Cooking oils also go to high temperatures. Do they expire before a synthetic would?
Edit:
Wasn’t wondering to make a substitute. It’s not an environmental or political question. Just wondering the *why* (:
Thanks so much to everyone who answered!
In: Chemistry
Not all oils are created equal. “Oil” is a broad array of hydrocarbons, and some of them burn differently than others. Shove the wrong kind of oil into an engine, and it’ll either not run at all or will run for a while before breaking (you can’t put gas in a diesel engine, for example). Sure, you can modify car’s engines to run off vegetable oil (and some hobbyist mechanics *do* do that), but then you run into other problems, such as:
* There’s no infrastructure for vegetable oil cars (gas stations, oil refineries, etc.) that there is for gas cars. (With the exception that gas is already supplemented by up to 10% corn ethanol already).
* You have to *grow* the crops that you’re burning in your cars. Viable farmland is already at a premium, and now you want to add fueling cars to it?
* Using crops for fuel will increase the prices of those crops as food.
Now, all of those are solvable, theoretically, except that there’s no economic incentive to do so yet. When crude oil starts really running dry, then maybe we’ll move to grown oils (and my money’s on GMO algae farms over vegetable oil as a renewable fuel source), but for now, convincing the government to ignore the oil industry and invest billions in converting the whole infrastructure over is nigh-impossible.
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