RUN YOUR DIESEL ON SOYBEAN OIL
September/October 1979
By Michael Brown
Michael Brown (the author of Brown's Alcohol Motor Fuel Cookbook) reports on still another renewable fuel possibility.
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The events of this past summer have provided just about everyone with abundant proof that the days of inexpensive and readily
available fossil fuels are gone for good.
However, North America is—like it or not—a continent that runs on wheels ... and our dependence upon transportation (and therefore upon the internal combustion engine) requires that we come up with alternative liquid fuels.
As most MOTHER-readers know by now, alcohol is one possible answer to the gasoline crisis. (In fact, all the information you'll need to convert your car to alcohol fuel can be found on page 78 of this issue! ) There are other alternatives, too, some of which might not make economic sense—at least in terms of fulltime use—yet, but that could come in handy in an emergency ... or even become economically practical as fossil fuel prices continue to rise. One such ''unlikely" fuel—which is capable of powering any diesel-engined tractor, truck, or auto—is vegetable oil!
Now the notion of running an engine on "essence of soybean— isn't near as crazy as it might sound. You see, when Rudolf Diesel designed his first engine-around 1890—he planned on fueling the powerplant with coal dust ... a material that was abundant in Germany at that time. It was years later that the engines were first run on petroleum products.
Then, in the twentieth century, the Chinese were hit by terribly inflated petroleum prices ... and they solved the problem—in part—by running their diesel engines on vegetable oil!
It seems that—prior to World War II—diesel fuel cost about twice as much as did vegetable oil in China ... and the petroleum product's price doubled and trebled following the war. So, under those circumstances the vegetable-based fuel made good economic sense. (For all I know, the folks in China may still be running their tractors on tung oil.)
Of course, I didn't travel to China to find out about the fuel potential of vegetable oil! In fact, I came across the idea while I was researching alcohol fuel in the Berea College (Kentucky) library.
In the course of my studies I read a set (of books titled The Internal Combustion Engine, which had been published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hidden in the second volume—appearing only as a footnote—was a mention of a master's thesis that had reported on the use of soybean oil as a diesel fuel.
