Deep-Fried Fuel Efficiency

When 17-year-old Matt Willner fueled up his 1999 Volkswagen Beetle, purchased from eBay, he quickly realized that peeling potatoes, not rubber, was the way of his future.

"The engine starts on diesel fuel, heats up the veggie fuel for about 10 minutes until I hit a switch, and it starts running off straight vegetable oil," Willner explains of his car, which operates on a Greasecar Vegetable Fuel Systems conversion kit designed for diesel engines. Willner purchased his car with the kit already in place, but these $800 to $1,100 systems can be installed at home, or by a Greasecar-certified mechanic listed by area at www.greasecar.com/resources.cfm. Depending on the mechanic, installations will run from $500 to $850 for cars and $850 to $1,200 for trucks.

Considering our planet's dwindling, non-renewable oil reserves, Greasecar kits, and others like it, are worth investigating. Willner refills his petroleum tank less than once a month, and his vegetable oil comes from the Dwight-Englewood School cafeteria in Englewood, New Jersey, which supplies renewable reserves of used oil for free. Good for the earth, good for the wallet. In fact, since he bought the car last September, he says his total fuel costs have been "a bit less than a hundred dollars."

Greasecar's Michael Garjian says that using straight vegetable oil for fuel can lower greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 100 percent, greatly reducing air pollution. And, he adds, "It's carbon neutral. When you burn vegetable oil, the gas contains carbon dioxide, but it's the same carbon dioxide...that was absorbed by the plant while it was growing."

Given the environmental and financial benefits of veggie oil as a fuel alternative, there is a catch. As Willner points out, "It's not exactly legal." And he's right. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stated that tampering with an engine in any way that might pose a risk to public health violates the Clean Air Act, and because the conversion kits have not yet completed EPA testing to see if emissions pose such a risk, drivers who install them may be fined $2,750, even though veggie oil generates few, if any, harmful emissions. But Garjian says that Greasecar kits are currently undergoing EPA testing, and he thinks consumers will be purchasing EPA-certified kits within a year. For now, veggie car drivers needn't worry much over the regulation. As of June 2006, the EPA had not yet issued the fine.

For those who'd rather not risk it, biodiesel is another renewable-fuel option produced by removing glycerin from vegetable oils. Because it is less viscous than pure vegetable oil, it doesn't require the heating process from a conversion kit or the 10-minute wait. Biodiesel can actually fuel a diesel engine without any conversion at all. Biodiesel's detractors point to the fact that it emits higher levels of smog-forming nitrous oxide than conventional diesel, a problem which biodiesel manufacturers are working to correct. And biodiesel is often blended with petroleum diesel for use as a fuel, so other greenhouse gas emissions are generally not as clean as pure vegetable oil. Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction. According to the United States Department of Energy, using biodiesel as a fuel instead of petroleum diesel reduces carbon dioxide 15 percent for B20 (20 percent biodiesel, 80 percent petroleum) and over 75 percent for B100, (100 percent biodiesel).

Another alternative is ethanol, made from feedstock with a high sugar content such as sugarcane and corn, and designed for use in flexible fuel vehicles (FFVs). E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, only moderately reduces greenhouse gas emissions, about 1.5 tons per year according to the U.S. Department of Energy, but switching to ethanol can reduce petroleum usage in automobiles up to 95 percent according to Daniel Kammen, Ph.D., and Alexander Farrell, Ph.D., of the U.C. Berkeley Energy and Resources Group.

However, ethanol is not without its critics. David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell, and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at U.C. Berkeley, argue that it is a wasteful energy source. In a study published in the March 2005 Natural Resources Research, they found that ethanol made from plant biomass requires more energy and fossil fuels to produce—29 percent more when made from corn—than the energy ethanol generates. Kammen and Farrell counter this argument with their finding that useful byproducts from ethanol production such as corn gluten feed and corn oil (used to feed livestock) in fact saves energy and partly offsets the energy used. Yet another ethanol critic, Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, charges that the increased demand of corn for ethanol production will cause corn prices to rise, jeopardizing the world's food supply and adversely effecting low-income and developing countries that depend on U.S. corn exports, which currently make up 70 percent of the world's exports. Brown's solution: higher fuel-efficiency standards and hybrid gas-electric cars charged by renewable wind energy.

Until you have one of those in your garage, try an alternative fuel. To locate biodiesel and ethanol retailers, go to the U.S. Department of Energy's Alternative Fuel Data Center at afdcmap2.nrel.gov/locator.

Willner's veggie car is an example of what he calls "little changes that make things better for people—not just the impact the car will have, but the impact on people who see the car." Whether we drive or not, maybe we can all help to make those changes.

"Tell your readers, next time they jump into a taxicab," Garjian says, "ask the cabby if he's got a diesel engine. If he does, tell him he could get free fuel. He's got buddies in restaurants; he's driving people to his favorite restaurants all the time." And, if cabbies weren't paying for fuel, maybe we'd pay them less to drive us around. Just a thought.