Amen,… I don’t think you necessarily have to compete with big oil to sell your product. If it makes any resonable profit, and can be done at a grass roots level, then it can and will happen if the technology to do so is disseminated and the powers that be will allow it to happen. Big IF’s maybe, but we don’t need to compete with big oil. Their profit margines are way higher than they need to be in order to make it profittable for a local Indian family to collect plastic and make fuel on a relatively small scale. Look at all of the “illegal” refineries in Africa. Making diesel and gasoline in the jungle just to make a few dollars. The way they are doing it is very bad for the ecology and very dangerous. I am not promoting that, just saying that when people are in need of an income, they can make things happen at a lower level than might be considered profitable by big business…
At least that’s my hope…
Kristijan, I have a question for our chemist…
context: refining waste oil into fuel.
I watched a video of pirates making diesel from stolen crude in the back woods of Nigeria a while back. They were just boiling oil in a drum with an open fire and running the condensation pipe through a tank of cold water. I think they probably blow themselves up pretty often, but if they can do that in the jungle, surely we can do it with better equipment. It just got me to thinking.
As I understand it,
raise temp to 248F to boil off the water to atmosphere
Then gasoline at 104 F- 420F depending on specific molecular structure,
capture and re-condense
kerosene @ 500F
diesel 1 at 626F
diesel 2 a second time at 626F to remove more impurities
Then Lube Oil at 752F
Leaving tar/sludge/road pavement goo.
My questions are these.
- are these numbers correct?
- DO you boil off the water and gasoline together and capture them and then separate them in a second process?
It seems they would both boil out and re-condense together, or at least they would overlap.
I found this after I posted. so maybe it answers my questions.
Which prompts another question: How long would the oil have to stay at each temperature to accomplish each phase of “boil off”? Minutes? Hours?
I’m pretty sure gasoline and water separate if left unagitated. You could always add alcohol to the water to help it burn off.
Sorry for the late responce.
Billy, what kind of waste oil exactly are we talking about here?
If its cooking oil, l filter that and use as is. I have had a grunge aginst diesels for years, and l still kinda do, but being able to fuel my old diesels with this fuel sheds light on the concept 
we made biodiesel in the lab in chemist school but for now l just cant see it being worth it. Moderner diesels have a problem with that anyways, just talked to Tone on the phone about the topic actualy. He is a expert in that area…
If its engine oil thats in question, it too can run old diesels straight if filtred. Not my kinda thing thugh, there is some nasty junk in that oil… Kinda seems too much to blow those in the air we breath…
If distilling the motor oil in to gasoline is the question, you answered it your self. Lube oil is a separate fraction, not a compound like crude oil. So unless you invest in some cracking action, you will only be able to distill a slightly cleaner version of that motor oil.
If crude oil separation is what you are after, first of all congradulations on finding an oil well 
joke aside, to answer the question of how long the temp needs to be held, its the same as any distilation. Think moonshine you never get pure alcohol, even thugh the difference in boiling point and water is big. Some water always escapes with the alcohol vapor. The condensers at refinerys are diliburately desighed so that part of the vapour recirculates back, otherwise you wuld always get a mess out, like diesel/petrol mixes. Its a mess…
Plastics to gas. here, we do not talk about normal distilation anymore. Think of plastic as a clean suuuper heavy fraction of oil. Like gasoline that decided to become diesel and way overdid its self it went to became parafin wax, then it still kept going and became plastic. With plastic to oil we want the other way, we want smaller molecules. This operation is called cracking and we somehow need to do it. High temp and time are easyest althugh the proces is energy demanding… The resault is the stinkyest oily substance you ever came across but it apeaes it is an excelent fuel. The weedeater motor l run it on run like crazy.
Ok, so I am working on the idea of plastics to fuel…
but this question was about the use of waste engine oil/waste automatic trans fluid/other mechanic shop oils etc. as a diesel engine fuel. Shops here tend to dump all oil products in a tank or drum and pay someone to come pump them out and haul them away. With fuel prices rising…I see this as a resource.
I am aware of the concept of “black diesel”…meaning filtered (or not) engine oil being mixed with some percentage of diesel 2 from the gas station.
DIfferent people report different results.
ATF seems to have a detergent effect in older fuel systems and possibly causes break down of injection pumps/injectors etc due to “over cleaning” them.
Brake fluid mixed in tends to eat rubber
gear oil tends to “caramalize” on everything and cause smoke
My interest is in refining, with heat, this mixture of oils so as to create a safe (for the engine) diesel fuel.
