CI#4 – Vegetable Cooking Oil as Fuel

How it works

In order for a vehicle to run on vegetable cooking oil, the owner must have a diesel fuel tank. If the person does not, he or she must install a diesel fuel tank into their car. Once this is in place, it’s time to worry about the actual oil. Vegetable oil is much more viscous than regular gasoline or diesel so it clogs the engine a lot more. In order to solve this problem, the vegetable oil is usually mixed with conventional fuels and put in a two tank system that uses petroleum to start and shut down the engine and the other tank to run on vegetable oil once the engine is heated up. For those using used cooking oil from fryers at restaurants, the oil must first go through a series of filtration. This gets out food particles and other contaminants that could potentially clog the fuel lines. Other than the first few steps, vegetable oil is combusted in a similar way to petroleum.

Who will use it?

Currently some vehicles are already using this type of fuel. They have retrofitted their fuel tanks and connect with a local restaurant to get the used vegetable oil from. The supply has a limit though because restaurants do not produce as much cooking oil waste as to adequately provide fuel to many vehicles.

Benefits

By using vegetable oil as fuel, the waste that restaurants produce would be reduced since their waste is now becoming energy. In testing conducted by consumer reports, it was found that cooking oil produced less smog-causing NOx and particulates (soot) than regular diesel.

Drawbacks

In order for a vehicle to run on vegetable oil, it must be retrofitted with a diesel fuel tank which then causes less trunk space in the vehicle. It is more expensive than diesel and other fuels as of now, so it’s not the best choice for the wallet. In the comparison with regular diesel, cooking oil only recorded 42 miles per gallon while diesel recorded almost 49 miles per gallon. This is a significant difference and shows that vegetable oil is not quite up to standard yet.

Overall

I find this the most intriguing because it takes something used and makes it useful.  So far it doesn’t seem like that plausible of an option due to supply and also the fact that usually it is mixed with a large amount of other fuel. I still think that it is worth looking into more, but it will probably just stay for car tinkering junkies.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/fuel-consumption/vegetable-oil-fuel1.htm

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/2012/05/diesel-vs-biodiesel-vs-vegetable-oil/index.htm

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One Response to CI#4 – Vegetable Cooking Oil as Fuel

  1. jyv5106 says:

    My dad’s coworker acutally drives a car that uses the cooking-oil fuel system that you talk about. And from what I’ve heard, it’s actually quite practical and economical. He goes around to fast-food restaurants, and offers to take (for free) the waste cooking oil they were going to through away. And there is no shortage of cooking oil: in fact he has more cooking oil than he could possibly use to fuel his car. So, it’s not as crazy an idea as you might think.

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