You can go to Mc'D's, order 10 gallons of their fryer oil, and pour it directly into your diesel fuel tank. Fuel efficiency is reduced less than 10%. Right now a lot of places will give it to you for free since they have to pay to have it hauled away anyways. I see it being a commodity in the future, used veggy oil. For prolonged use, it's recommended to add some filters in fuel line, and some fuel/air mix adjustments, beyond the filtering before pouring it into the tank.
And yes, I'm fully aware of diesel prices, been fueling a diesel E450 or 350 every night for the past 12 years.
Ethanol fuel is easy to burn, just requires some tweaking to the engine design. Brazil currently runs 25% ethanol in their gas, and have over 500,000 pure ethanol fuel vehicles on the road right now.
But oil is running out. It's a fact. It's a non-renewable resource. No more dinos around to smush up!
. Seriously though, we will eventually run out. be it 50 or 500 years, it eventually will go dry.
Why aren't the mega corps worried? Some are that short sighted and mis run. Enron case in point. But most of them realize they can't afford to switch yet. The have their infrastructure already built. Some it is still at a loss, and they need x number of years before it will turn a profit. In the future they may see the need to change. But right now, it goes against their bottom line to pursue alternatives to their main product. Same with the auto industry. Change costs money. And change affects the business partners you've had for the past 100 years. No reason to rock the boat.
I understand farming, and appreciate the amount effort that goes into it. I can't find a reference for the 25lbs/ gallon. But seeing that 400 gallons / acre / year of corn, that number seems about right. Of course I also found it's not just corn that makes ethanol:
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Ethanol can be produced from a variety of feedstocks such as sugar cane, bagasse, miscanthus, sugar beet, sorghum, grain sorghum, switchgrass, barley, hemp, kenaf, potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, sunflower, fruit, molasses, corn, stover, grain, wheat, straw, cotton, other biomass, as well as many types of cellulose waste and harvestings, whichever has the best well-to-wheel assessment.
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And wikipedia also mentioned an algae that can produce 6000 gallons / acre / year. That's pretty efficient comparatively.
But then there's also the impact aspects. Oil production is messy. Corn, is well, a plant. Majority of farm land doesnt change much except for the plowing and other prep. Yes, there are some terraforming type projects to make more farm land, but the vast majority of farms use the land pretty much as they find it.
1 Oil tanker hit's an Iceberg (or 1 oil platform randomly explodes) and all hell breaks loose. 1,000 corn trucks flip over and you have some really happy squirrels and a lot of shoveling to do. Oil spills kill off bio mass, corn spills add to it.
But the bottom line is, ethanol and bio-diesel, is a far more economical and environmentally friendly solution to our energy demands. But the effort required by the big business that controls the market won't happen until a major tipping point occurs.