BioWillie pens a biodiesel book

Posted by Sarah van Schagen at 3:54 PM on 19 Aug 2007

Willie Nelson is talking about biodiesel again. This time in book form, and the result is On the Clean Road Again: Biodiesel and the Future of the Family Farm.

The 90-some-page pocket-size book (it's like a li'l Willie you can carry with you everywhere!) is divided into two parts: the past (or the history of petroleum) and the future (in Willie's world, that's biodiesel). Thankfully there's also an afterword to talk about the other future ... you know, wind and solar and hydro, etc.

Aside from the cover image of Willie (in chaps!) holding two gas-pump nozzles like sharpshooters, my favorite part of the book (which, ahem, I haven't actually read) is a comparison of the recipes for petroleum v. biodiesel.

Enjoy:

Petroleum versus Biodiesel

Mother Earth's Recipe for Petroleum

Ingredients:
170 quadrillion tons algae
252 billion tons (approximately) dinosaurs
1 dash or sprinkling of various other prehistoric animals and vegetation (chef's choice)

Instructions:
In a very large cooking pan, also known as an ocean, cover ingredients generously with warm salty water. All algae, dinosaurs, and vegetation will eventually settle to the bottom, creating a roux.

Cover completely with heavy layers of silt, shale, and muck.

Cook at 400 degrees for 100 million years.

The mixture will eventually turn into a hard rock, and, when stirred, an oily substance will bubble out. Cover the oil with a piece of sandstone (if sandstone isn't available, any porous rock will do). Next, cover the oily sandstone with a clean nonpermeable rock and simmer continuously for another 200 million years, stirring occasionally.

Yield: At least 2 trillion barrels oil*

*Note: May be difficult and costly to remove from pan

...

Willie's Blender Biodiesel

Prep time: 20 minutes

Clean up: Varies considerably

Ingredients:
200 milliliters methanol (caution: can make you go blind)
3.5 grams lye
1 liter vegetable oil

Instructions:
Place methanol and lye in blender. Blend. Stop. Blend some more. You have now created sodium methoxide. The sides of the blender should be getting hot. At this point, the mixture can eat through your skin and the fumes are explosive and dangerous to inhale. Have the fire extinguisher and a telephone handy.

Pour vegetable oil in with the sodium methoxide. Blend for 15 minutes. Cheaper blenders can and will fall apart during this process of continuous blending. I like to sing to the mixture right about now. Any good country song will do -- something with a good beat. Stop blending and singing after 15 minutes. If done correctly, two layers will form. The bottom layer is glycerin, a by-product of the procedure, and the other layer is biodiesel. The glycerin can be safely composted or made into soap to clean up the mess in the kitchen.

Yield: 1 liter biodiesel

For story: BioWillie pens a biodiesel book
9 Comments | Post a Comment

Great

It will probably make the New York Times best seller list, right behind the Left Behind series.

In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world

by biodiversivist at 9:49 PM on 19 Aug 2007

His Ingredients

His Ingredients get a bit more complicated when you consider

The material to make the methanol, was natural gas.
The material to make the fertilizers for the soybeans, was natural gas.
The energy to process the soybean crushing, was natural gas (or worse coal)
The energy to move that product to their station was diesel.
And as a result by taking soy off the market, new soybeans are grow in the Amazon rain forest.

The Algae part might work though.

by GreyFlcn at 10:37 PM on 19 Aug 2007
[ Parent ]

dinosaurs on the go!

How much of "fossil fuel" is animal remains, and how much is plant remains?

As once a kid who got into dinosaurs and other prehistoric critters a long long time ago, through a stamp book that my father brought home to me from our local Sinclair station (Sinclair no longer exists on the East Coast, though, and it is always a bitter-sweet bit of nostalgia when I travel west of the Mississippi, as I did recently, and see that cutely curvey, but stupid, shit-green brontosaurus), I was impressed by this:

<<
252 billion tons (approximately) dinosaurs
1 dash or sprinkling of various other prehistoric animals and vegetation (chef's choice)
>>

How much do we know, really, about the animal remains that went into our petroleum? I had always thought that the original organic matter was wood, or other plant-stuff.

