[swede]

Hi everyone,
I just recently started a job as a heavy duty diesel mechanics instructor at a college. As one of the exercises for the students we had a fellow come down for a biodiesel demonstration and I must say, I was impressed at the simplicity of the process. If done correctly it can be a cost effective alternative to fossil fuels. The variety of materials that the biodiesel guy had made fuel from was impressive. Some materials lend themselves only to a warm climate, but there are some that work well in a cold climate such as here in manitoba. A few of the more typical materials used were new and used corn and canola oil, which with the correct additive you can safely operate to -30c. Some of the most surprising sources were pressed in an oil seed press, used coffee grounds, yield around 5% oil by wt. and another very interesting prospect was using weed seeds from an edible grain/oilseed cleaning plant. The weed seeds had been removed from the edible grains as part of the cleaning process and were otherwise simply a waste product. This is a very ingenuitive use of a product that has already used all of the energy input of producing an edible product but does not divert food from the market like using new oilseed harvest.