In the interests of fuel economy, I’ve been thinking about trading in my 2002 Jeep Liberty for one of the new diesel models. But now this article in The Smithsonian (via SciTech Daily) really has me thinking. Consider these two use-cases:
Every few weeks, Etta Kantor goes to a Chinese restaurant and fills a couple of five-gallon pails with used cooking oil. Back in her garage, the 59-year-old philanthropist and grandmother strains it through a cloth filter and then pours it into a custom-made second fuel tank in her 2003 Volkswagen Jetta diesel station wagon. Once the car is warmed up, she flips a fuel toggle on the dashboard to switch to the vegetable oil. Wherever she drives, she’s trailed by the appetizing odor of egg rolls.
Sean Parks of Davis, California, collects his cooking oil from a fish-and-chips restaurant and a corn-dog shop. He purifies it chemically in a 40-gallon reactor that he built himself for about $200. The processed oil can be used even when his car’s engine is cold, at a cost of about 70 cents a gallon. Parks, 30, a geographer for the U.S. Forest Service, makes enough processed oil to fuel his family’s two cars.
The article goes on to point out that the grease running through all the deep fryers in all the restaurants and fast food joints in the US could be used to make about 100 million gallons of biodiesel fuel annually, which could meet about 5% of our national fuel consumption needs.
What’s most impressive to me about the adoption of this energy source is that apparently some folks don’t feel the need to wait for biodiesel to be offered at their neighborhood Shell station before they start using it. They’re adjusting their vehicles and finding the fuel themselves.
The article concludes:
Grass-roots fans aren’t waiting. Kantor, who paid $1,400 to outfit her VW diesel with a second fuel tank, says she gets nearly 200 miles per petrodiesel gallon. “This is not about money,” says Kantor, who speaks at schools about protecting the environment. “I’m doing this to set an example.”
Well, 200 MPG sounds pretty darn good. I doubt a modified Jeep would be quite as fuel efficient as a modified Jetta, but still.
Even at 150 miles per gallon, that would be 8-9 times better than the mileage I’m currently getting. And there’s a hot wings place just right up the street (with a McDonald’s and a Popeye’s along the way.)
Hmmmm…….
UPDATE: Well, our friends J Random American and Engineer Poet didn’t waste much time in totally raining on my hot-wings-Jeep parade (see comments, below.) However, J’s cat diesel idea has me thinking that maybe we shouldn’t just be thinking of running the Jeep on chicken grease. The chickens themselves would appear to be a good option. Of course, if we really want to get a meme going, maybe we should crunch the numbers on how much fuel we could get from puppies. I can think of at least one prominent blogger who might be intrigued.
On a more serious note, J points out some very real economy of scale objections to these gimmicky fuel sources. Read the whole thing.