BioDiesel for all

In recent years we all experienced a dramatic increase in food prices, and many blame the biofuel industry, to exhaust our basic crops, using it for fuel instead of food. Although partially true, here presented 3 claims that will show why I believe that the reasons for food prices boost is not due to biofuels:


1. The rise in food prices due to the increase in crops prices are still greater by a huge extent (200%) relative to the use and production of biofuels.

2. Most of the increase in food prices and shortening of food, in such a short period of time is correlated to the increase in life style in developing countries like China and India, and to increase in demand, and not decrease in food production.

3. A lot of the biofuel production comes from recycled oil or inedible crops. Moreover, the demand for alternative fuels increasing the need of production of better crops and better agricultural techniques, causing an increase in the efficiency of crops production.

As a whole, I believe that promoting biofuels will eventually be excellent for the food industry, since it will give a new focus of better agriculture.

Autor: mattyos

The processing of biodiesel may require a number of biodiesel filters in order to ensure that the end product is of excellent quality. When you try to recycle waste vegetable or surplus corn oil and make them into biodiesel, you might need a biodiesel filter for your engine to make sure that contaminants can't enter into the engine and damage it. Different biodiesel filters may be required for a number of different applications.

Biodiesel filters should have the following properties in order to work best in any given conditions:

1. High Temperature Properties. Almost any filter media can be used for water-based products. But in the case of filtering hot oils, resins and other high temperature products, a filter media that can withstand prolonged exposure to high temperatures is preferred. Biodiesel filters should be able to have excellent high temperature properties to be able to handle the filtration of biodiesel well enough.

2. Excellent Filtering. Biodiesel filters should be able to filter out the contaminants well enough in order to make a better grade product. All filters have a micron rating that determines the size of the particles that can be effectively captured by the filter media. A biodiesel filter having a 5 micron rating is preferred to provide excellent filtering properties.

3. Chemical Compatibility. A biodiesel filter should be able to withstand exposure to such chemicals as solvents, acids and alkaline solutions. A lesser quality filter may break down when exposed to such chemicals. Make sure that the biodiesel filter that you use has the property to withstand breaking down when exposed to such chemicals.

Biodiesel has become a very popular fuel alternative to petroleum-based fuel today. That is why more and more people are trying to make use of biodiesel in order to lessen their reliance on fuels based on fossil oil, which can pollute the environment. With biodiesel, people have the option to make use of a cleaner alternative. Here are just some of the key advantages of using biodiesel:

1. The use of biodiesel produces at least an 80 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions. Not only that, biodiesel contains little or even no sulfur content that can result in as much as a hundred percent less sulfur dioxide being released in the air.

2. Biodiesel is the only alternative fuel available that can run in any conventional diesel engine. Other alternative fuels such as waste or straight vegetable oil may require your diesel engines to be modified. This is not so with biodiesel. Anyone can use biodiesel immediately to fuel any conventional diesel engine today.

3. Biodiesel contain less unwanted contaminants that can do some damage to diesel engines. Biodiesel also has better lubricating properties than petroleum-based diesel and can help protect and extend the life of diesel engines. It's a better solvent than petro-diesel and may therefore help clean the fuel lines and the engine itself by dissolving fuel residues and flush them out.

4. Biodiesel in non-toxic. It is safer to handle and transport. It is also highly biodegradable and has a higher flashpoint than conventional diesel.

5. Biodiesel can be produced from renewable oilseed crops such as soybeans, canola and mustard seed. As a renewable resource, production of this alternative fuel can go on and on as long as cultivation of such crops is continued. There is also research being done in trying to raise and harvest oil-rich algae as another source for the production of biodiesel.

About the Author

Matthew runs a site dedicated to the latest biodiesel news at http://www.biodieselfuelonline.com

Autor: mattyos

If you are looking for a way to save on your fuel costs, it's time for you to take a look at the different fuel alternatives available for you. Petroleum prices have been steadily growing with oil getting more expensive in the world market. Before you find yourself worrying about the rising prices, it's very welcome news that there are some alternatives that you can consider to alleviate your fuels expenses.

One of the more promising fuel alternatives available today is biodiesel. Biodiesel is processed fuel that derives from biological sources such as vegetable oils and animal fats. Biodiesel as a processed fuel differentiates it from the use of straight vegetable oil or waste vegetable oil as alternative fuels.

Another advantage of biodiesel is that it can be readily used in current diesel engines as a fuel unlike straight vegetable oil fuel which may require the same diesel engines to be modified.

Biodiesel is also seen as an environmentally friendly alternative. It's both biodegradable and non-toxic. It has low sulfur content and produces fewer particle emissions than your conventional petroleum based diesel fuel.

