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Looks like you’re right about ethanol affecting shelf life, but it goes from 3-6 months to around 12 months. So still an issue in longer term apocalypse worlds
https://universaltrades.co/blog/gasoline-shelf-life-guide-en/
Also, I don’t think setting up a small scale biodiesel plant would be out of the question for a large enough sect of sufficiently educated humans in an apocayse setting. But it’s definitely a step above something that a small homestead could reasonably expect to setup imo.
https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Bio-Diesel
I think this where the crunch would come in. Biodiesels are economically feasible because of factory farming, which have massive carbon inputs. Could a small community farm enough biodiesel to make the investment in that bushy tech tree worthwhile? I tend to doubt it.
Yeah I’m inclined to agree with you. More likely to me would be sourcing and preserving some of those oils so you have a more stable mid term fuel source, but eventually when that runs out you’d need to pivot to other options.
Something like use cars and motorbikes for 1-2 years, then convert to other fuels based on availability and knowhow for the next however many years, then back to horses.
Cool. You can be Transportation Secretary for Schipelblorpia Enclave.
Lol. What an honor.
In terms of quantity, it depends on competition from food production, basically.
Modern fertilizer and pesticides allow you to get a much higher yield on the same land, and modern farming vehicles allow you to plant and harvest whatever oil crops without an army of labourers. If you had a ton of idle land, because all the urban people are dead, it reduces to the second problem.
Pressing/steeping the oil out of it is another challenge. Probably surmountable, although it's still going to cost a lot more than it does now.
The fuel used to run the tractors can itself also be biodiesel.
Absolutely! The question are is you want to have an agricultural system with such a fragile link in the chain. And modern factory farming isn't just "a tractor", which can certainly help small scale operations. I can see a tractor being an adjunct, but probably supporting a large group of farmers, who, at any rate, probably need to keep busy anyway.
How is a thing you can do yourself in a closed loop "fragile?"
Because there are a lot of parts on the tractor that might need to be repaired and replaced. Even if you had access to everything you need, how many people are going to know how to do it?
And timing is critical in faring, so you'd have to get the tractor repaired quickly if anything goes wrong.
So if you lose one person or can't fix one part quickly enough, your entire agriculture system falls apart if its based around a tractor.
A system built around human labor or even animal labor is much more resilient.
We were talking about carbon inputs and biodiesel, not reliability. Growing biodiesel has no carbon inputs if the farm itself runs on biodiesel.
Just looking at the whole picture. Farms do not "run themselves on biodiesel," they put that biodiesel in machines.
but you wouldn't be able to get methanol you'd have to use ethanol, and also perhsps make your own sodium hydroxide or potassium hydroxide (wood ash + slaked lime) not saying it's impossible but it gets a notch harder
For sure. And I’m not claiming to have all the answers or the best long term or sustainable processes. I think you could reasonably set up a still to make methanol:
https://www.sciencing.com/make-methanol-5396607/
Similarly for NaOH, though you’d need to source cacium hydroxide
https://theblogjournal.com/how-do-you-make-sodium-hydroxide-at-home/
I could see sourcing some of these more shelf stable components from places that apready had them, but as for what happens when those run out, yeah, you’re just going to have to find something else or find a way to make it yourself.