| zoneofcontrol | 20 Jan 2016 10:57 a.m. PST |
The US Navy is deploying a fleet of ships that will run on fuel partly made with cattle fat. However, they have offered a "No comment" response when asked if there is any truth to the rumor that they have contracted with Ronald McDonald to supply the fleet with both burgers and grease. In a related news item, Jenny Craig has been drafted into the US Navy to help compensate for the side effects of exposure to these new fuels. link |
| Rubber Suit Theatre | 20 Jan 2016 11:42 a.m. PST |
Suet's a weird choice. Lard is more economical, corn oil even more so (you have to grow genuinely staggering amounts of corn to make suet). Seems like a "pretending to comply" choice so that they can claim it isn't economical if it works. Or the suet guys paid the right bribes. Nuclear vessels emit zero carbon from the ship's powerplant (the Navy generously allows the crew to breathe) and don't enrich the Iranians or other people that hate us. |
| Mako11 | 20 Jan 2016 2:15 p.m. PST |
Oil, at 14 year lows, and they're buying that, when the navy doesn't have enough money to fund vessel, aircraft, subs, or personnel? Simply brilliant!!!!! |
| Mithmee | 20 Jan 2016 2:21 p.m. PST |
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| Mako11 | 20 Jan 2016 5:53 p.m. PST |
I thought solar and windpower are/were? |
| Mattw3385 | 21 Jan 2016 2:42 a.m. PST |
Pretty cool idea. They should did this years ago. I wonder why they picked beef tallow instead of a vegetable oil like rape seed or soybean. |
| Bangorstu | 21 Jan 2016 5:58 a.m. PST |
Tallow is a waste product… for corn oil etc you need to grow crops specifically for the oil, which means less land for food. |
| Mattw3385 | 21 Jan 2016 3:57 p.m. PST |
Bangorstu, I know that. And tallow makes a bad feed stock for biodiesel due to its cold sensitivity. Vegetable oil is a more ideal feed stock. Due to its greater cold tolerance. Hopefully they hydrotreat the biodiesel so it would be identical to diesel fuel. |
| Lion in the Stars | 21 Jan 2016 5:35 p.m. PST |
It's not like the ship fuel would get below ~40degF, so cold tolerance isn't as big a deal as you'd think. And we already have plenty of waste veggie oil sources onboard ship, we have deep fat fryers! |
| zoneofcontrol | 21 Jan 2016 6:07 p.m. PST |
The thing that concerns me is the availability of fuel or ingredients to mix fuel far afield (or a-sea.) Thinking back to this time in the last century when the US Navy introduce the Pennsylvania class battleship. Nice ships but they were oil burners in a coal fired world. It was a drawback that kept them close to home for most of their useful service life. Can the navy afford to have these ships unavailable due to a logistics problem? Or do they care? |
BigDan  | 22 Jan 2016 8:47 p.m. PST |
ZOC, it wont matter, there is no difference between the engines that run on regular DFM and DFM with a very small percentage of beef. Same engine, same filtration system, same tanks etc… As a matter of fact when we received the green gas we mixed ours in with regular DFM. |
| Lion in the Stars | 22 Jan 2016 10:05 p.m. PST |
@ZOC: All changing from diesel to biodiesel does to you is make you change the fuel filter from all the crud the biodiesel cleans out of your tanks and pipes. |
| Mako11 | 24 Jan 2016 12:50 a.m. PST |
Sails are clearly the way forward, errrrr backwards, as it were…….. |
adds infantry to his Israeli force.
