Posted on 06/01/2008 5:07:19 AM PDT by kellynla
WACO, Texas — There's a reason David Cole's diesel pickup truck smells like fried chicken.
It's fueled by the glistening, golden waste oil of a restaurant fry pit.
Every two or three weeks, Cole visits a North Waco chicken joint and empties out a 50-gallon oil barrel. He takes the free fuel home and filters it through a homemade system of pipes and barrels. Then he pumps it into a tank in the bed of his 1995 Ford F-350. The four-door truck, which can switch easily from diesel to cooking oil, is the only vehicle for his family of four.
"We take it on a lot of weekend trips down to Austin," he said. "Last week, we went to Victoria. The highway is where you get the most use out of your vegetable oil."
Cole, 26, farm manager at the nonprofit World Hunger Relief Inc. in Elm Mott, is one of a new breed of grease monkeys who are bucking high fuel prices through used vegetable oil.
Their motives are a blend of frugality, environmental altruism and good old do-it-yourself spirit.
"We were looking to buy a new vehicle 2 1/2 years ago," Cole said. "I wanted to buy a used truck, but I was learning about the environmental repercussions of our oil use and how it affects Third World people. ... I got sucked into the world of vegetable oil. I was totally fascinated by it. I bought the truck in spring of 2007, and I've been running it on vegetable oil for six months."
For Cole, it's also about avoiding the high cost of diesel — which topped $4.50 a gallon at some Waco stations within the last week.
Waste vegetable oil is free or dirt-cheap if you don't mind getting your hands dirty and you're willing to spend the time and money to convert your engine. Cole bought a conversion kit for about $2,500, and he improvised a filtration system for about $250.
John Hendrickson, manager of Waco Transit, is holding the cost down on his diesel-to-waste oil conversion by using off-the-shelf parts designed for hot rods.
He estimates he will finish the conversion soon at a cost of about $1,500.
Hendrickson, 36, has been brewing his own biodiesel for a couple of years, using waste oil that he picks up from a convenience store fry pit. Biodiesel can run in a diesel engine without conversion.
But it requires methanol, an alcohol that has been getting expensive lately, so Hendrickson decided to switch to waste vegetable oil.
"I'm a cheap guy," he said. "I may end up using both biodiesel and waste oil."
He estimates that the cost of collecting the oil and purifying by running it through a centrifuge costs him 11 cents per gallon. He expects he will get 20 miles to the gallon on waste vegetable oil, slightly less than real diesel.
An idea for all?
At prices like that, why doesn't everyone run on waste vegetable oil?
To begin with, it's a challenging fuel to use. At colder temperatures, it begins to gum up and can damage engines. Grease users like Cole and Hendrickson solve that problem by preheating the oil and starting and ending each trip with diesel to purge the system.
Then there's the question of supply.
In past years, restaurants have paid to have contractors pick up waste oil and were all too happy to give it away for free. Those days are coming to an end along with the era of cheap fuel, said Sammy Citrano, owner of George's Restaurant in Waco. In the past two years, he said, restaurants are starting to charge for their waste oil, and he has heard reports of people stealing the stuff from alleys.
"It's almost like copper," he said.
It's not that running diesel engines on waste vegetable oil is a new idea.
Rudolf Diesel himself experimented with using peanut oil in the engine that he invented, and in 1912 he pronounced it a potential rival to petroleum as a fuel. The oil crisis of the 1970s inspired some do-it-yourselfers to try vegetable oil, new or used.
One was David Tinsley, who used to own a chain of 50 Tinsley's Chicken restaurants and now owns Health Camp Burgers on the Circle in Waco.
In 1980, Tinsley started using leftover cottonseed oil from the chicken vats to fuel his Mercedes Benz turbodiesel sedan.
"I did 50-50 oil and diesel," said Tinsley, who lives near Lott. "It drove real good as long as it was warm weather. In a cold snap, it couldn't go over 15 or 20 miles an hour."
Tinsley still has the Mercedes, and he plans to start using grease in it again.
"I hate to throw anything away, because anything worth throwing away will someday fuel something," he said.
Another pioneer in the field is Max Shauck, a Baylor University aviation and mathematics professor.
After the oil shortages of the early 1970s, he began experimenting and running vehicles with biofuels that included waste vegetable oil. Currently, he is consulting with the airline industry and the Federal Aviation Administration on biofuel for jets.
"Giving the run-up on prices, everyone's desperate for a solution," he said. "When you look at (petroleum) oil at $137 a barrel, it's going to take everything we've got."
Shauck foresees large-scale biofuel production from crops such as algae, but he thinks the automotive use of waste vegetable oil will remain a niche market.
"For pure vegetable oil, I don't think it will be more than a very limited usage," he said. "It's going to be more for people who are interested in sustainable fuel."
Weighing the benefits
Shauck said waste vegetable oil and similar biofuels don't emit sulfur pollutants, unlike diesel, but they can emit smog-forming nitrogen oxides.
While plant-based fuels emit the global warming gas carbon dioxide when burned, they are made from plants that actually take carbon from the air. So the carbon footprint is smaller than fossil fuels.
Both Hendrickson and Cole have come to see the societal benefits of biofuels over the years.
