A gas station in every back yard

Biodiesel is basically vegetable oil with the sticky stuff removed. People making their own biodiesel at home typically start with used cooking oil from some restaurant. You can use soybeans, corn, sometimes sewage, or any of a million oily plant or animal fat to cut out the restaurant step.

I'm hearing some really good things about biodiesel. Remember the corn shortages from ethanol? That sort of thing doesn't happen as much with biodiesel because different parts of the plant form the fuel. Most diesel vehicles or generators or pumps or what have you will just use biodiesel straight out of the spigot, without modification.

Biodiesel burns cleaner than standard diesel. The efficiency isn't the same, but it is like 80 or 90 percent. That sounds like something that can change. Besides, you can grow it in your back yard. I've heard that making biodiesel is on par with making beer. The process is different, but the skills involved are similar. I do not know how much land you need to grow a year's supply of juice. I have no idea how big a tank or what other equipment is involved. I bet you could grow your own for less than it costs to buy it from a dealer. Especially if you spread the cost over a couple of years.

One guy's 77 cents

A few questions

Land. Will farm land get more expensive? Depending on how many liters you get to the acre, I bet this sort of thing could take off and huge companies would start snatching up what ever land will produce plants that will work for the process.There is also talk of using bacteria to make biodiesel from even less usable plant matter. Perhaps even trash. . Wouldn't it be nice to have a Bionator 3000 (tm) sitting outside your garage where you threw your trash. Inside the garage, on the other side of the wall, you had a mini gas pump.The Bionator 3000. It slices it dices it eats the grass clippings and pees biodiesel. "Back to the Future" eat your heart out

Taxes. How is the government going to tax home grown biodiesel? I have friends who make their own beer. Did you know something like 65% of the cost of a beer is tax? I'll have to verify that number. When they make their own beer, they pay no tax except on supplies and equipment. I wonder how long the same would occur if say FedEx started growing their own biodiesel. If FedEx does the process from start to finish and only puts the stuff in the tanks of their own trucks, would they pay tax on the fuel itself?

Tax exempt entities. How about coops? If a group of people, farmers for example, get together and create a biodiesel coop, as long as they consume their own fuel, how would that work? Churches still pay tax on gas when they pull up to the pump. What about church or charity biodiesel? Could they swap some homemade biodiesel for a donation?

Infrastructural taxes. The purpose of the gas tax is to pay for roads and infrastructure for the roads. That is the idea any way. If I'm a guy on some land with a diesel truck and a home brewery, how am I to pay taxes on the fuel? If I make enough fuel to drive around in my truck on the roads, I'm not paying the normal fuel taxes, and thus not supporting that infrastructure. Same goes for electricity. If I am good at making biodiesel and can make enough to run my house off a generator and not the power grid, then I should not pay the same taxes on that amount of biodiesel because I'm not using the existing electricity infrastructure.

That second bit goes for plug in hybrids too. If you put gas in you plug in hybrid car, you are paying for the road infrastructure. If you put electricity out of the wall/grid in the same hybrid car, you are not paying for the roads and bridges. Maybe that is why it is so difficult to get real electric cars on the roads.

A solution for this discrepancy is to stop charging taxes on fuel and start taxing the roads and bridges. That will go over like a new tax in an election year. Short of putting toll booths everywhere, thats not going to work in the near future. Besides, that is a whole new layer to the infrastructure that must be paid for.

Another solution is to charge the same relative tax for gas and electricity. One has to go up and the other has to come down. The one that goes up will get used less and the one that goes down will get used more. Gas is pretty much the same price if you buy one gallon or a million gallons, as far as I know. Electricity has as many pay structures as there are bureaucrats who can write the rules.

Another idea is to get rid of the tax on fuel and tax the vehicle at point of sale or yearly that is based on real or estimated need for the support of infrastructure. That would make cars harder for people to afford over all. It would move the cost of vehicle ownership right up to the front. The auto industry has far too powerful of a lobby for this to occur.

Conclusion

Face it, they know how to turn shit in to fuel in the form of methane and no one uses it. The change to the next big thing will only happen when the current way of doing things is less of a pain in the ass than switching. That is always the way it happens, regardless of what you are talking about. Higher prices for gas will drive alternatives. Any one who knows anything about business knows the instant an alternative comes along, the price of gas will plummet. So, no on fronts the change for change.