Many are complaining about fuel prices going up because of the war on Iran, but prices were already high because of high taxes:

• US fuel taxes make up 20+% of the price
• European fuel taxes make up half of the price
• It appears 7.6% of the German government's revenue comes from fuel taxes.

You can avoid these taxes by making your own diesel at home, potentially saving money while reducing waste and being less dependent on geopolitical affairs.

Biodiesel is easy to make from new or used vegetable oil and can be used instead of diesel in 21st century cars.

• Short version: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Bio-Diesel
• Long version: https://www.dudadiesel.com/biodiesel.php

If you want to save a lot of money, ask restaurants for their old cooking oil cheap or for free. Biodiesel can also be made from animal fat, which is cheaper than vegetable oil, but there are fewer guides on the process.

Diesel can also be made from used motor oil if you have a centrifuge and a still for distillation: https://carobjective.com/how-to-make-diesel-fuel-from-used-motor-oil/

How to make a simple still from a pressure cooker, copper tubing and bucket: https://www.instructables.com/How-to-make-a-still/

Making a fractional distillation column isn't that much harder: https://www.instructables.com/Build-a-Lab-Quality-Distillation-Apparatus/

With this you could potentially separate crude oil into various components and use them for both gas and diesel cars, stoves, heating, oil lamps or sell them. Small sellers may be exempt from taxes depending on where you live.

For gasoline you could also try the ideas here, although they seem to be expensive or impractical for road users: https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Synthetic-Gasoline

Very few people have diesel vehicles in the uk.

I've ran various vehicles off SVO and WVO but I just switched to red because of the faf.

When the red 'ban' came in and you needed to fill out that stupid fucking form I just switched to kero.

Used to mix it with 10-25% used motor oil and then filter it through a few jay cloths.

I've got a pre filter on the van so that catches all the gunk without fucking up the main.

Now with kero being so expensive I'll probably just go back to SVO

My understanding is that the vast majority of US subsidies in this area are for production rather than consumption subsidies aimed at reducing the price (only $44 billion out of $760 billion). The US is also on the lower end of fossil fuel subsidies compared to other countries at $28.16 per person in 2021, which seems considerably less than how much each person would have paid in fuel taxes that year.

This is only marginally more practical and economical than drilling and refining your own oil.

You can also avoid the cost of gas/petrol prices by using an electric vehicle. I pay $0 to fuel mine since I have solar panels.

There used to be something called a "GreaseCar" conversion kit. It would modify a diesel engine to accept cooking oil without any special preparation. The main thing would be to semi-regularly change a special filter, but that was it IIRC.

@stoptech@lemmy.today

Interesting thanks!

Lucky you to have a place to put those panels. And a parking spot within reach.

Many people don't.