I work at a restaurant, and every so often the cooks empty the oil out of the deep fryer into 5-gallon jugs. The oil is thick and golden, spotted with black flecks of only what I can call crud.
Yesterday, in Cornell University’s B-parking lot, Gregg Wicken, the founder of VegPower, a mecca for veggie car equipment located in Brooktondale, hoisted a jug of vegetable oil from the backseat of his veggie car.
“This is great; this is golden,” he said, holding the jug up to the sunlight. “You can almost see through it.”
Why such fuss over vegetable oil — a waste product that many restaurants must pay to have disposed of? Because, in a straight-vegetable-oil-fueled car, or veggie car, a car with a diesel engine converted to run on SVO, SVO is worth the price of diesel, about $3.55 a gallon. Wicken said that some restaurants have 400 gallons of waste SVO sitting outside in a dumpster — to Wicken, that’s about $1400 worth of fuel.
Wicken’s almost-transparent oil, procured from an Asian restaurant in Collegetown, requires little filtering before being used as a fuel, Wicken explained. The less filtering the oil needs, the more cost-effective converting to a veggie-powered engine from a diesel-powered engine is, because the less money needed for new filters to replace the clogged ones.
Wicken noted that any hydrogenated oil is bad as fuel — greasy spoon type joints that use the same oil in their deep fryer over and over, or that use shortening, will “clog the fuel injectors and not burn efficiently.”
A centrifuge filter — as well as a RoadTote filtration system designed by Wicken — works well to purify the SVO before it’s poured into the fuel tank.
Biodiesel, another alternative fuel derived from renewable resources, differs from SVO in that the biodiesel is basically chemically-modified vegetable oil — and costs about $3.50 per gallon. Diesel engine cars can run on biodiesel without a conversion procedure.
Mark Wienand, of Greasestation, a conversion garage in Endfield, said that some SVO — known as commercial or virgin SVO — is made from crops grown expressly for production into SVO.
However, “this is less than ideal, but it’s better than petroleum,” Wienand said, in terms of the fuel’s effect on the environment.
Howie Amann, a resident of Hamilton, NY and a customer of Wicken’s, converted his diesel Jetta, which already had a 120,000 miles on it to a veggie car about four years ago because, he said, “It’s ecological, cheaper and [because he] believes in it.”
Over the course of one year, Amman said that the conversion, which can range in price from $900 to $1500 pages paid for itself.
Waiting for the oil to warm up is one drawback to using a veggie car in Ithaca in the winter. Wienand said that in the summer, it takes five minutes for the SVO to warm up; in the winter, the SVO takes about 15 minutes to warm. While the SVO is warming, the engine runs on diesel.