Written by Darr   

What we should be doing is encouraging our farmers to plant Canola.

Press the oil out of it (100-120 gallons per acre, versus about 3 gallons of biodiesel per acre to till/plant/cultivate/harvest the Canola), heat 100 gallons (378.5 liters) of that oil to 180°F (85°C) with solar hot water equipment.
Mix 46.73 oz (1325g) sodium hydroxide (NaOH) *or* 65.5 oz (1858g) potassium hydroxide (KOH) - both commonly known as "lye" - with 20 gallons (75.7 liters) of methanol, pre-heat the methanol+lye solution, then add it to the Canola oil.
Stir for half hour, then let it settle overnight to separate into biodiesel floating on glycerin.

Use the resulting pressed canola meal as a nutritious livestock feed supplement. The 10% byproduct of glycerin can be used in soaps or lotions, or burnt for an auxillary heat source.

Mix 80% biodiesel to 20% #2 diesel in cold weather, to prevent gelling.

If there's a surplus, sell it in the pumps currently used for E85, as nobody buys that because it's not priced cheap enough to make up for its lower miles/gallon of energy content. Export corn to China instead of using it to make ethanol.

A 400 square foot 'lean-to' roofed shed with ~250 sq.feet of SHW panels (to heat the oil) and 72 sq.feet of PV panels (to run the pumps), could easily make 100 to 400 gallons per day (depending on how cloudy it is).

Build a mini processing plant as described on every farm in the USA that dedicates at least 60 acres to growing Canola... obviously, mega-farms that put more than 300 acres in Canola would need to build extra refineries (Ag Dept should build only the first one).

If those mini refineries cost $100,000 each to build, using the $2 billion per year currently paid to corporate farmers to NOT grow anything on 30,000,000 acres of tillable land, means we could build 400 such plants in every state per year (think of all the building/plumbing/electrician jobs that would create).
In 2 years, even at the minimum estimate of 100 gallons/day, we would have the capacity to process 15 million acres (approximately 3% of U.S. cropland) of Canola per year... that would replace nearly 120,000 barrels of imported oil EVERY DAY.
Then if our source of imported crude oil ever gets cut off for some reason (some of you are too young to remember the embargo), we'll have an alternative fuel needing no distribution in order to continue food production... also eliminating artificial shortages imposed by companies manipulating the supply (e.g. see California right now).

Admittedly, that plan would make only about 15,000,000 gallons per day, but it creates a lot of jobs and makes us a little-less susceptible to being held hostage to oil imports, while amounting to only slightly-more land than is currently held idle in the Conservation Reserve Program... a program that costs taxpayers EVERY YEAR about 4 times what was lost on Solyndra once.

Sorry there's no Energy Policy or Renewable Energy category that would better fit this... I was going to post it as my first comment (to the Enbridge pipeline to Maine article), but didn't know there was a size limit for comments. So it's my first article, instead.