home         math     •     donate     •     resources
  Free Petrol for Life

  Some of you, for whatever reason, pay thousands of dollars monthly to own a car. It's a car you only need to go to work, really. It's work you only do to pay for the monthly cost of your car.

  Whatever.

  Luckily, the cost of petroleum can be... deleted.



image cc0 by byrev @ pixabay.com (link)

Consider Moonshining

  Ethanol has an octane rating about 50% higher than pure isooctane. It tends to prefer a different compression ratio than petrol, but enough of the world is running on ethanol that almost all automotive vehicles have a "flex fuel" piston cylinder length.

  If you're in the United States' federal jurisdiction, you will need a fuel distiller's permit - "TTB F 5110.74." It is, in fact, free at the time of this publication.

https://www.ttb.gov/regulated-commodities/industrial-alcohol/alcohol-fuel

  This creates an excellent situation. The wastewater from noodles or boiling mashed potatoes? Goes in your fuel tank. Bread went moldy? Goes in your fuel tank. Fruit went bad? Goes in your fuel tank... and you might never pay for gas again.

Or, Biodiesel

  If you take used cooking oil, a bit of lye, and some of that ethanol, and heat them together, you get biodiesel, which will run a diesel engine.

  There are elaborate biodiesel recipies online. If you don't have lye, baking soda cooks to sodium oxide with heat, which becomes sodium hydroxide when it comes in contact with water... but the woodlye (potassium hydroxide) from wood ash will work. It's just an alkali transesterification catalyst.

  Most biodiesel recipies use methanol - wood alcohol. Ethanol works just fine, though, and you can make it yourself.


  So, whether you use unleaded or diesel, there is no reason to pay for gas again. You can just make that yourself.


 •
Back to the Life Skills Vault