This morning's kitchen experiment is in ALTERNATIVE ENERGY.

Somewhere around 2009 AD we will have seriously exhausted the world supply of cheap and easy oil. What's left will be expensive, very expensive!

Once upon a time oil could be found spontaneously oozing out of the ground, but during the past 140 years since its "discovery", those sites have been located and utilized. After 2009 (ten years after the peak of Hubbert's Bell Curve of Oil Exhaustion) (http://www.ecotopia.com/hubbert/index.html) we will be pretty much dependent on billion dollar oil rigs to seek out the dribs and drabs remaining. Then at some point it will require more energy to find the oil than the oil itself can produce. We will then stop looking.

When the local oil company charges $4125 (plus tax) to deliver a single load of 275 gallons of #2 furnace oil to our houses (at $14.99.9 per gallon), we will have become highly expert wood choppers, just like our great-grandfathers. Once again the wharpling song of the two-man tree felling crosscut saw will be heard soughing throughout the land. Are there a lot of available trees close to your home? nice big ones? and do you have a secure location where harvested wood can be kept from thieves motivated by the warmth habit? Can you remember where you might have put your grandfather's quaint wood splitting maul and wedges? Over by the fake fireplace?

Oil Deprivation must have a profound effect on our petro-economic civilization. The World Trade Center operates daily on the consumption of 80 megawatts of electrical energy, which is equal to the rightful electric demands of a small city of almost 33,000 people, like Bangor, Maine. A flagrant consumer, Las Vegas, Nevada…a.k.a. the Twinkling Whore of the Desert, spends a million dollars a day on electricity. Do not look for employment there, or in similar locations after 2009 (or "whenever"). Car salesmen need not report for work. Anyone in ANY WAY oil dependent maybe ought to think about it another line of work. Insurance sales, more layoffs than payoffs, may not be a good choice either. Maybe there is work in the coal industry?

Cheer up a little. You can have your own diesel generator in your private home and continue to drive your Chevy Diesel Off-Road luxury truck. Make your own diesel fuels! We have long known that animal and vegetable fats may be converted to motor fuel through a process called TRANSESTERIFICATION (trans-ester-if-i-cation). This is a relatively simple chemical process which renders fats and oils similar to the diesel fuel molecule, but without waiting the 200,000,000 years required by nature for the next "conventional" batch to be provided by natural geo-chemical processes.

First…obtain an unlimited and secure supply of animal fats or vegetable oils. Do not neglect any possibility, keeping in mind that others will be anxious to obtain the resource themselves. Kids at the peak of their fertility will still want to drive their TransAm's to highschool. (In the past 12,000 years the Homo Sapiens population has increased from one million to six billion, a factor of 6000 times, and most of that in just the current century.)

(It will be a matter of conscience for the motorfats hunter or broker to decide on the morality of contacting hospitals for liposuction wastes). Do not be lured by the easy access to waste fats provided by the fast food industry. As the automobile dies, so goes our ultra-sophisticated hamburger stands. Farmers with dead dairy cows will probably want to process them for their own tractor fuel…so don't hang around gazing wistfully over the pasture fence with cyanide laced sugar cubes in you outstretched hand.

Nevertheless, "Be Prepared" Build a small transesterification mini-refinery processor! Make motor fuels right in your own kitchen! "How To" information will soon be available in both printed and videotape forms. Searching on the Internet for TRANSESTERIFICATION will lead you to information resources for this construction. A 30 gallon processor might be a comfortable size, large enough so you won't have to transesterificate every day, but small enough so that unreasonable batch size demands won't drive you crazy in your search for resources.

A good place to start looking for this sort of information would be to point your browser (while you still have one) at (http://www.veggievan.org/science.html) where you will learn how to convert waste deep fat fryer fats to good quality diesel. Fats which are solids at room temperature, or are laced with salt, present further problems and will require more effort to locate conversion information.

In the meantime perhaps I can answer the question, "How far might I be able to drive my diesel car on the fats recovered by home cooking "x" number of pounds of bacon?", and the corollary, "How many pounds of bacon would be required for processing in order to drive from New York to a vacation retreat in the Pocono Mountains (round trip, of course) in a bacon fat fueled 1974 VW rabbit equipped with a diesel engine?"

As an example the Author has chosen an alternate trip from New York City westward for 94 miles to Emmaus, Pennsylvania, instead of to a resort, to a quiet village in Amish country, in part because the people of Emmaus are not as petroleum addicted as the rest of us, and would not be likely to try to steal our alternative bacon fat derived fuel while we were peacefully employed "taking a rest" in their tourist "outhouse".

In today's experiment I have extracted the fat for a half pound of bacon by placing it in a frying pan on our kitchen stove. I spent about 20 minutes on the test, so don't think that extracting bacon fat is a "trying" experience, even though it was on whaling ships. (During the fry-out I carefully weighed the pan and its contents together at the end of each reduction phase, using an electronic scale recycled from a defunct salad bar application, calibrated to measure in hundredths of a pound increments, accurate enough for this crudely conducted test.) The half pound (.50) of bacon produced 20% water vapor as "steam" rising from the pan…keep in mind many meat producers have small notes on their packaging saying "Water Added". Other invisible off gassing filled the house with a pleasant smell, but accounted for another 20% reduction in the weight of the test sample.

The cooked to-a-crisp fried bacon amounted to 40% of its orginal weight, while the desirable fat for motor fuel weighed 2/10^th of a pound and measured 3.18 fluid ounces in its liquid state. No attempt was made to desalinate the fat, which the thoughtful motorist would certain insist on doing, but this kitchen laboratory has had no intention of getting molecular or keeping a mass spectrograph up in the dish cupboard.

We produced a tenth of a quart of potential fuel, ready for transesterification. Europeans, particularly the Germans, have already become aware of the price potential for motor fuels, to the point that they are already collecting waste fats, door to door, as part of their motor fuel manufacturing program. In some places in Europe a gallon (US measure) of gasoline is already approaching the $5.00 mark. And if we are all to be Saddamized in the Persian Gulf, extravagant prices are a real possibility pretty soon.

If we assume that there are no further losses in refining the bacon fat, we can now draw some conclusions on the needs for the 188 mile round trip New York to Emmaus and return. We would need to fry 167.11 pounds of bacon in order to make the trip.

Cheap bacon at about $2.49 per pound would bring our raw material costs to $416.10. Time spent laboring over a hot stove? Could be written off for its recreational value. We would need to run ourselves and our stove for a minimum of 8 hours and 20 minutes. The cost of operation for the stove (fuel only…no amortization) is crudely estimated at 1000 watts (continuous), for an estimated $1.20 in 1997 dollars, but could be as much as ten times higher in 2009 (due to nuclear plant shutdowns and 60% of our electricity supply comes from carbon which was once upon a time fossilized solar energy). Maybe more! (Note: Most coal fired electrical generation plants are not located at the mine, and their fuels must be shipped by means of engines (trains and barges) fueled by rare and increasingly expensive petroleum resources.)

We have neglected some of the advantages of the pork bellies home oil refinery. First, with fuel costs skyrocketing and furnaces curtailed, running the kitchen stove all day could be expected to bring at least that one room up to a comfortable warmth. And second, all the food scraps which have been going to the landfill might be used right down cellar, raising our own pig on homemade swill.

Having an animal in the cellar helps with heating….in the olden days in Europe the rule of thumb was that there should be one cow in the cellar for each room upstairs in the house needing heat I don't know just what to tell you folks who live in apartments in the city.

Bon voyage and bon appetite!

Charlie, a humble inventor