Burnin' Oil on Wheels

Image Gallery Claire Anderson and Shawn Schreiner in front of their vegetable oil-burning truck and Airstream camper.

We sometimes drive 100 miles in our truck on 1 gallon of petrodiesel from the fuel pump because most of the fuel we are burning is used vegetable oil — and that’s even while dragging our homestead along behind us: a shiny 3,000-pound Airstream camper.

Shawn and I can stretch our petro-dollars far because of the ingenuous yet simple auxiliary fuel system we installed — one that enables us to burn a cleaner, greener and cheaper fuel that we regularly harvest from greasy spoons and fine eateries alike.

The Squeaky Wheel

Our diesel truck burns used vegetable oil, almost straight from the restaurant where we collect it to our fuel tank. Pyrotechnically speaking, vegetable oil and petrodiesel fuel aren’t so very different. If you thin vegetable oil (either with chemicals, as in biodiesel, or with heat, as with straight vegetable oil), it combusts very similarly to petrodiesel.

In fact, Rudolf Diesel, the German engineer who pioneered diesel engines in the early 1900s, originally designed diesel engines to burn vegetable oil. Today’s modern diesel engines will burn vegetable oil as easily as petrodiesel, too, as long as the oil is warmed (and therefore thinned) before combustion. Using used vegetable oil for fuel produces less pollution and decreases particulate emissions, helps keep grease out of landfills and sewers, and reduces our reliance on foreign oil. And it’s nontoxic and biodegradable, too.

Pieces and Parts

The system we use was designed by Greasel gurus Charles Anderson and Perry Pillard (see “Get Grease,” Page 59). It consists of an auxiliary 113-gallon, segregated fuel tank equipped with two heat exchangers (one in each side of the divided tank) and a special heated filter that’s mounted under the hood, in line with our regular diesel fuel filter. (Folks who aren’t crisscrossing the country can convert their standard fuel tank to hold vegetable oil and use a small auxiliary tank — such as a 5-gallon marine fuel tank — to store petrodiesel.) No engine modification is required. A little extra plumbing, hose clamps, filtering and heat turn the used vegetable oil into a valuable fuel source for your vehicle.