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Deep-fried driving
By Emile Hallez
ehallez@mscd.edu

Kerry Appel lives in a school bus. Most of the time, the shaggy-haired owner of Café Rebelión, a coffee roaster that imports organic, fair-trade beans from Mexico, parks his 66-passenger-child-toting-rig-turned-motor-home in the company’s warehouse. Among the vehicle’s amenities are a sofa, a small kitchen and most importantly, a fuel tank topped off with homemade biodiesel. Appel is but one individual in a growing movement to fight the petroleum industry’s burgeoning pockets with the unlikely weapon of used cooking oil.

“I’ve been making my own fuel since Bush invaded Iraq,” Appel said. “To me, it was a moral and symbolic act … it gives a person, a community or a county autonomy from the energy producers.”

Biodiesel and waste vegetable oil (WVO) are two types of fuel to which many consumers have turned as alternatives to gasoline and diesel. Biodiesel is produced from vegetable oil – often collected from restaurants whose owners otherwise pay to have their used cooking oil carted off to rendering plants. WVO is filtered cooking oil that can be combusted in any diesel engine that has the necessary modifications.

A WVO system retains a car’s stock diesel tank but adds an additional one to hold the oil. Hot vegetable oil combusts under pressure similarly to diesel, therefore WVO-powered cars are started using diesel and switched to vegetable oil when the WVO tank reaches an adequate operating temperature. Drivers can view the vegetable oil temperature on dash gauges and change the fuel supply with a simple flip of a toggle switch. Before engines are shut off, a back purge of the oil lines with diesel is required – cooking oil easily gels at cold temperatures, resulting in clogged fuel lines and an inoperable engine.

The benefits of using either fuel are often chalked up to frugality, environmentalism and social responsibility.

“I would pretty much tell everyone on the planet to go to waste vegetable oil,” said Lonny Kirby, owner of a yet-to-be-named Denver company that designs, fabricates and installs WVO systems in its customers’ cars and trucks. “Once you drive for free, it’s really hard to go back to paying for it.”

WVO enthusiasts often establish relationships with restaurants, dropping off empty oil containers and picking up full ones a few days later. At Denver Biodiesel, a vegetable-fuel cooperative, customers can purchase filtered cooking oil for about one dollar per gallon, Kirby said.

Though fuel savings are substantial – Appel said he spends about 80 cents per gallon to power his school bus – vegetable-oil fuels have the added benefit of environmental consciousness. The carbon dioxide emitted from vegetable oil combustion was recently taken in by plants, rather than released by millions-of-years-old fossil fuels, making WVO and biodiesel carbon neutral.

Because vegetable-oil fuels emit no net carbon into the atmosphere, the concern of greenhouse gas production and global warming is reduced.

“Just like everybody else, I said ‘that can’t be real,’” Kirby said of WVO-powered cars. He initially built several cars using advice from a few books, but he had poor results. Most of the systems failed on the scale of months, but his greatest success with WVO came when he started building his own systems, he said.

Disbelief aside, many might find the process of making biodiesel or converting cars to run on WVO daunting.

“A lot of people are afraid to try it because they have a newer diesel vehicle and they’re afraid that they’re going to hurt their vehicle,” Appel said. “I’ve known people that have put biodiesel in cars from two years old or newer … I’ve never heard of any mechanical problem due to biodiesel.”

Appel knows; not only does he run his school bus on biodiesel, but he also powers with the homemade fuel a 1987 Mercedes-Benz, a 1989 Ford F250 and a unique diesel motorcycle he built with his own hands.

“I use (the school bus) fairly frequently in the warm months because I have a 42-acre piece of land down in southeastern Colorado that I have declared as autonomous territory in the same model as the Zapatistas.” Appel buys his coffee from the Zapatistas, an autonomous collective and followers of Emiliano Zapata, who live in Chiapas, Mexico.

Though Appel said it takes about a week to produce a 30-gallon batch of fuel, he only spends about half an hour of actual work making it. After mixing methanol and lye in a large plastic drum, he pours the combination into a vat of used cooking oil and allows it sit for seven days while glycerin, a byproduct of the reaction, and residual methanol settle to the bottom, where it can be separated from the fuel. When the biodiesel is ready, it is pumped through a filter to eliminate contaminants, such as pieces of French fries and onion rings. He procures the used cooking oil from the Czech/American bar Sobo 151.

“I think we can do a lot better for cold weather than what’s out there,” Kirby said. He designs systems aimed at Colorado residents, who don’t have the luxury of warm winters. Though biodiesel resists gelling more than WVO, it can still plug fuel lines when the mercury drops.

“If you keep an eye on the weather and you anticipate extreme cold weather coming, you can put a little diesel in the tank with your biodiesel, and you don’t have any negative consequences,” said Appel, referring to the more cold-resistance properties of petroleum diesel. “Nine months out of the year you can do 100 percent biodiesel.”

For Denverites unwilling to snap on rubber gloves (methanol is toxic), make weekly collection journeys to deep-fried eateries and dedicate adequate garage space to a biodiesel tank, there’s an alternative: The Denver Biodiesel cooperative. Members of the co-op pay fees or volunteer for discounts on vegetable fuels. The group once produced its own biodiesel, but now obtains it wholesale from Rocky Mountain Biodiesel, who makes the fuel from waste oil.

“The fire department gave them all kinds of trouble,” said Kirby, explaining the cooperative’s end of in-house biodiesel production. Members of the co-op meet on the first Saturday of every month at 2:30 p.m. at the Mercury Café.

“The first batch I made … it was such a liberating feeling,” Appel said in retrospect of four years of biodiesel production. “It worked fine. I was just laughing and feeling so happy and free from the participation in the petroleum industry and the wars that go along with it ... I’m really glad I did it, because it wasn’t that hard.”