Motor oil is not that bad, but ATF might be a nother deal… I have not investigated it much, because l never even seen one here 
99.9% of “not new” vehicles here are either manual or belt variomatic.
I can imagine your potential feedstock might be a complete mess… Perhaps distilation might be the only way. Maybee add some lime to the mix before distilation, or better quicklime! It will chemicly bind to both water and acids and probably detergents too. Then let sit for it to fall out and distill the now somewhat cleaned mess. Burn the lime sludge in the distilation vessle fire to dispose the nasty crap, and maybee even reuse the lime/ash… Just thinking here
I’ll be following this experiment, it’s very interesting to me
As far as ATF goes never ever use the Mobil1 Synthetic LV ATF HP. Coworker threw some in his Isuzu and it ate all the seals in his fuel system.
Also I think it absorbs water.
When I use veg oil I toss in a little turpentine or gasoline into it. There’s a guy on youtube that did solvent experiments. I think he does the same with used motor oil.
Edit: The best thing about the turpentine oil mix is you can hypothetically make your own diesel fuel on the farm. Harvest sunflowers for oil and distill your own turpentine and sell the Rosin. 20% Turpentine to 80% WVO so maybe pure VO would work even better?
It definitely brings the viscosity down so it may not need preheating like straight oil sometimes needs.
I think I am going to make a new collection barrel for “engine oil only”, and one for all the other stuff. It seems that engine oil is safe enough to just use directly mixed with diesel after it’s been filtered enough (2 micron or so).
With the other stuff, K, so you’re saying to mix lime into the mix to drop out some of the nasties.
Would you do that cold and just stir it in and let it settle out. Or would you have to heat it at that stage also? Are we talking about using hydrated lime …agricultural lime, (ground up limestone), the same stuff one would use to whitewash a concrete building?
Or anhydrous lime?
I also think that the mix of oils we would get from any other shop would be so mixed up with everything, we would have to distill it to make a safe product.
I think I want to start moving on that as well. Using woodgas, with an unlimited supply of prepared kiln dried precut woodchunks, as a heat source for refining, I think we can produce the diesel we need for heavy hauling from a waste product that we can get paid to haul away. And I think starting with waste oil is miles ahead of starting with plastics.
Do you also extract used oils from garages or something? Depending on the place you’ll probably have much more oil than ATF mixed in.
The dealership I work at we have maybe two times a day the Transmission techs will empty their catch buckets, but we have way more oil changes than atf changes on a daily basis.
From what I understand about filtering waste motor oil it can either be centrifugally cleaned or ran through filters. I had looked into it but didn’t want to pay for a big centrifuge. It would probably be more worthwhile to you though.
I don’t haul waste oil now, but I could if I had more use for it. Shops have to pay someone to haul it away to the recyclers. There was a time when recyclers would pay for it. But those days are gone.
Now it collects in drums that get stacked here and there. Or dumped on big land clearing brush piles to light green logs on fire. Some of it ends up in the landfill or the ditch. I have 10 or 30 drums of it around here just waiting for a project like this, or being used for “pressure treating” lumber or fence posts etc.
Now that we have the ice business, our primary expense, other than ice, is diesel fuel. With the price going up, I am looking for alternatives. And our loads are way too heavy, and our customers driveways are way too clean to rely on woodgas for this kind of work.
Before now, we have not needed large quantities of diesel and only used some off-road diesel for equipment. But now we use 2-5 drums of fuel a week during the ice season. It would be nice to offset that with an alternative when possible.
If you were to go to collecting it, I’m sure you could train the guys to separate fluids to at least two categories of Oil and ATF.
I have been down the whole bio-diesel path. I was in the restaurant business so I had lots of fryer oil. Worked on restaurant equipment so I had contacts for lots of oil. I converted one (240d) Mercedes and two (300d) The old Mercedes will burn about anything you can throw at them. Also two gmc with 6.2 diesels in them and made an Elsbett system for a ford 7.3 diesel. I have also done plastic to oil at one time as well as black diesel. The more modern diesels like 2000’s have an optical sensor that doesnt work with alternative diesel fuels. I still have a centrifuge that I used after filtering all the oils. An engineer friend of mine got into black diesel with a 6.5 chevy. He ended up scarring the injection pump and it wouldn’t run on regular diesel. Another friend had a wrecker service with medium duty trucks. He paid his IFTA tax and filed all the mileage reports. He ended up in a year and a half battle with IFTA, state department of revenue and IRS when one of them asked for fuel purchase reciepts. I don’t know if he ever really got it all straightened out before he moved to the Philippines. Plastic to oil has a lot of paraffins that are a problem especially in the north. Not only a gelling effect but they want to collect together and be kind of sticky. I guess I haven’t given up on the dream as I still have an old benz behind the barn. I hope that you find a solution that works for you.
