All hypothetical, but suppose some backyard inventor comes up with a home device that allows you to make gasoline from household garbage and waste. These cost about $500, but you can make about 20 gallons of high octane gasoline per week from it. Now, nobody buys gasoline anymore, so states get no gas tax revenue, the Feds get none, and OPEC sees a collapse in oil prices.
Would this be a good thing overall?
There are few processes that can’t benefit from economies of scale. For example, we could all boil our water to sanitize it, but it’s more efficient to have a central water purification plant do it.
So if such a thing were invented, it would simply replace the front end of the current gasoline supply chain. No more oil wells. No more refineries. Instead we’d have large garbage-to-gasoline plants feeding their output into the current distribution network.
(BTW, this is why Elon Musk’s “Let’s put a battery in every house!” plan is a bad idea.)
The biggest impact would be on global warming. Depending on the specifics of how this process adds or removes carbon from the atmosphere, it could make global warming better or worse.
The oil companies will put their gasoline in clear plastic bottles and give it a French name and people will pay 10 times what it costs them to make it at home.
Someone would blow themselves up and we’d be back to driving to the nearest BP in no time.
You can homebrew biodiesel from waste cooking oil. I know of a few people online who do it. Most are retired, or have irregular/seasonal working hours. I don’t know of anyone with a 9-5 job that cares to spend the time and energy to do it. My truck could burn the oil with only filtering and drying needed, and I still cant be bothered with the trouble to source the oil and the mess and space to process it.
Much of the driving people do could be taken care of with a bicycle or a pair of walking shoes. They can’t be bothered.
For starters, don’t assume that there’s no gas tax revenue just because people are home-brewing it. If we use alcohol for comparison, there is a company out there that distills its own liquor and then serves that at its own bar/restaurant. Their state requires each bottle to be taxed and labeled before it can be taken to the restaurant. Failure to pay the alcohol tax would be illegal.
So governments could come up with some way to 1) make it illegal to do home production of gas or 2) tax home production of gas.
Plus, states are already considering different tax models for electric vehicles. A per-mile tax based on the odometer would be pretty easy to implement.
In terms of OPEC collapse and all that… gas isn’t free. It never will be. Biodiesel uses vegetable oil as an input and if that wasn’t free from restaurants, there’d be a substantial cost for it. I can’t imagine that any wholesale replacement of gas production would remain cheap with that kind of demand, so you’d reach some equilibrium between the drillers and the home brewers. Perhaps disruptive, but getting oil out of the ground has a whole range of costs and some oil fields would still be productive and profitable at very low oil costs.
I know that you postulate making gas from household waste, but I question whether households produce that much waste. 20 gallons of gas is about 125 pounds of product. Once you exclude all the water, nitrogen, oxygen, etc. from the non-metal, non-glass waste… that’s, what, 300 pounds a week of input to get 125 pounds out? My household can’t keep up with that.
WVO conversions used to be all the rage, but the problem was that most places where there were a lot of people doing it hit “peak grease” pretty quickly as demand for free used fry oil outstripped demand. Then companies cropped up that started paying restaurants for their used grease and making into commercially sold (and taxed) biofuels, which basically put a kibosh on people wanting it to make their own fuel.
You can also homebrew ethanol for fuel. See TTB F 5110.74 – Application for an Alcohol Fuel Producer Under 26 U.S.C. 5181
There’s almost no such thing as waste cooking oil. It’s worth too much… almost as much as the new stuff, so there is a highly competitive industry in recycling it. The biodiesel promoters claim or assume tons of the stuff just goes down the drain or into the landfills, which isn’t true.
I think used cooking oil is almost as costly as crude, in quantities for recycling.
Yup. Cooking oil theft is common now. Restaurants have oil dumpsters that they now have to keep locked because of the value of the oil.