While traveling down the California coast last month I met Shawn Sears of Half Moon Bay. It wasn't his vehicle that caught my eye; it was the smell of his exhaust that caught my nose. It smelled like dinner.

Shawn runs used vegetable oil in his Mercedes Turbo Diesel Wagon. "The best part is that the fuel is free!" exclaimed Shawn. With a small conversion to a diesel engine you can use vegetable oil as your fuel.

About three years ago Shawn met some people who were running their diesel on vegetable oil. " I was very excited when I found out that this was possible. I bought the book ( From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank , by Joshua Tickell - ISBN# 0970722702), rigged up the car and 35,000miles later, it still runs like a charm." He said as he tried to hide his giant smile.

Originally the diesel engine was built to run on peanut oil. Rudolph Diesel invented this engine with the thinking the biomass fuel would be available to the common folk as a means of competing with the industries that were monopolizing energy production (Oh how some things never change). "It is guilt free driving" says Shawn.

And burning vegetable oil is so much healthier for the environment.

• Hydrocarbons are reduced by 95%
• Speciated hydrocarbons are reduced by 50%
• Carbon monoxide is reduced by 43%
• Particulate matter is reduced as much as 86%
• Sulfur oxides and sulfates are eliminated by using biodiesel
• Aromatic compounds (mutagenicity compounds) are
  reduced 75%-90%
• Carbon dioxide is reduced 78%
• Nitrogen oxide is increased by 5.8%, but the use of an additive or a catalytic converter now virtually eliminates this increase

(Source www.ybiofuels.org )

There is some cost involved in converting a diesel engine over to vegetable oil. You are looking at $500 - $1500. The problem is that regular vegetable oil is too thick so you need to heat it up and make it more viscous. For more information on conversions - go here - www.greasel.com

The next challenge is filtering the fuel. Restaurants normally have to pay to have their used vegetable oil to be removed from the property; so when you offer to take it away for free they are usually more than willing. There is an exchange of your time to track down and filter the fuel, but with the way gas prices are it seems to make sense.

I asked Shawn why he thought this information was not more readily available. "It's a money thing and the oil companies don't want to cut into their business," he said. (Really, why tell people that destroying the environment is not totally necessary - when you can line your pockets with cash and say too bad about the smokey air).

You just never know what you will find when you are trying to discover fun on this planet. Discover Fun tips their hat to Shawn and his dinner smelling Mercedes.

Shawn Sears lives in Half Moon Bay, CA. He works with a non profit society called Vida Verde Nature Education www.vveducation.org which takes underprivileged youth from the inner city on camping trips and provides nature education.

 

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