[OFB Cafe] Bio Fuels

[Chris Olson]

From: "Timothy Butler"

> Says the guy driving the Dodge/Cummins pickup, paired with his wife
> who drives the same.

And both running on biodiesel fuel grown and refined on our own farm.  And my 
truck is more fuel efficient than your car.  My truck weighs over 8,000 lbs 
empty and in stock tune it'll get 24 mpg empty - that's 96 ton-miles per gallon 
of fuel.  Hook onto a 36,000 lb trailer (44,000 GCW) with my log skidder loaded 
on it and it'll get about 13 mpg - right on par with my Freightliner for 
ton-mile efficiency.  I can hook up my laptop with Cummins InSite software, 
tweak the injection timing and injection event, and although NOx exceeds 4.0 ppm 
(the EPA certification level for the ISB 610 Cummins) at rated power with the 
injection timing tweaked, I can get 29 miles per gallon out of it empty if I 
want to.

Of course, it's a diesel and it's inherently more fuel efficient than the 
spark-ignited thing you drive.  Us dumbass farmers/Wisconsin Northwoods Hicks 
have known this for years, and that's why we don't drive vehicles with gas 
engines for our main transportation.  Perhaps this is also the reason that about 
half the vehicles sold in Europe are also diesel powered.  You can't sell a 
diesel-powered vehicle to most Americans if you bend over backwards because 
they'll invariably opt for the [cheaper] gasoline powered model - they'd rather 
spend their money on gasoline.

Bottom line - I'll bet you a $10 bill that I use less petroleum for my personal 
transportation in a year than you do with your "relatively fuel efficient" car, 
and that includes the fact that my Dodge/Cummins is getting close to 600,000 
miles on it and I regularly put on close to 100,000 miles per year, over half of 
them pulling 20,000+ lb loads.

It helps to put things into perspective.
--
Chris