Vegetable oils as alternative energy

The availability of biodiesel around the world is increasing, although still tiny compared to conventional fossil fuel sources.

Since the current world energy resources and consumption is mainly fossil fuels, society is very dependent on them for both transportation and electric power generation.

Along with straight vegetable oil and biodiesel, some energy technologies that could play an important part in the future include:

Plants use sunlight and photosynthesis to take carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the Earth's atmosphere to make vegetable oil.

Thus vegetable oil does not increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, and does not directly contribute to the problem of greenhouse gas.

However, as with other "renewable" energy sources, there may be a (relatively small) carbon footprint associated with the production or distribution of vegetable oil.

Vegetable oil is far less toxic than other fuels such as gasoline, petroleum-based diesel, ethanol, or methanol, and has a much higher flash point (approximately 275-290 °C).

The cost and weight to store a given amount of energy as vegetable oil is low compared to many of the potential replacements for fossil fuels.

[10] MAN B&W Diesel, Wärtsilä and other companies produce engines suitable for power generation that can be fueled with pure plant oils.

In Europe, straight vegetable oil (SVO) costs 150 pence/litre at most supermarkets [11] and somewhat less when bought in bulk direct from the manufacturers whereas diesel costs at least 130 pence per litre (in the UK [12]) to well over that (depends on the year, 1.4 euro is the current market price in central Europe).

They did this in spite of the fact that packaging by the gallon adds to the cost and it was illegal to use in a car since no fuel tax had been paid on it.

[20] Since vegetable oil (even as biodiesel) does not contribute to greenhouse gas, governments may tax it much less than gasoline as they have done with ethanol.

While the move is good for reducing greenhouse emissions, soaring oil prices have encouraged most countries to 'go green' by switching to greater use of biofuels."

Apart from their facility of growing in non-arable and/or marginal land, these trees offer major advantages over peanut, soy-bean, sunflower, etc., in that they have long lives (up to 100 years), very low maintenance (since the intensive husbandry is limited to the first few years of their producing lives) and can provide cash-crops to rural areas, such as rural India.

In the case of Millettia Pinnata and a few others, the fact that they are nitrogen-fixing legumes is another very important factor, in that they do not deplete the soil.

Yet another benefit of using Millettia Pinnata to produce bio-diesel is that it can tolerate low rainfall (as little as 250 ml per year), far below what most food-crops require, thus reducing yet more their potential to compete.

[26] Producing vegetable oil this way could result in reduced deforestation and less competition for food production land.

Yusuf Chisti of the Institute of Technology and Engineering at Massey University states, "As demonstrated here, microalgal biodiesel is technically feasible.

[39][40][41] There is substantial research and development work in this area but as of 2007 there is no commercial vegetable oil produced from algae and used as biofuel.