What's more, the process of making biodiesel fuel has been extensively developed to a point that it is now possible to produce this alternative fuel right in your own home. There are now biodiesel kits made available to allow you as well as other consumers to make your own biodiesel to use.

If you're really concerned with trying to bring down your expenses on fuel, investing on a biodiesel kit might be a wise decision. A biodiesel kit is simply a system that you can use to convert waste or straight vegetable oil into an alternative fuel that you can effectively use in your diesel-engined cars.

Most biodiesel kits are portable enough that you can set it up anywhere in your home. But most people prefer to set it up on vacant outdoor space such as a tool shed or just under an overhang.

So why should you buy a biodiesel kit? There are a number of reasons. One is to save money. With a diesel kit, you may be able to make your own alternative fuel which will be able to help you save about two dollars per gallon.

You will be able to produce and make use of cleaner and better quality diesel which can be a benefit to the environment. With biodiesel, you can also make your car engine run better on a cleaner alternative fuel which in turn can also help your car engine run longer. Not only will you be saving on fuel costs, you're also helping the environment instead on contributing to its demise.

There are more reasons in store that will help you decide in getting your own biodiesel kit. You might be able to produce more biodiesel than you can use and sell it instead to make money.

By producing your own fuel with your own biodiesel kit, you no longer have to rely on oil companies for fuel. You never have to worry about the rising costs of conventional fuel. You can even produce biodiesel as fuel to produce electricity for your home or office. With all of these reasons, you can now look at a biodiesel kit as a worthwhile investment.

By LAURA LAYDEN (Contact)
April 5, 2008

The roots for a new energy crop in Southwest Florida have been planted.

In LaBelle, a company called My Dream Fuel LLC is cultivating Jatropha curcas, a tree-shrub that shows promise as a new biodiesel crop in the U.S. that could one day power engines and generators.

Nearly 1 million seedlings are in the ground at a nursery in Hendry County and promoters are looking for farmers – here and across the country – to raise them as oil-producing plants.

Researchers say the plant can produce four times more fuel per acre than soy, and 10 times more than corn.

The demand for oil from the plant already is strong, said Paul Dalton, a former child advocate and attorney who owns My Dream Fuel.

“There are about 100 buyers for every gallon you produce,” he said.

His company soon will open a $1.5 million, 15,000-square-foot center for seed crushing and plant cloning at the State Farmers’ Market off Edison Avenue in Fort Myers.

The Jatropha tree, native to Mexico and Latin America, has been grown in other countries, such as India and Africa, for fuel and medicine. It produces fruit with oily seeds that can be crushed to make biodiesel.

In India, there are large plantations with millions of Jatropha trees and My Dream Fuel has a contract with the government to train 1,500 farmers to grow the trees. In China, there are now more than 1 million acres of Jatropha growing.

Locally, Dalton has so much faith in the trees that he expects to put another 1 million in the ground in LaBelle before June.

His company is one of the first to do large plantings of trees in the U.S., he said.

Some of the trees came from a cloning plant in Mysore, India, and some came from the company’s own testing program.

The cloning plant here will be able to churn out plants at the rate of 1 million a month, Dalton said.

“We studied our mother trees that we use to clone for over six years, and we have over 500 of them. So we have the largest bank of mother trees in the world, of any company,” he said.

In Southwest Florida and across the state, more crushing plants are planned to keep up with the expected growth in demand for Jatropha oil.

In Collier County, the small farming town of Immokalee is being scoped as a possible site for a processing plant that would produce biodiesel from the oil.

Leading that effort is Golden Gate Estates resident Dave Wolfley, the owner of Sunshine Biofuels, a start-up company formed two years ago to build an alternative fuel plant.

The biggest issue had been finding the feedstock.

Jatropha is just what Wolfley has been searching for.

“There is a ton of money in it,” he said.

He’s searching for large landowners in Southwest Florida who are willing to give Jatropha a try. He said he’s found a few, but he won’t reveal their names.

Concerned about pollution and the country’s dependence on foreign oil, Wolfley has developed a small processing plant in his garage where he uses waste vegetable oil from restaurants to cook up his own biodiesel to fuel a Jeep and a Ford pickup truck.

Dalton expects his seedlings to go quickly. Last year, his company sold its entire inventory of about 12,000 trees in four days, he said. Back then, the trees were in pots and there wasn’t a nursery.

“We know of a couple of groups from New York and from Spain that want to plant in Texas and Brazil. So in the next couple of weeks, we may exhaust our current supply,” Dalton said.

In Southwest Florida, Dalton is targeting citrus growers with diseased trees and cattle ranchers looking to diversify.

The dreaded canker and greening diseases have left thousands of acres of citrus land sitting bare, which could be used to grow the new energy crop. The hardy Jatropha is more resistant to disease and can survive a three-year drought.

