at his home in Stamfordham Road, Eachwick, near Ponteland, which he uses to produce 1,000 litres of bio-diesel a week.
He collects waste cooking oil from pubs and restaurants and each weekend he processes it into environmentally-friendly bio-diesel.
It is then used by his dad to power his farm’s tractors and vans saving him around £300 a week.
Talented teen transforms cooking oil into fuel – [via] Link.
Related:
- Cheaper veggie diesel… – Link.
- Garbage, fry grease and Linux – veggie oil supercomputer – Link.
- Veggie oil / grease powered toy Jeep – Link.
- DIY Veggie Conversion Kit – Link.
- MAKE AUDIO SHOW: Biodiesel! – Link.
- Making Antifreeze from Biodiesel – Link.
- Homebrew Biodiesel reactor plans… – Link.
- Biodiesel motorcycles – Link.
From the pages of MAKE:
Making Biodiesel. The best way to learn how to make your own backyard biodiesel is to start with a one-liter batch. It’s easy to make a small batch that will work in any diesel engine. You won’t need any special equipment–an old juice bottle will serve as the “reactor” vessel–and on such a small scale, you can quickly refine your technique and perform further experiments. MAKE 03 – Page 68. Subscribers–read this article now in your digital edition or get MAKE 03 in the Maker store.
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12 thoughts on “Talented teen transforms cooking oil into fuel”
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Hah! This is awesome, and a true Maker!
Mythbusters did this…run used cooking oil through a simple filter and it can be used in an ordinary diesel engine with the same fuel efficiency as real diesel.
It’s not recommended to run modern diesel engine on straight vegetable oil. Due to the viscosity of the oil when cold, it’ll clog your injectors. Also kills your fuel pump pretty fast.
There are kits to retrofit existing diesel engines that adds an extra tank for the vegetable oil and a heating system for it (it uses the engine heat for that, nothing is wasted :)
You start your engine on regular diesel, wait for the second tank to come to temperature and then switch to straight vegetable oils. Before shutting it down switch back to diesel so the oil does not cool and set in the regular fuel line/pump/filter/injector.
Like this kid is doing, making bio-diesel is a chemical procees, and that one works exactly like diesel.
Emission wise/total polution wide, I don’t know which is better. Running straight oil = less processing of fuel but more burning of stuff, or bio diesel = potantially hazardous processing but emission closer than regular diesel.
The issue I see with this is that is does not scale well. There is just not enough used cooking oil to fuel all the cars on the road.
It might be free for now. You might have a contact that saves it for you, and if only one other person wants it, they might say, gee, someone picks ours up already. This will work for a while until one of the guys says, gee, I will give you a fiver for a #20 can of it.
I can think of many things in my life that have been transformed from waste products to commidities. I know it is very anti make, but if I am saving a lot of cash on an easy process that uses a waste product, I would be the last person to tell anybody else about it.
Also, make folks, not to be niggerdly, but it sucks when you blog stuff in your not free rag. Can we keep the blog stuff free please?
Hi,
Its really great guys Talented teen transforms cooking oil into fuel, Its really so interesting for me, I liked your article guys.
Thanks
It just goes to show that converting waste cooking oil into Biodiesel can be done by anyone as long as they have the interest and willingness to do so. WCO can be the fuel of the near future; with all the grease restaurants and homes produce, without a doubt Biodiesel will be more accessible. As a grease collector in Texas (http://www.1stchoicegrease.com), we understand the importance of grease. Through our collection and transportation service, we bring the WCO or WVO to recycling plants for them to do the conversion. This is our simple way of contributing to a cleaner planet.