I am a truck driver and I own my own truck, a 1995 Freightliner with a 12.7 liter Detroit Diesel and I have watched the fuel debate closely because last year I personally bought $33,000.00 dollars of diesel. This year I have almost exceeded this dollar amount already and because of the newly enacted emissions I have noticed my fuel mileage drop from around 7 MPG depending on load and environmental conditions to between 6-6.4 MPG with the same environmental conditions as before. I have recently started using bio-diesel when I can buy it and I have noticed that my fuel mileage has increased to above 6.5 again. Also there is less “clatter” noise and less engine vibration when using bio-diesel in B-2 to B-20 blends, my older year model truck seems to do best on B-5, I have yet to use B-100 so I cannot comment on that but if you do the math for petro-diesel at $4.30 a gallon, 6.2 MPG it is 69.3 cents per mile fuel cost, and for Bio-diesel at $4.45 a gallon, 6.5 MPG it is .684 cents per mile fuel cost, you discover that it costs almost a full penny per mile less for biodiesel even though I am paying 15 cents per gallon more for the pump price. Then you take that .01 cents per mile and times it by the miles I drive per year and you find that in my case I can put around $800.00 a year in my pocket doing basically the same thing. Now I’ve found that depending on what part of the country I’m in, the price of bio-diesel is within a couple of cents per gallon of petro-diesel and that adds even more money to my pocket.
That said I have compared notes with other truck drivers with new trucks and they have just the opposite results. Which leads me to think that a lot of the end result you will get using bio-diesel depends on the blend, the compression ratio of the engine and most importantly the injection timing of the engine, all things that can be tweaked and changed as needed once enough testing has been done to determine the best combination.
Personally I think that using algae to produce “crude” oil to refine into different types of oil products will eventually be the best option once there has been enough research done to work out the scalable problems, considering the current thought is that most of the crude oil we use today came from aquatic algae and other plant life from 15+ million years ago.