I have the same experience with the Benz, it doesnt mather what you throw in, it will work. They have a build in preheater. Even did it with my ML 270 cdi. That one got it mixed half half. As fuel I use veggie, but also hydraulic oil. With that, things are going fast. You dont have to fight for a gallon of oil at the local fish fries but get 250 gallons at once from a crane overhaul. I stopped this, because still dependent from a surplier. And my Vito now isnt using to much.
I also intend to use waste oil in my diesel engine. The oil is filtered and mixed with oil 1: 1 to get the appropriate viscosity and this will be consumed by the engine. Quality combustion will be provided by wood gas. As I have already written, diesel engines of the older generation with injection in front of the chambers are ideal for these oils, they have nozzles that do not clog, the fuel in the front of the chamber is well gasified and mixed with air and burns well.
Billy, try mixing waste oil and oil in a smaller ratio, say 20%, at the beginning, and test it in your truck, of course in a separate tank, if successful, you will increase the ratio.
Plastics and oil deposits will be used as an addition to wood chips for gasification.
I made the mistake of thrusting myself on Jacob earlier. He didn’t have any intention of coming this way, until he realized I seriously had cut him up the finest wood fuel I could possibly make. Once I realized I had offered unwanted help, the only fair thing to do was to deliver the fuel to him with least inconvenience to him. I learned my lesson about offering unwanted advice.
So this is my victory lap…the reason I don’t want a wood powered car is because I make my own fuel for my trucks and equipment for the price of the ingredients, and time. The fuel I make now costs $0.25 per gallon. I project it to rise to $1.00/gallon, as I purchase new ingredients.
I live slightly north of 47° and have been forced to work out the gel point problem.
I have been making fuel since 2002.
I have worked out the Molybdenum contamination problem, Kristian wrote about.
I have a Mechanical engineering degree, and a minor in Chemical engineering.
If you want to know about how to do this successfully, I am happy to help if asked.
I doubt it. People are pretty lazy when it comes to things they don’t see a personal benefit in.
That is my plan…to mix small percentage into diesel to extend mileage.
We already use a good bit of plastic inthe wood gasifiers. Mine more than Jakob’s I guess.
Consider yourself asked sir.
There are several fronts to attack the problem.
a. Research your particular engine/ fuel system. Find the water separator. Find the primary and secondary fuel filters. Run the numbers on all three. Find out what micron size the manufacturer called for each filter material was called for. Shoot for a fuel that screens 5 microns smaller then the vehicle secondary filter. This is not always possible with inexpensive filters. Racor makes a 1 micron filter setup and I plugged that up within a day with pump diesel. Look for army surplus filtration setups, or massive quantities of inexpensive WIX filters to build a oil house filtration setup.
b. Start gathering free oil. It’s not worth doing until one has at least 300 gallons. Ask yourself if you are committed to picking up oil. I have commitments for oil pick up that are 18 to 20 years old.
c. Embrace chemistry, build your plant in a building, not on the vehicle like gas producers. All the problems can be worked out discreetly within the shed.
- Physical Chemistry is the least expensive. Freezing, heating, spinning, settling, mixing, and the like, should be your first steps in the processing.
- Chemical reactions are more expensive, but can lead to less labor time, so may be cheaper if one has something to do that pays more. They are also essential to meet some of the goals, you set for your fuel.
d. Stay quiet about it.
I agree with Bruce. I used a settling tank, and homemade bag filters, Then commercial filters. When I thought I was getting pretty clean then I ran in a centrifuge. In my case, I always thought it can never be filtered enough. If you know a bit about where you are collecting the oil from makes a difference. Some places pour antifreeze in with the oil, transmission fluid and in the first settling tank or bag filters you will find metal shavings, bits of hose and gaskets, even possible floor sweepings.
Seventy microns is the thickness of a human hair for reference.
You might find a centrifuge on ebay like I did. Here’s the link to a centrifuge like I used. US Filtermaxx 10,000G WVO Biodiesel Centrifuge Oil FIltration WMO Black Diesel | eBay. I picked up the one I have for around $400 used.