Would You Use Veggie Oil to Fuel Your Vehicle?

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The cost of the new and refined oils does translate into fewer headaches than burning free used vegetable oil, which can have bread crumbs, water, even the occasional chunk of catfish in it. But there are different schools of thought on how clean used vegetable oil needs to be before you burn it in an engine.

One restaurant prefilters the oil for Martin and Markoulatos to clean it up a bit, and then the two tinkerers pour the oil into a 55-gallon plastic drum with a spigot 6 inches from the bottom. They let the oil sit for a week before drawing off everything above the dregs. Before they pour that into their trucks, they filter it again.

Pollution-wise, the differences between burning new and used vegetable oil are less stark. William Kemp, in his book Biodiesel Basics and Beyond says that new and used oil just about tie on soot and nitrogen oxide emissions, while waste oil puts out more carbon monoxide, and new oil puts out more carbon dioxide.

When comparing vegetable oil emissions to petrodiesel, the results are more mixed. Diesel exhaust puts out more soot than veggie oil, while putting out about 10 percent fewer hydrocarbons. But these measurements, Kemp says, don’t account for the biggest environmental argument in favor of vegetable oil to fuel cars: global warming. You have to grow plants to produce vegetable oil so the carbon dioxide emitted by burning it is captured as a new crop of oil plants grows.

Then there is veggie oil’s close cousin (some would say rival) — biodiesel — which is vegetable oil chemically processed to work like petrodiesel in standard diesel engines without modifications. It is available, usually blended with petrodiesel, at hundreds of filling stations across the country. Biodiesel proponents say veggie oil fuel, particularly waste oil, will always be a low-volume, backyard enterprise.

“People think vegetable oil and biodiesel are the same; they are not,” says Joshua Tickell, author of Biodiesel America. “Modern diesels are not made to run on straight vegetable oil (SVO). The SVO concept distracts from the huge potential of the biodiesel industry. There is no prospect for straight vegetable oil being a reliable fuel,” Tickell says.

There are numerous fans of veggie oil fuel, though, who have come to the opposite conclusion and feel just as strongly.

“Our conversion kits are developed and tested by our engineers for each specific application to ensure compatibility, and we have many customers who have been running successfully for almost 10 years,” says Justin Carven, founder of Greasecar.

(These contrasting perspectives are but one example of the contentious and evolving debate about the short- and long-term feasibility of biofuels. For more on their potential compared to other energy options, see Solar is the Solution. — Mother )

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