What has become America’s fastest growing alternative energy effort to replace fossil-based fuels?

It’s the biodiesel-processing industry. From a miniscule half-million gallons produced in 1999, biodiesel production in 2005 topped seventy-five million gallons–a one-hundred-and-fifty-fold increase.

Diesel is the fuel that runs America’s commercial transportation fleets, from private trucking firms to school and municipal busses, to some fleets of U.S. government vehicles.

The U.S. Navy in particular-—which has been the largest consumer of fossil-fuel based diesel in the world–has now begun processing its used cooking oils into alternative energy biodiesel.

Cooking oil in the gas tank? Yes, that’s where biodiesel comes from.

An alcohol like methanol, with a catalyst, stabilizes vegetable oil, or to a much lesser degree, animal fat, molecules, into ” bioesters”, the basis for the alternative energy fuel, biodiesel. The resulting biodiesels will vary according to the mixes of oils or fats used to produce them, but all of them have to meet certain quality standards.

Soybeans, sunflower seed, rapeseed, and palm oil seed are seeing demand as a base for alternative energy biodiesel; canola oil and even the waste oils from the restaurant and food processing industries are also making their way to the diesel engines of America.

Compatible with traditional fossil-fuel diesel in any proportion, biodiesel is most commonly mixed with petroleum-based diesel in an 80% regular diesel to 20% alternative energy ratio.

Derived from replaceable vegetable oils and animal fats, biodiesel is a renewable alternative energy fuel. Its ingredients can be grown, or raised, on farmlands anywhere in the world.

Both non-toxic and much less combustible than regular diesel, alternative energy biodiesel is biodegradable, and neither a ground nor water contamination threat.

And, for the mechanically-minded, biodiesel actually reduces engine wear because of its lubricity. It is so effective as a solvent on existing engine buildup, in fact, that the release of those deposits, when an engine is first switched to alternative energy biodiesel, may clog the fuel filter. Replacing the filter after the first 100 gallons of biodiesel use will eliminate any problems.

Cooking oil in the gas tank. Welcome to the alternative energy world.