[horselover]

Cool. You haven't gone to find those vehicles yet? If I could I'd go out myself, but I don't have much time nor do I have a digital camera.

[shadowbot]

No I havent yet, I have a camera but the difficult part is finding a chunk of time to go on a mission that I dont know exactly how long it will take. I'll definitely get around to it though.

[horselover]

That's cool. I know how hard it is to find time to do things. My schedule makes it hard to do anything exept on Friday's and Saturday's.

[shadowbot]

Ok so Dufferin, west side of the street, south of wilson around lawrence or eglington. I think I got all that.

[horselover]

Cool. I hope you find it. I'll check back when I've got internet access again, or you can send me a pm if you find it. Whatever is easiest.

[shadowbot]

Ok. I passed by dufferin up to saint clair didnt see anything.

[savinggreen]

There are loads of grassroots projects using cooking oil. I remember reading about one a few years back in outside magazine (http://outside.away.com/outside/feat..._grease_1.html). Note don't try to put cooking oil in a gasoline engine!

On a larger scale, the whole world is moving toward finding ways to bring biodiesel into the regular market. Biodiesel is like a veg oil, and is typically blended with diesel. in northern climates, a 100% veg oil or biodiesel blend is not really practical as it tends to gel in the cold. But lighter blends - typically B5 to B20 - are feasible. There are currently 3 retail biodiesel pumps in Canada (that i know of): 1 in Ottawa and 2 in Toronto. Got a diesel VW or Smart car? here's the link to the company that produces the biodiesel (http://www.topiaenergy.com/). look under 'where to buy' for the addressses of the retail outlets. Many federal, provincial and municipal governments are filling their bulk tanks with biodiesel for their fleets. Anyone know of other retail biodiesel pumps?

FYI - currently Canada is in the process of working out the details of legislation that will require 5% average renewable content in gasoline and diesel. The whole initiative is not without issues, though. Gasoline will get its renewable content from ethanol, which can be great. Unfortunately, most ethanol in Canada is made from corn, and the process of converting corn to ethanol is very inefficient. In places like Brazil, ethanol is a great option because it is made from sugar cane - a very efficient process. Biodiesel seems to be more efficient in terms of processing, but can be problematic, as in extremely cold climates, additives are required to ensure that it doesn't gel (and leave you stranded on the highway at -40). Often the additive is jet fuel, which means the benefit of blending in the biodiesel is pretty much offset.

Its by no means perfect at this point, but at least its evolving.

[horselover]

It would definately be north of St. Clair. Not sure exactly where, but it's there. Somewhere close by the dealerships. I wish I remembered exactly where but I don't.

[Matt Kuzma]

I've looked into the cooking oil thing a little and this is what I've found.

First of all, running a diesel engine on cooking oil isn't a very different concept from biodiesel and there are a number of designs out there to process used fryer oil into biodiesel
.

Biodiesel from used oil and pressed fresh from soybeans is a good alternative to regular diesel in the sense that it reduces our dependence on oil and is greenhouse-gas-neutral, meaning that whatever greenhouse gasses it contributes to the atmosphere were pulled out very recently by the plants that produced that oil, unlike fossil fuels. So from a Global Warming perspective and a Foreign Oil perspective, it's good.

The one big concern is that burning oil and biodiesel generates huge quantity of oxides of nitrogen, which are serious pollutants and terrible human health threats. It's possible to modify the engines and carburetors to reduce the pollution levels, but you can't eliminate them as far as I know. So it isn't 100% good. And if too many people start using these fuels without modification, the pollution could be pretty bad. As a result, in the US at least, the EPA has started looking at regulating the use of those fuels.

[Sophie]

There were quite a few people using it in the UK at one time, but apparently the police could spot them because their vehicles smelled like mobile fish fryers.

The government have appeared to pick up on it now and if you are using oil as a motor fuel you have to pay that level of tax on it, which actual makes it more expensive than ordinary diesel.

There is also a chain of garages that sell official bio-diesel, but yet again, the government intervened, I think late last year, and now that is more expensive than ordinary fuel.

It seems that the big corporations are looking into producing the bio-fuels and they are protecting the market until they can enter it in a big way.