alafarmnews

A Tour of the
American Roads and Restaurant Grease Bins
By Scott Wilcox

On the 25th of May this year, my best friend Luke Scruby, who is an engineering student in Virginia, his sister Emily, and I (currently an undergraduate student in Agriculture at Auburn University) pulled out of Charlottesville, Virginia, headed to Alaska for the summer. Already not a normal road trip, what made this trip more unusual is that we planned to traverse the continent in a huge green 1985 international school bus outfitted as an RV and converted to run on vegetable oil recycled from restaurant fryers. The idea for the trip was born out of a love for the outdoors, the environment and travel. So when Luke and I decided we were going to Alaska, a 54-passenger, grease burning school bus was the obvious choice.

Scott Wilcox scavenging and filtering used restaurant grease as fuel on his trek to Alaska. The 1976 Mercedes used about 520 gallons of used vegetable oil on the 13,000 mile round trip between Virginia and Alaska.

We chose a school bus because we were already well acquainted with the virtues of school bus travel, having taken one cross-country road trip in a bus after graduating high school. But unlike our last bus, a 67-passenger gas guzzler that got five miles per gallon, our new bus was smaller and, more importantly, a diesel. Having a diesel engine allowed us to convert it to burn vegetable oil; and with the ever increasing price of fossil fuels, this was the only way we could afford to take the trip.

Scott Wilcox, with the retrofitted ’76 Mercedes used on the Alaska trip, parked next to a field of canola in Canada, from which biodiesel is made.

The concept of running a diesel on vegetable oil is by no means a new one. In fact it is as old as the engine itself. When Rudolph Diesel unveiled his first engine at the Exhibition Fair in Paris in 1898, it ran on peanut oil. Diesel engines ran on biomass until the engine was altered by manufacturers to handle lower viscosity fossil fuels. This change is attributed to the boom in wealth and influence surrounding the petroleum industry. It dealt a critical blow to the future of biofuels in diesel engines. However, with increasing prices at the pumps, unrest in the

higher viscosity than fossil fuels at ambient temperatures, the addition of a heated fuel tank and heated fuel lines is required to lower the fuel’s viscosity. So we diverted the coolant from the engine to heat the fuel lines and tank. However, we still had to start on regular diesel because the engine would not start on cold cooking oil. Once the engine reached running temperature (which usually took 2-5 minutes) we would switch over to vegetable oil for the rest of the day, but switched back to diesel a few minutes before we parked the bus for the night to prevent the vegetable oil from congealing in the fuel lines.

While most alternative fuels are receiving more publicity and gaining popularity, a large portion of our population is still unaware of them and their potential use. Our trip would serve as a working example of biofuels in action. With "Powered By Recycled Vegetable Oil" written on the side of the grass-green bus in big yellow letters, who could ignore it? Every time we stopped to fill up on oil or buy a cup of coffee in a gas station we would have to explain what we were doing, give a tour of the bus and its workings, and answer the litany of questions.

Unlike biodiesel, which is chemically altered vegetable oil, running straight vegetable oil (SVO) through an engine requires some additional modification to the engine’s fueling system. Since vegetable oils have a

Luke Scruby with his sister Emily and Scott Wilcox

Friend and travel companion Luke Scruby, Luke’s sister Emily and Scott Wilcox pose before their cooking oil burning bus before leaving Virginia for Alaska. The 20-year-old bus made it as far as Indianapolis before succumbing to 1,114,000 road-weary miles.

Luke Scruby, left, and Scott Wilcox at their dream destination: mountains and glaciers in Alaska.

Unfortunately, our bus wasn’t destined to make it to the 49th state. After only two weeks on the road, plagued by preexisting mechanical problems and costly repairs, our bus succumbed to its 1,114,000 road miles. Ironically, the bus died in the same city it was born in, Indianapolis. After exhausting every possible bus salvage solution we could think of, we were forced to abandon our original plan. So we spent a night in a scrap yard in Indianapolis, packed what we could salvage into a U-haul and headed back home. After all the love and time we put into the bus over the past year, we were forced to part with her for a measly hundred dollars.

But being too young to know better, we had already figured out our next attempt to make it to Alaska. We decided to convert Luke’s 1976 diesel Mercedes to run on vegetable oil, and head out again in two weeks. Transplanting the vegetable oil system from the bus to the trunk of the Mercedes was no easy task but we managed to get back on the road. We had to pack considerably lighter to fit into a car but we made it to Alaska in six days burning only one tank of diesel fuel, despite searches and questionings at every border.

All told we traveled 13,000 miles mostly on used restaurant grease that was free. It did not take long to learn that the quality of the used cooking oil was usually related to the quality of the restaurant: in general, grease from fast food restaurants was of low quality. Scavenging used grease was quite an experience, including discovery of a dead squirrel in the fuel at one of our "filling stations."

We crossed the continental divide and the Artic circle, walked on glaciers, and climbed mountains, spending only about $100 on regular diesel in regions where there were simply no restaurants. While used cooking oil will not solve our problem of dependence on foreign oil, it is an environmentally friendly fuel that allowed us to make the trip of our dreams on a college budget.