The Jatropha crop has the potential to be more profitable than citrus, Dalton said.

The average farmer can gross a little more than $2,000 an acre annually at current prices, and the plants live 40 to 50 years, he said.

The main expense for the grower is the plant itself. A seedling costs $3, with a $2 planting fee.

My Dream Fuel offers to plant and harvest the trees mechanically for growers. Under the arrangement, growers prepare the fields and maintain them. The plants require an occasional watering and virtually no fertilizing.

“It’s such an easy tree to care for. It doesn’t really require much at all,” Dalton said.

For the first 500 gallons of oil produced, larger growers get all the profits. After that, there’s a sharing arrangement.

In all, My Dream Fuel has about 1.5 million trees in the ground in Southwest Florida.

Eight months ago, Dalton donated 1,500 seedlings to Lee County for several test plots, including one on a nearly 1-acre farm in the Buckingham area.

LaBelle Grove Management in Hendry County also purchased young trees for an experiment of its own.

The test projects have gone well, Dalton said.

A few other growers are trying Jatropha in Southwest Florida, but they’re keeping it quiet, in part because they want to stay ahead of the competition, he said.

Ron Hamel, executive vice president of the Gulf Citrus Growers Association, representing growers in a five-county region, said he hasn’t heard that growers are jumping all over the idea.

But the potential for a new crop has created a buzz in the industry.

“I haven’t heard anything negative about it,” Hamel said.

Locally, environmentalists don’t seem to be raising a big fuss about Jatropha.

“If it lives up to its promise of being a very productive source for biofuel, then great,” said Brad Cornell, a policy advocate for Audubon of Florida and the Collier County Audubon Society.

The society doesn’t support growing corn for ethanol because there’s no efficient way to do it, and there are concerns about greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

Roy Beckford, an agricultural and natural resource agent for the University of Florida/IFAS in Lee County, has pushed Jatropha as an alternative crop for South Florida growers for years.

He said it’s actually good for the environment because one acre of plantings, which is about 600 trees, will remove four metric tons of carbon dioxide gas from the air a year.

Beckford is overseeing several experiments with Jatropha in Lee County. He’s also working with a few farmers with plans to grow the trees commercially on 10-acre plots in North Fort Myers and Arcadia.

One grower in Lee County has set aside 200 acres for the promising crop, Beckford said.

“Certainly in our area we are kind of pioneering this whole thing,” he said.

By Frank Tate



Have you ever noticed that a herd of lembu or cows, all tend to move together in the same direction? Have you often wondered why this phenomenon occurs?



Imagine that you are taking a slow and leisurely drive along one of Malaysia�s lovely scenic country roads, away from the speeding juggernauts and cars on the North South highway. As you drive, you take in all the rolling fields of lalang, oil palm plantations stretching as far as the eye can see. Suddenly, something catches your attention. It�s a herd of lembu up ahead, in a nearby open field. Curiosity gets the better of you and you park off the road to investigate further. And there, you stand beside your car, in the middle of nowhere, watching the herd instinct in action.



For unexplained reasons, you scramble towards a low wooden fence and catch up to the lembu as the herd slowly makes its way across the field of lalang. Curious as to why they would all move in the same direction, you look towards the center of the herd and wonder aloud: "Why are all the lembu walking in this particular direction, as if on auto pilot?"



When I ask this question at all my seminars, the response I hear from delegates from all over the world is invariably the same: "They're all moving in the same direction because everybody else is!"



People and organizations too are like this herd of lembu. They too are strongly influenced by the direction of the surrounding herd. Just take a look at the behavior of some NGO's in the developed world.



First, we have the so-called Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Helmed by its Executive Director, the infamous Michael Jacobson, and backed by an annual budget in excess of US$16 million, CSPI has launched disinformation campaigns against Malaysian Palm Oil. In fact, so disingenuous has been Jacobson's claims that he has earned the rare distinction of being called various things in the media � ranging from the benign "Consumer Advocate" to the less flattering Nutrition Terrorist, Terrorist, Food Fascist, Food Cop, Killjo�, Food Nazi etc. In fact, the latter labels appear with such stunning regularity in the media that few men could have been so definitively defined.



Jacobson, to put it mildly, is guilty of utter disregard for the truth and scientific facts, frequently exaggerating figures and claims to advance CSPI's own agenda



Having failed in a campaign in the eighties to portray palm oil as unhealthy, Jacobson and CSPI have been racking their collective brains as to how to discredit what is, inherently, healthy oil. Health claims or the converse, �un-healthy� claims, of course, have to be backed by rational science. However, these are matters that CSPI, despite their grandiose and associative-scientific sounding name, would have difficulty in delivering. Throwing figures and �facts� that would fail to pass muster for a secondary school science project, CSPI recklessly and with gay abandon, continues to launch fresh attacks, this time targeting the sustainability of oil palm cultivation. They argue, most deviously, that oil palm plantations have led to the destruction of rainforests and consequently, have deprived orang utans of their natural habitat. Interesting. Perhaps, even persuasive. If not, for the facts!