It rather should surprise us, that we do not have show-offs boasting that they are driving with pure T-rex, or V-raptor, or Trike. And in their yachts, they only use Liopleurodon; in their jet-skis, the finest Ichthyosaur.

As for Willie Nelson: He is a great musician, and a great performer. His rendition of "He Was a Friend of Mine" is perhaps the deepest part of the soundtrack of "Brokeback Mountain." It is too bad that he got into this biofuels promotion thing, which is not to the liking of all of us. Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that his heart is in the right place.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 11:42 PM on 19 Aug 2007

Dinosaurs eat plants

Dinosaurs eat plants.

And if they eat other dinosaurs, well those dinosaurs eat plants.

It's all plant matter originally.
Aside from perhaps bacteria that feeds off of inorganic minerals and heat.

by GreyFlcn at 12:21 AM on 20 Aug 2007
[ Parent ]

OK, but it is a bit more complicated ...

The earliest animals that we know much about, right after the Cambrian explosion, seem well adapted to eating other animals. And not plants. Herbivory is a practice that seems to require some sophistication, shall we say.

The earliest dinosaurs, known from fossils in South America and southern Africa, are apparently carnivorous.

That is why the study of dinosaurs is not a boring biological dead-end. All dinosaurs evolved from small bipedal carnivores, and yet they exhibited some of the most amazing quadrupedal herbivores that ever evolved, in the course of their very long dominance of terrestrial fauna.

The sauropods (e.g. Diplodocus, and Brachiosaurus) (of the Saurischia) must have had huge, terrific guts, which of course do not fossilize, so we can only speculate what their digestion was like. The presence of collections of polished stones within the rib cages of some fossilized sauropods suggests that the animals swallowed stones for use in grinding up plant material, in some inner organ.

As for the herbivorous hadrosaurs (e.g. Parasaurolophus) and ceratopians (e.g. Triceratops) (of the Ornithischia), their food-processing teeth were probably the most sophisticated of any teeth that ever evolved in any vertebrate group. (My dentist, strangely, is not at all interested in this.)

To reduce the analysis of fossil fuels to a sense of "it is all plants, basically, so the animals do not matter," sort of kills the fun. Plus, it looks anti-intellectual. Let us learn what we can learn. And let us understand that whatever we can learn about any living creature is a precious gem of knowledge, for which we should be very grateful.

Chickens deserve our true friendship! So do fish! So do other sentient beings! Let us learn to be kind.

by caniscandida at 1:41 AM on 20 Aug 2007

Biowillie conned again

Family farms with wind machines, solar, and biogas replacing the GHG grid. That will save them, not biodiesel fuel farmed in the devestated tropics. Slashed and burned to put in palm plantations.

Poor biowillie, conned just like Branson and Gates. Thousandaires (like willie) or billionaires, they all fall for the same propaganda.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

by amazingdrx at 6:22 AM on 20 Aug 2007

Roll A Fat Pipe

If only they could make oil from weed, then Willie Nelson could satisfy both his goals in life.

Texeme.Construct(function(x)=Participation(x))

by jabailo at 4:52 PM on 20 Aug 2007

Boutique fuels

I love the joke about "Willie Weed." You can smoke it, you can pump it!

Anyway, bio-diesel pretty much a "boutique" fuel. So far most fleets are blending it with diesel maybe 10 to 80 percent. Each kind of source material, from French-fry grease to rapeseed, has different carbon foot-prints, emission levels, and fuel qualities (some cause gummy residues and readily grow algae). Interestingly enough, because of increased efficiency, NOX exhaust emissions can actually go up 2-5%, not good in certain ozone areas.

I suppose that any clean fuels are a good idea, but having lots of very small, marinalized boutique refiners doesn't seen to make sense to me. /sammie

Onward through the fog

by Sam Wells at 11:33 AM on 21 Aug 2007

Actually you can, but

If only they could make oil from weed, then Willie Nelson could satisfy both his goals in life.

Technically you can, catch being it's worse than Soybeans.
http://greyfalcon.net/hemp.png

Ironically though it would probably make a decent food product.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaHoIhjUsxM

by GreyFlcn at 12:57 PM on 21 Aug 2007
[ Parent ]

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