MPC
When people talk about gasoline/fuel alternatives, most automatically think of ethanol. While it has it's good points, generating enough ethanol to quench America's gasoline addiction is still a long way off. It is not yet cost effective and there is not nearly enough corn out there to replace the 400 million gallons of gasoline we use daily. To answer to the gas-replacement problem, we could try and utilize multiple types of fuel coming from a variety of sources. Aside from ethanol, another huge potential fuel is biodiesel. It is completely biodegradable. It can be used as is with any diesel engine currently in operation. It can be mixed with petroleum-derived diesel fuel. Too good to be true? So yes, there is a drawback. While it can be made very efficiently in a single step process using any seed oil (rapeseed oil, soybean oil, etc), making said seed oil requires huge amounts of land and resources. The U.S. itself only produces about 6 million gallons of soybean oil annually and while ethat seems like a lot, we use over 600 million gallons of diesel every year. Not even a drop in the bucket.This has led people to look into alternative food oil sources which can be used to generate biodiesel in a similar manner. One option is to use animal fat/oil. Tyson (the meat packing people most well-known for processing chicken) alone apparently produces 300 million gallons of beef, pork and chicken fat each year. Also, producing one 42-gallon barrel of renewable diesel requires about one barrel of animal fat. Apparently, each barrel requires, on average, two steers, or 16 hogs or 1,300 chickens. Using this info, the vice prez of my company did some quick calculations and came up with this:
If it takes 1,300 chickens to get one barrel of diesel fuel, and one barrel is 42 gallons, that’s 31 chickens to generate one gallon. At around 30 mpg fuel efficiency for most smaller cars, that’s one chicken per mile.
We should switch MPG to MPC.
Also, since BackBlog (my previous comment section provider) seems to have dropped the ball on blog comments, I have decided to turn on Blogger's own commenting system. Hopefully, this will be more reliable.