The superior sustainability of the Malaysian palm oil industry is patently obvious, and it is clear that the Malaysian oil palm cultivation is superior to any large scale agriculture in the tropics or the temperate countries in terms of sustainability parameters. The plantation industry is professionally managed, with many of them such as IOI Corporation, Golden Hope, PPB Group and KL Kepong, operating as listed corporations on the Malaysian stock market where corporate governance and corporate responsibility are well practiced more than farm activities in other parts of the world. The Palm Oil Truth Foundation (www.palmoiltruthfoundation.com) has sought to remedy the misconception that palm oil contributes to deforestation and enlighten the world of the fact that the Malaysian Palm Oil industry has always adopted sustainable cultivation best practices, including conservation and replanting. The MPOC, in fact has set up a US$5 Million Conservation Fund to assist in wild-life conservation.



But Jacobson understands the lembu phenomenon and knows that the herd instinct will take over. And sure enough, the NGO�s and other organizations have taken the bait and like the proverbial lembu, have predictably, blindly followed the herd.



First, the BBC sent a film crew to film the so�called deforestation and habitat loss of the Orang Utans. Then the NGO�s added their voices to the irrational chorus of calls for consumers to avoid palm oil products as they had allegedly come from unsustainable sources. The Friends of the Earth, a UK NGO alleges that �the palm oil industry is now considered by scientists as the biggest threat to the Orang Utan�! Scientists? Which scientists? The pseudo-scientists from the verbose sounding �Center for Science in the Public Interest�? It was almost hilarious to watch documentary after documentary warning of the dangers of palm oil because of the damage caused by the humble oil to Orang Utan habitats. Hilarious because nothing could be further from the truth, at least as far as Malaysia is concerned!



Comprehensive policies and laws on environmental protection are in place in Malaysia and are strictly enforced by the Department of Environment. Endangered species, including Orang Utans, needing protection are given priority with strong conservation programs put in place. Sabah, with a growing palm oil industry and one of the largest states in Malaysia had drafted a master list of protected areas based on the guidelines of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). In fact, 21.8% of Sabah is now protected, more than double the 10% recommended by the IUCN. It is also interesting to note that the Malaysian Palm oil industry is the prime mover for the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil to encourage best practices and to minimize any adverse impact on the environment by the industry, long before the latest shenanigans initiated by CSPI started.





Almost all oil palm expansion in Malaysia is pursued through the conversion of existing rubber, cocoa and coconut plantations or from logged over forest areas which have been earmarked for agriculture. Moreover, out of the total land area of 30.2 million hectares, only 6 million hectares have been designated for agriculture under the Third Malaysia Agricultural Plan. Oil palm cultivation falls well within the area zoned for agriculture. Ironically, the area still under forest cover remains at well over 60 %, certainly much higher than that of the developed nations from which all this brouhaha over Orang Utan habitats are originating.



Recently, the European Free Alliance MEP�s together with an MEP grouping known as The Greens in the European Parliament (together, they form the 4th largest grouping in the European Parliament) lent their not inconsiderable voice to the issue. Lobbying the European Parliament�s �Industry, Technology, Research and Energy Committee�, which is tasked with proposing energy policies with an agreed EU target of 25% biomass renewables by 2020, this grouping managed to get the Energy committee to include, inter alia an amendment to �ban the use of palm oil for feeding our cars� due to the �lack of environmental standards and safeguards� leading to �an increase in tropical deforestation�, whilst �failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly�! Couching their proposal in euphemistic language, and this really takes the cake, the grouping went on to justify their proposal on the basis that the emergence of a European biofuels sector would offer opportunities for biofuel technology transfer to developing countries crippled by rising oil prices! It is this last statement that gives a clue as to the grouping�s real agenda and intentions. The proposal is designed to protect their turf, to protect the European biofuel sector! So much for all the WTO rules against protectionism.



It is about time that the world wakes up to such insidious and deceptive campaigns and that can only be achieved when the world develops the discernment to see through the veil and stop being lembus. That may be counter-intuitive but the herd instinct can only be overcome through education and clear branding and communication programs. Programs that will, ultimately, expose the lies and half-truths that appear to be the penchant and almost exclusive purview of CSPI and others of their ilk.

A very nice movie presenting biodiesel driven motorcycle, Thsi is a very cool application recommended!



That is a good inspiration for us.
Thanks.