Safe Speed Forums

the "Huge profit" probabally isnt that huge when you consider the turnover.

"Billions" are not a good measure on their own. You need to see what the actual profit as a %age of turnover is.

(I suspect it is not that great, just like supermarket chains)

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Is it me or have prices (esp. of diesel) leapt by ~3p over the weekend?

Did I miss another tax rise?

Derv should be going down, has been a new diesel refinery opened somewhere recently. Red diesel is about 48.5ppl

Fuel duty went up about a month ago that will be the source of the rise in price. I love petrol but I always like to have a diesel car as well as a petrol car because you can make biodiesel and run the diesel off that. Also I am planning to get my car modified to run on vegetable oil. These are both ways of avoiding the government fuel tax. And diesels aren't as slow as you might think either! You can still have high octane (or should that be certane? ) action especially if you fiddle them because diesel lumps are stronger than petty lumps so they have more performance leeway.

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Currently undergoing training with the I.A.M.

The oil price has recently gone up to over $80/barrel and the £ has fallen further against the dollar.

The differential between diesel and petrol has come down from about 10p to 2p over the past year, though.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

80 million barrels a day world wide or about 30 billion a year
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con-energy-oil-consumption

Also what people forget/ignore is that petrol and diesel are not the only products generated by refining. Crude Oil has many different uses and byproducts.

http://energyalmanac.ca.gov/gasoline/whats_in_barrel_oil.html
http://www.royalpacificpetro.com/html/techinfo_crude_oil_yield.htm

Crude Oil Yield

A barrel of crude oil (42 US Gallons) will yield slightly more than 44 gallons of finished refinery products. This is due to the reduction in density of many crude components during processing. Here is the break-down from a "typical" barrel of oil.
Finished Motor Gasoline 19.5 us gallons
Distillate Fuel Oil 8.61 us gallons
Various others 15 us gallons

So a barrel will produce about 75ltrs of petrol and 30 ltrs of diesel. So it looks like about a $2 to $4 a profit per barrel (is that right? )

Yes, you can make biodiesel.
But not at your home you can't.
For a start your home insurance will not cover you for any significant amount of methanol stored/used in domestic premises.
Depending upon the model, your car will run quite well on a 25% mix of vegetable oil to diesel. Any more and you will need to run it as duel-fuel and start on pump diesel then switch to heated vegetable oil....you will then need to remember to switch it back to pump diesel several miles before you stop the engine (the problem is the viscosity....quite apart from the stress thicker oil puts the engine injection system under you have to remember that if the oil is thicker less gets pumped through the injectors).
Biodiesel made by the transesterification process is not suitable for engines made much before 2000.....some have problems with the seals in the system...and much of the oil so made is insufficiently "washed" to remove the byproducts of the process.
Now we come to straight vegetable oil. You can run your car on it. Yes, you can. But not if you buy it from a shop. Let me run this through with you. Oil bought from a shop is FOOD oil....and carries a zero rate of vat. But ONLY if used as a food. If used as a FUEL it then carries the fuel vat rate. Not paying it is tax evasion and is [obviously] illegal !
So: you can get away with using straight vegetable oil (up to 2500 litres a year is [fuel] tax free under the biodiesel simplification scheme) but you have to pay the vat on its use.
I've been running my van on 33% recovered/filtered vegetable oil for two years now....some 3000 litres @ 65p/litre.
It ISN'T as easy as the internet sites make out....you WILL need to change the fuel filters more often than if running on pump diesel.
And if running on rebated diesel.....there are plans to make the smoke test on the diesel mot also cover as a detector for rebated fuels....you should note that if the revenue stop you and your vehicle is "running on red"....you will wave goodbye to the vehicle AND its load...AND pay a hefty fine AND the costs of transport to the impound.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Okay dude, but I would never let them take my beloved car No need to go all strict on me either since I didn't even say I was planning to "run on red" Do you have a set of automated replys for each subject and just choose the most relevant one? And besides, as long as you use under 2500 litres of veggie then you do not have to pay anything more than the retail price, that is common knowledge among people in the know now. P.S., you can make your own biodiesel. Special machines are sold with the ability to do this. There are dozens of adverts in any car magazine for machines ranging from £300 to £1000.

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Currently undergoing training with the I.A.M.

Just cost me 80 quid to fill up the Volvo.

80 ****ing quid.

It's getting stupid.

I have run this through with the people at HMRC.
You CAN use vegetable oil...up to 2500 litres/year...tax free.
BUT you CAN NOT buy it from a shop and use it without paying the vat....
See, I also read the internet stuff....but I thought I'd check it first. So I asked the people who should know....I asked the question about vat on food products (vegetable oil).
Oh, and those nice little "oil heaters" that clamp onto your injector pipes and heat it up by "induction".......don't work.
Before I tried it on my van I asked some nice people about it (they service and repair injector pumps....so I thought they may be the ones to ask).
Very informative....they've had LOADS of injector pumps to repair...many because of people filling the vehicle up with neat vegetable oil...apparently there is a pressure relief bypass valve that bypasses oil to maintain a constant pressure....if the oil is too thick it cannot pass enough oil to relieve the pressure and the pumps gets damaged....seals blow....the trick is to keep the viscosity within the limits the pump is designed to operate at..

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Jomukuk, there are biodiesel machines you can get to produce biodiesel, not heat it up on it's way to the injector pump. The issues you are describing are only for common rail diesel engines not the mechanical ones like I have.

