FUEL ALTERNATIVES

Methane derived from methane is not the only alternative source of fuel, but it is the easiest to manufacture at home.

Waste vegetable oil (WVO) meaning cooking oil from deep fryers is also feasible but will requires some effort to make it usable. To begin with it must be filtered to remove solid particle contaminants that could clog injectors and cause scoring to fuel pumps.

Vegetable oil is much thicker than diesel fuel and rapidly gels or thickens as it gets cold.  

Some amount of pre-heating the vegetable oil is often needed in cooler climates. This is an added step that adds to the effort of using waste vegetable oil

If you have access to a source of free waste vegetable oil this may still be a viable and worth while effort where you use swat equity instead of cash to obtain fuel.

Biomass including corn has been composted and reduced by fermentation to produce ethanol. Ethanol can be used as a fuel or blended into gasoline and diesel to reduce the amount petroleum needed for a given amount of engine fuel.

The process of fermenting biomass into a usable fuel is more involved and time consuming. There is also the added complication of needing a permit from the government to produce alcohol.  To be legal this alcohol must be denatured or made unfit for drinking by humans.

Hydrogen has been touted as a wonder fuel because it burns clean leaving no residue except pure water. Electrolysis has been the primary method of generating hydrogen.

Unfortunately it requires more energy to split a water molecule into its component oxygen and hydrogen atoms than the energy recovered by using the hydrogen as fuel.

Until some new advance comes along this is not yet a fuel suitable for DIY off grid creation.

Burning wood has been a mainstay of energy for off grid homes.  Unfortunately it requires a lot of effort to fetch and cut into usable pieces to fit   stoves and except for heat is very difficult to convert to other forms of energy. Steam engines seem like a good choice for converting wood heat into other forms of energy until you examine how inefficient it is.

Recent advances in technology have promised to change that.  A Sterling engine converts heat directly into motion. Some progress has been made  in combining a Stirling engine with a wood burning  stove  with a Stirling engine  Unfortunately  these are not yet  generally available to the public.

Water power is a possibility  but is often  a nightmare of bureaucracy and red tape because  water use  on existing waterways  has for  centuries  been  subject to laws and regulations.

I leave wind and solar to the last partially because both are variable and unpredictable.

Some locations have a steady supply of one or the other but most locations will experience periods of calms and even the sunniest location has darkness at night.

Water power will often vary with the season. Climate often produce cloudy conditions lasting weeks at a time.

It should be obvious that no one single source of energy is going to be the solution for every situation.  There must always be back-ups and alternative.  It should also be clear that some means of energy storage is necessary. Energy storage will be the topic of a separate blog.

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