Here’s an interesting article about the Department of Defense contracting with a company in Ohio to build them a portable biofuel (biodiesel) production plant to be used by the military.

PLAIN CITY, Ohio, December 11, 2007 – Diversified Energy Corporation (DEC) and Velocys Inc. have been selected by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to design a portable renewable fuel production system based on DEC’s breakthrough HydroMax gasification technology and Velocys’ advanced Fischer-Tropsch approach. The goal of the DOD funded effort is to develop a transportable system that can convert waste products generated at military installations into 50 to 500 barrels per day of high performance renewable fuels, such as diesel and aviation fuel.

If biodiesel is good enough to run one of these:

… it’s good enough to run my truck or motorhome any day!

Source.

Earlier this evening, my wife and I had one of those moments when you’re reading something, think about what you just read for a second or two and then your brain goes into overdrive with new ideas and realizations.

See, the spreadsheet I’ve been working on to crunch the numbers for the lifestyle we’re about to embark on checks out. With our current income, we can afford it, but just barely. There’s one column that dwarfs all the others combined.

Fuel.

Whether we go gas or diesel, it’s going to be expensive. Really expensive. I’ve read other traveler’s blogs and a lot of people are spending $1,500, $2,000, even $3,000 a month on fuel. That we simply cannot afford.

That was until I once again hit the ole’ Internet to do some more research. One of the blogs I subscibed to last week when I started planning all this was the Live Lightly Tour. Well, the light bulb went off for my wife and I when we read about their rig.

We’re still trying to decide on whether or not to buy an older RV that needs some TLC in October (when the lease on our house is up) or find out some other kind of creative living arrangement through February when we’ll be able to buy a $15-$20k RV. If we stay in our current house after our lease is up, we’ll be esentially throwing away $1,000 a month on the increase rent (month-to-month costs more) and utilities.

If we have to buy in October, we’ll have about $7,000. In February we can do a lot better. We’d like to wait until February to buy, but need some suggestions about where to live from November until we can buy the RV. Anyone have an RV or trailer we can live in at a park somewhere? We’ll take real good care of it for you!

Wow, I never thought I would come across a topic so passionately debated in RV forums. One forum I frequent has a 183-page (and growing) “discussion” on the matter that I skimmed and got no useful information out of.

We’re still a couple months away from trying to swing a trade with our current vehicle for the truck we are going to use, but now is the time we need to figure out which way to go. It will affect what kind of trailer we’ll buy, if we can even consider a 5th wheel, how much we’re going to pay for fuel on the road, et cetera.

If you have any tips form your personal experience, or can point me to a website with more info (I’ve found some), I’d really appreciate it.

See you on the road,
Aaron