Hiya Doug. I hauled 145,000 lbs. of soybean oil today. Some nice folks used it to make mayonaise for potato salad, some used it to manufacture ink and the last customer was making pizza dough. Sometimes I haul the same product to Seattle Biodiesel or Seaquent Biodiesel just south of here, Portland OR. Occasionally haul canola oil too. The boss sez NO to putting even B5 in the fuel tank however.

Lots of mythology in bio-fuels it appears to me. I have discussions with the food processors and chemical plant folks about this several times a week.

Good luck with your biodiesel experience BTW. Number one thing to look out for is clogs in the filter and injectors. This is because of the additives that are used in biodiesel that they never mention. You need a few things to make the bio part combine with the petroleum part and to try and make up for lost cetane rating. Cetane is the bang part of the equation that translates to heat energy which makes horsepower. Biodiesel still lags real diesel in cetane rating. These handy additives tend to scour out the shellac sediment that actual diesel leaves in the fuel system and flushes it to places you don't wish it to go. Makes a lovely goo in an engine's delicate parts. Haven't researched methanol yet (I've hauled that too!) which is a popular additive but the additive I find troubling is the lye they add to biodiesel. Lye= sodium hydroxide= caustic soda. I've hauled millions of pounds of that nasty stuff. Used a lot in smokestack industries to neutralize acid rain as it is an alkaloid. So... how do you make sodium hydroxide? Get a big pile of salt over there at your Chlor/Alkaly plant and put water on it. Capture the brine runoff and zap it with hideously prodigious amounts of electricity (oh yeah, making electricity is bad for Mother Earth too they tell us and $$$) and capture the various gases, vapors and effluvia that result. In addition to lye you'll get your sodium hydrochlorate (look out for spontanious combustion on that junk), your primo hydrochloric acid and don't breath too much of the chlorine floating around either.

The mythology part? Some hippy biodiesel dude is reclaiming used fry oil at fastfood joints and your biodiesel exhaust smells like french fries. There are around 101 problems with this alchemy lead-into-gold alternative fuel deal but I do believe that what we do today benefits the future implemetation of energy solutions. Good luck Doug!