Bend Over & Grab Your Ankles...

[Conan71]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071105/ap_on_bi_ge/oil_prices

Might be good news finally for bio-diesel and ethanol, though the consumer is going to take it up the tail-pipe in the short-term until there's better manufacturing and distribution infrastructure for home-grown fuels.

$4.00 a gallon 100% petroleum diesel will make bio-d very competitive, though bio-d producers are creating a glut of glycerine as a by-product from their operations which is proving increasingly harder to get rid of in the quantities they are producing.

[RecycleMichael]

Is your thread title about the cost of fuel or the need to find more uses for glycerine?

[breitee]

It's the fleecing of America.

[Ed W]

Glycerine is an essential ingredient in explosives, if I recall right, so maybe we should just go blow something up...uh...Iran?  Pakistan?  Camden?

[Conan71]

It's under trial with the University of Missouri as a potential cattle feed-stock.  The study started in May and will run through November.

Kind of an interesting concept that no-doubt will have long-term pratfalls and will wind up with all future generations of humans being born naked or some such dreaded side-effect.  Take something which is normally fed to cows, make fuel with it, then feed them the dregs.  Pretty novel, eh?

I was relatively unaware of the glycerine issue until one of the bio-d plants we work with in Colorado started having a problem with how to get rid of large quantities of glycerol which is a combination of glycerine, methanol, and the catalyst in the reaction process, usually (but not always) sodium hydroxide.  Apparently separating out the pure glycerine is the issue with disposal.

[YoungTulsan]

Essential ingredient in explosives...

Fed to cows...

Exploding cows?!

[Ed W]

The cows themselves could be terrorists bent on our udder destruction.  It cud be the end of western civilization, as we know it.  The big dairies are their unwitting accomplices, fellow travelers on the cowpath to Armageddon.

(I gotta cut back on the coffee!)

[RecycleMichael]

Ed:

Smell our dairy air.

[inteller]

those of us in our NGVs are laughing (again).

so will you be asking for a gas card for christmas?