I run my diesel Jeep Liberty on biodiesel. I only have a few minutes, but I'll try to give you a rundown on why we chose to go this way when it was time for us to get a new vehicle. And here are some of my past posts on the subject:
http://www.mothering.com/discussions...&postcount=888http://www.mothering.com/discussions...&postcount=893
If you search the whole forum for biodiesel, you'll find more posts from other people on the topic, too, in various subforums. I describe in one of those how we obtain the fuel, our decision on the vehicle, etc.
We wanted to reduce our reliance on petroleum for transportation, but we also didn't want to give up utility in the vehicle (4WD or AWD for safety on our twisty country roads and occasional off-road stuff, towing capacity, etc.). We considered hybrids, but our main reasons for not choosing that option were:
* they're still dependent on gasoline
* none on the market had the capabilities we wanted
* we were nervous about the unproven lifespan of the hybrid powertrain.
Biodiesel is not an environmentally-perfect option, but there isn't a perfectly "clean" choice at this point. After much consideration, we decided it was the most reasonable of the more-environmentally-friendly-than-gasoline choices for us at this time. Some of our reasons for choosing biodiesel:
* The emissions are much, much lower than petroleum fuel for everything except NOX
* The fuel is carbon-neutral, meaning the carbon released when it's burned is equal to the carbon sequestered from the environment by the plant from which the oil was extracted while it was growing (as opposed to burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon into the atmosphere that has been sequestered underground for millions of years, thereby upsetting the balance of the carbon cycle, which is the lynchpin of the whole global warming deal). The absolute carbon-neutrality of bio-d will vary based on the source of oil used to make it, but in all cases it's better than petroleum.
* We can run biodiesel in a proven, reliable, unconverted diesel engine in a vehicle that has all the utility we want and should last a good 300,000 miles (which is a long, long time for us, since we typically drive about 10,000 - 12,000 miles per year).
* We could make the fuel ourselves, if necessary. The possibility of a serious petroleum shortage/gasoline availability problem is not remote, in our opinions. (OTOH, if we can't get biodiesel for whatever reason, we can still run on petroleum diesel, and while it has a pretty bad name among the environmentally-aware, that's blunted considerably by the fact that diesel engines generally get much higher mileage than gasoline engines, so emissions
per mile aren't as bad as diesel's "dirty" reputation implies. But we hope to never have to run on it for any significant distance, anyway.)
* We have the option of adding the conversion necessary to run this same vehicle on straight veggie oil, and it's very likely we'll do so after the warrantly is up.
As usual, this ended up a lot longer than I intended. Here are some biodiesel links:
http://www.biodieselnow.com/http://www.biodieselcouncil.org/http://www.biodiesel.org/ (this one is a trade organization, so it's more focused on big industry making/using biodiesel than on grassroots and used cooking oil biodiesel)
). It uses the same amount of gas as our 1999 Honda Civic did, but has room for all of us and all of our things. I am not sure what else to tell you. If you are looking for a sedan, then obviously this won't work for you. If you want something bigger, this is the most efficient overall and cheapest on the market.
, but they could start using solar, so hydrogen is a step in the right direction from using oil directly, because it least it has the potential of being oil-free. I know, it's terribly frustrating.
: what AJP said!