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Currently undergoing training with the I.A.M.

Yes....quite....so is mine....mechanical injector pump.....those are the ones that don't like thicker oil....the common rail ones just pump a lot less thicker oil into the engine...which then does exactly what a petrol engine does when run lean...the biodiesel producers STILL need methanol and sodium hydroxide....and all that for 2500 litres a year ?
Note: if you produce more than 2500 litres per year you must also register your premises and pay duty...on all you produce...once you go over 2500 litres you then need to pay for the lot....
Given the toxicity and extreme volatility of methanol I decided to not bother with transesterification. Especially as my domestic insurer declined to provide a quote for the added risk.
Note also that the residue from the process has to be disposed of properly. The drain is not an option.
All-in-all....I prefer to just filter veggie waste and mix it with pump diesel.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

It's always good to have that fuel flexibility there incase fuel prices spike again.

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Currently undergoing training with the I.A.M.

I can see the temptation, but I'm sceptical of the long-term benefits. In fact, this trend for every man and his dog to try running their diesel car on some home-made concoction (or a mixture of that and pump fuel) is something that's seriously putting me off buying a second hand diesel car. You have no idea what it's been run on and there's always the fear that you'll be left to fork out for the aftermath of someone's "fuel savings".

On the other hand, does anyone know how miscible old veggie oil is with kerosene? I use that for domestic central heating and the temptation to filter our old cooking oil and lob it in the tank is great. The pump for the central heating boiler is only about £60 to replace and the burner jet is a service item anyway. OK, I doubt we'd get enough veggie oil in there to make much of a difference, and it might end up sitting in there for 9 months or so before being burned, but as they say, "every little helps"!

How many bloody chips do you eat that you have enough waste oil to make a saving big enough to dominate the cost of the pump?

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When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Are you sure you use kerosene....the usual fuel oil is "heavy" oil (diesel)(red).
In any case...it makes little difference....the answer to your question is...."don't know".
The problem with "reclaimed" oil is that you do not know what is in it. Some is liquid vegetable oil, some is solid animal-based fats....some is solid vegetable oil...most is a mixture of oil/fat/water/waste solids. That is where the problem lies in processing reclaimed oils.
In your case there are few problems since your chip fat will be vegetable oil and as long as you sieve it to remove solids it should mix well.....and it will burn better as well....the domestic fuel oil has a higher sulphur content than pump fuel...so it will burn cleaner.....(although not much...since you obviously do not have much)

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing

Yes, it's "28 second kerosene" (the "28 second" bit being do do with the viscosity). There is heavier stuff called "35 second kerosene" but the 28 second stuff is by far the most common for domestic central heating. It's not unlike diesel (maybe a bit thinner) and I know that some unscrupulous chaps try to use it as road fuel! I think most diesel engines will run on it but it's not good for the engine and has very poor lubricity so the injection pump isn't likely to live long.

DCB, yes, we don't have a great deal of the stuff - not something that's going to pay for an extra holiday each year! However, we DO have a septic tank which doesn't like having oil /fat / grease chucked down the sink so I thought that for the few gallons a year of veggie oil that we throw out, I could lob it in the central heating tank and kill two birds with one stone!

I like having fuel independence Mole, veggie is 100% legal and does not damage anything in the system. Infact it actually cleans it. This is true of both veggie and biodiesel. It was even in an edition of Car Mechanics magazine.

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Currently undergoing training with the I.A.M.

I'm all for fuel independence too - but not at the cost of an injection pump! I work with several of the major manufacturers and their view on this is most certainly different to the magazine you mention! In fact, even most of the advocates of veggie oil and biodiesel advocate changing the filters more often, so I doubt it "cleans" anything! One manufacturer I work with has recently completed a load of tets on a particular supermarket chain's own "B30" (30% biodiesel mixed with regular mineral diesel). Other major manufacturers won't even allow that on their newer "Euro IV" diesel engines. I freely admit I don't know enough about it to make an informed decision myself, but I can't see what they'd stand to loose by advocating biodiesel in their products if it didn't do any harm. It's not like they are owned by the petrochemical companies! In fact, they'd probably get extra sales from the greenies if they DID say it was OK. The only language these guys understand is the "bottom line". That reinforces my suspicion that they are scared of big warranty payouts if they tell everyone it's OK to use the stuff.

It is only legal if you either use LESS than 2500 litres, or use more and pay the tax. And the biodiesel simplification scheme is up for review next year.
All manufacturers will tell you (and have already said it several times) that their warranty is void if run on anything other than pump diesel (most are wary of the B5 diesel)
The ONLY time you can say that running on 100% vegetable oil is "safe" is if it is the SAME viscosity (at all temperatures) as pump diesel. At -20C soya oil is many times thicker than pump diesel and rapeseed oil is as well.
I change my fuel filter at 5000 miles....and it needs it as well...I can see that by the gunge in the bottom of the bowl.
Don't make it out to be better than it is....at the end of the day the fuel injection systems are designed to be used with oils of a specific viscosity (+-)....all food oils and most biodiesel blends fall outside that range.

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The world runs on oil, period. No other substance can compete when it comes to energy density, flexibility, ease of handling, ease of transportation. If oil didn’t exist we would have to invent it.”

56 years after it was decided it was needed, the Bedford Bypass is nearing completion. The last single carriageway length of it.We have the most photogenic mayor though, always being photographed doing nothing