Running on Vegetable Oil

The use of plant oil as fuel may seem insignificant today. But such products can in time become just as important as kerosene and these coal-tar-products of today.- Rudolf Diesel 1912

Here’s a fact that may turn your head – you can run some engines on vegetable oil and vegetable oil is now cheaper than gasoline. For instance, as this is being written, gasoline in Ontario Canada is running between $1.25 and $1.35 per liter and in this same area you can buy canola vegetable oil for $1.00 per liter in some grocery stores (see your local Costco store as an example).
Remember the saying: "there is nothing new under the sun"? Well in 1900 Rudolf Diesel was showing off his new engine to the world at the Paris World’s Fair. This engine ran on virtually any oil, and at the time he was in fact running it on peanut oil. Shortly after that he wrote: "The use of plant oil as fuel may seem insignificant today. But such products can in time become just as important as kerosene and these coal-tar-products of today."
As the petroleum industry took over during the rest of that century the dominant oil for diesel engines became stinky, toxic, petroleum diesel oil – a non-renewable, polluting and expensive-to-refine choice. However now thanks to the price of petroleum rising out of sight, vegetable oils are competitive again as well as being renewable and non-toxic.
With the cost of gasoline and diesel oil running at all time highs you (like I) may be wondering where the price increases will stop and how we can possibly afford them. Fortunately the alternative of modifying the diesel engine in your car, tractor or generator to run on vegetable oil now makes a lot of sense.
We should make some terms clear here. There is something called biodiesel, which is vegetable oil that has been processed to remove the glycerine. It is more expensive and somewhat dangerous to process. What we are talking about in this article is straight vegetable oil (also called SVO), which is the same stuff you cook with and put on salads. We already mentioned peanut oil, but safflower oil, canola oil and sunflower oil are also excellent choices for running in diesel engines. You can use new oil (also called virgin oil) or used oil from restaurants as long as it is liquid and it’s filtered
3first to remove food particles. Used oil can often be gotten for nothing – which, of course, is highly recommended by the Scrooge Guide. After all what will warm the cockles of your heart more than idling down the road on fuel that costs nothing?However you shouldn’t just run out and buy a used diesel car (if you don’t already have one) and dump vegetable oil in the tank. You might get away with the first fill up because it will mix with the remaining diesel oil, but the second fill up will certainly stop your engine. The reason is you need to make a few modifications to the supply so the vegetable oil is heated up to about 160 degrees F. before it enters the engine. This modification won’t make it impossible for you to also run diesel oil. In fact the modification adds a separate tank for the SVO and heats the supply line. The best modification is to have both oils available so you can start and shut down the engine on diesel oil. That way the engine stays clean and is easy to start even in cold weather.There are a number of companies (probably soon to become very busy companies) that offer SVO modification kits for most diesel engines. For more information on this and other uses of vegetable oil (like heating your house) see the following web links.
Veg-Oil-Car UK site with lots of info: http://www.geocities.com/vegoilcar/
Elsbett German conversion kits for your car: http://www.elsbett.com/engl/index.htm
Goat Industries conversion kit: http://www.vegetableoildiesel.co.uk/conversionkits.html
Plant oil technology site: http://www.folkecenter.dk/plant-oil/plant-oil_en.htm
Oil Press for making your own Veggie Oils: http://www.oilpress.com/
Fatmobile site, how one person converted his VW: http://www.geocities.com/vwfatmobile/index.html
Heat your house on vegetable oil: http://www.columbiaboiler.com/wasteoil.htm
ATG conversion kit: http://www.diesel-therm.com/veggie-kit.htm
Plant Drive conversion kit: http://www.plantdrive.com/
Tons of information on SVO and all sorts of other alternate fuels: http://www.journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html

Scrooge