For some, used veggie oil is nothing but crap. But not for Chantale Doyle. Instead of looking for a gas station, Doyle peels the lid of a 60-gallon steel drum full of veggie oil! Yes, veggie oil. Her Volkswagen diesel van is running on veggie oil!
"Doyle is one of a small but growing number of Canadians running their vehicles on vegetable oil scavenged from the grease traps of restaurants. Most are environmentalists, although getting fuel for free is a nice side benefit. To find them, just follow the smell of French fries wafting from their tailpipes," Rebecca Dube of The Globe and Mail reports.
"I found it really amazing that it works so well," says Marc Amsden, an auto mechanic in Quebec. Veggie-oil conversions make up about half his business. Additionally, Amsden drives a converted VW Jetta himself. "It's free fuel, but even if I had to buy it and it [cost] ten cents more than diesel, I would still do it because you're helping the environment."
The fact is just any diesel car can be converted to run on veggie oil. Rudolf Diesel, for one, utilized peanut oil for fuel when he invented the engine in the 1890s. Converting a diesel engine needs the installation of a second fuel tank at the same time a mechanism to heat the oil.
"If you take on something like this, it's really hard not to examine every aspect of how you live. There's so many other simple things I could be doing," Doyle says. "I want to suggest to people there are so many modifications you can make in your daily life that add up."
Feedback to Doyle's veggie van is diverse. And it is not always in the way she expected. Some restaurant owners are so stunned by a request for their used grease that they instantly refuse - even though they would otherwise pay someone to haul it away for them, Dube writes.
"Some people will be like, 'You want what? You want to do what?'" On the other hand, Doyle met some of her most enthusiastic audiences in small towns in the Southern United States. "You go to a general store and immediately you just have a crowd around you," she recalls. "One guy stands out in my mind, this was in really rural Mississippi, and he was more genuinely concerned and knowledgeable about the state of the environment than people I've met in New York City. People are constantly surprising me."
"I see a lot more people doing it," says Damian Kettlewell of Vancouver, who converted his Mercedes-Benz station wagon three years ago. He fuels it with grease from the pub where he works. "People are definitely intrigued. They think it's cool and they ask a bunch of questions."
Dylan Perceval-Maxwell, a hemp boutique owner in Quebec, says people run after him on the street to ask about his veggie-oil-fuelled VW Golf. His motivations were "purely environmental," he says, "but when I'm driving, the biggest benefit is the fun of people's reactions." Good thing the fuel would not harm his and other essential parts.
Perceval-Maxwell is trying to compile a database of veggie-fuel drivers in Canada, to share tips on where to find good grease as well as information on which cars respond best and worst to conversion, adds Dube.
Mileage from used veggie oil is almost similar as regular diesel gasoline, and the oil helps the engine last longer, Amsden says. The big difference lies on the tailpipe, where veggie-oil vehicles are carbon-neutral. Tailpipes release less carbon dioxide and emit fewer pollutants than conventional engines.
