Jojoba oil could fuel cars and trucks

Yippee! Let's watch now as the governments around the world ignore this info!

Walter
What is Jojoba oil. What does it come from? Is it plentiful enough to be a viable fuel for automobiles. How does it measure in cost against crude oil based fuels?

It is produced from a scraggly looking desert plant and is one of the best lubricants available. Not enough heat resistance for internal combustion engine oil, but may work as a fuel. I'm surprised it is available in such quantity. Corn is more readily available, and alcohol produced doesn't seem competitive without rich subsidies.

Well, au, some of your questions can be answered by following the link(s).

I'm no engineer or geographer or similar, so I don't know more than to be found there. (Besides, I could tell you, my wife has a small bottle in the bathroom.)

Jojoba oil would be expensive in comparison to crude. Cheaper alternatives exist and are in production. Standard vegtable oil can be used as a replacement for deisel fuel already.

http://www.biodiesel.org/

There is a guy here in Danvers, MA that runs his VW Jetta deisel on oil recycled from McDonalds french fry machines at pennies/gallon and he gets better than 70 MPG using it..

Here's a link, which provides some more informations
International Jojoba Export Council

What must always be considered when talking about "alternative" fuels is, of course, their relative expense as relates to conventional Crude Oil distillates. We cannot seriously think of replacing the Gas we use now with other fuels until both overt and hidden costs begin to equal that of fuels we presently use. When that begins to become realistic we must then start to develop the infrastructure to manufacture and deliver the fuel to the consumer, an additional cost that must be factored in.

Alcohol has less caloric value then Gas, and at what point can we give up arable land for food production to devote to growing corn to make it?

Fuel cells, whose only by product is water, seem enviro-friendly but how does one get the hydrogen and oxygen? Can anyone cite a manufacturing process for Hydrogen/Oxygen whose energy requirement is viable and has no environmental consequences?

Solar power seems clean and eliminates the middleman but is very expensive and still requires government subsidies to lower the cost to individuals. But where does the money for the subsidies come from? Solar powered cars? Not in the Pacific Northwest!

Hydroelectric? No, not enough of it and when available is more expensive than Oil fired plants.

New sources such as Jojoba oil demand technological and infrastructure changes with inherent costs and one must still address the ultimate problem of reduced caloric content. This forces one to use more fuel thereby increasing cost and perhaps pollution just to accomplish the same amount of work done by a much smaller amount of petroleum.

Obviously we must develop technologies for the future when petroleum will be a much more dear commodity then it is today. But for now the best we can do is to encourage technologies that squeeze the most out of a drop of oil, raise CAFE standards in the Auto Industry, and explore further use of hybrid vehicles.

I know this is controversial, but we could start by including SUV's and Light trucks (pickup trucks) in the ranks of family sedans and station wagons (Mini-vans). Right now SUV's are considered light trucks and are not subject to the higher mileage standards the family car is.

I purposely left out nuclear energy because it is still out in the political wilderness. I just hope we still have the technology and won't have to hire the French to build our reactors when the time comes.

JM