Hendrickson started working at his dad's automotive shop in Amarillo before he could drive, learning to customize buses. He got a job as a mechanic at the Lubbock public transit bus barn while he attended Texas Tech University for a business management degree. That allowed him to get into transit administration without losing his hands-on knowledge of engines.
Along the way, Hendrickson served as a soldier during the Gulf War era and came to see alternative energy is a strike against oil-rich regimes that fund terrorism.
"The more energy-independent we are, the better off we're going to be. We've got to take the money out of it."
Cole, a Richardson, Texas, native, studied agronomy at Texas A&M University. He shifted his career goal away from turf management to crop science after his encounter with a missionary from Senegal opened his eyes to world hunger.
"I thought, 'Why am I studying landscaping when I don't have a passion for it?' " he said. "I felt called to serve overseas long-term. Our goal is to do that in the next few years.
Cole said he hopes this summer to experiment with converting an old John Deere tractor at World Hunger Relief to run on waste vegetable oil.
The nonprofit Christian ministry trains interns to help the poor in areas such as Haiti, Africa and Bangladesh to develop low-tech innovations and sustainable agriculture methods.
Cole said he hopes his knowledge of vegetable oil fuel can someday help a struggling farmer overseas.
"I'm hoping this is something God has given me an interest for that I can use in the future," he said.
It’s a two-tank system, with the primary tank with diesel being used to start and warm up the vehicle and then to purge the fuel lines at trip’s end, and the second tank holding the SVO/WVO, which is heated to 160 dgrees, and used to run the engine for the bulk of the trip, between start-up and purging.
Depends on the state. In Pennsylania, it’s a road usage tax, and you have to send the Department of Revenue quarterly tax returns and payments on gallons of biofuels USED (but not necessarily produced), at .21 per gallon.
How does the state charge for Electric car usage?
It doesn’t as far as I know, since Pennsylvania’s Prohibition-era laws have not caught up with modern technological developments.
i think it depends on the state, i know they hit you BIG-TIME for it in the UK. here in ny it's a moot point as there's no dedicated road tax that i know of, all the gas taxes go into the general fund and what slips through albany and ny's fingers goes to the roads and upstate.
now on trucks, some states make them pay just to Cross their state because they don't get any fuel-sales taxes from them so you see little state tax stickers on the back.
Yes indeed! Some things are best kept to one's self.
...as opposed to "turkey oil" because we all know turkeys can't fly.
I was behind a car not long ago that had “This car runs on vegetable oil” printed along the rear bumper. The stench coming from that thing was revolting! I stayed a car length behind, then two, then three, four...changed the setting on my interior car air system to inside air recirculation only...finally I pulled over and waited a while before I got back on the road.
I’m all for innovation and alternatives, as long as they don’t test the gag reflex of other drivers. Perhaps the car I followed was malfunctioning.
I get the same feeling every time I fill up and realize that I am enriching our enemies who are maiming & killing my fellow Marines & Soldiers in Iraq & Afghanistan.
Semper Fi,
Kelly
With vegetable oil as a feedstock, there are two options:
1. You can create biodiesel from vegetable oil which is what the transesterification process does. The desired outcome is to reduce the viscosity of the oil to one closer to the standard petroleum-based diesel. If properly refined, this biofuel can be used directly in diesel engines; put it in the tank and you go.
Unfortunately, 100% biodiesel (a.k.a. B-100) congeals at a higher temperature (~32F) than petroleum-based diesel does. This limits B-100 use to warmer ambient temperatures. An alternative is to mix biodiesel with petroleum-based diesel (a.k.a. B-80, B-50, B-20, etc).
2. You can also run your diesel engine from filtered straight vegetable oil with a conversion kit. The conversion kit preheats the vegetable oil to about 160F which reduces the viscosity closer to that of petroleum-based diesel. This preheated vegetable oil is injected directly into the diesel engine fuel intake and, from all that I’ve read, runs fine with it.
The conversion kit places an auxiliary tank in your trunk or truck bed and includes heating elements and water filters. The preheated vegetable oil lines run from the auxiliary tank to the engine. With the conversion, you use your petroleum-based diesel fuel tank to start and shutdown your engine. Once the engine has reached operating temperature, you select straight vegetable oil (SVO) with a manual or automatic switch from inside the car. It’s important to shutdown your diesel engine on petroleum-based diesel since the SVO needs to be purged from the engine prior to it cooling.
To find more information on SVO conversions, you can search Google or go to http://www.goldenfuelsystems.com.
that would have been my response, too! HAHAHA.
A coworker of mine put about $5K into the equipment & now runs as much of his machinery as possible on a mix of diesel and waste veg oil. He cracks jokes about the tractor being too slow to outrun its own exhaust, so you’re stuck with the french fry aroma teaser and no fries to go with it.
![](http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:R8sR7daexSBGmM:www.ted-kyte.com/3D/Pictures/Spark%2520Plug.jpg";)
Rest In Peace, old friend, your work is finished.....
If you want ON or OFF the DIESEL ”KnOcK” LIST just FReepmail me.....
This is a fairly HIGH VOLUME ping list on some days.....
It’s time to drill and build refineries.
Sign the petition here: http://www.gaspriceprotest.com/?g=1
This is very cool, methinks . . .
I get the same feeling every time I fill up and realize that I am enriching our enemies who are maiming & killing my fellow Marines & Soldiers in Iraq & Afghanistan.
Amen.
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