DEL.ICIO.USThese drivers dumped gas for biofuel
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Atlanta is in a mini gas crisis, and we’re freaked.
Two-hour waits? Line-jumper fistfights? It looks like scenes from “Mad Max IV.”
MIKKI K. HARRIS / mharris@ajc.com
John Knop of Roswell picks up used oil from a restaurant, fuel for his retrofitted diesel engine.
But if life without gasoline seems apocalyptic to most, it’s business as usual to East Cobb resident John Knop.
Knop doesn’t burn gas. His 1985 Mercedes 300SD runs on waste vegetable oil. He gets his fuel free from several local restaurants after they’ve run it through the fryer a few times.
Driven to help the environment, or their own pocketbooks, many Atlantans are seeking alternatives to the gasoline habit. The most adventurous, like Knop, retrofit their diesel engines to run on waste oil from restaurants, picking up free fuel while their friends wait hours in line and pay through the nose.
Collecting old oil, filtering out the residue, tinkering with balky diesel engines, keeping a greasy reservoir in the garage — not long ago, these eccentricities pegged vegetable-oil drivers as merely peculiar.
Now they’re beginning to look very clever.
Knop made the switch back in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina created shortages similar to those metro Atlanta experienced last week.
“It got me thinking that if our supply is that tight, that one storm could disrupt the entire Southeast like that, I don’t want to be part of it,” said Knop, 36, a commercial insurance broker.
“I’m just going to remove myself from that dependency.”
Though vegetable oil does have a lower carbon footprint, its clean aspect didn’t motivate Knop. “It’s not a save-the-world thing,” Knop said. “It’s a save-me thing.”
Knop said a lot of people made fun of him in the beginning but now are asking a lot more about it.
“My answer is, ‘Trust me, you’re not smart enough to do it.’ “
Perhaps not. Driving on vegetable oil has its drawbacks, as Greg Melville discovered when he took a cross-country trip documented in his new book, “Greasy Rider.” Mysterious smoke poured out from under the hood and the need to scrounge oil at every opportunity made the trip challenging.
Those difficulties aside, Melville is smiling a lot these days as he drives his 1985 Mercedes past the pumps. He’s a recent transplant to Asheville, N.C., where gas is in similar short supply.
“A small, petty man who drives a grease-powered car would be smug right now,” he wrote on his blog. “Yes that small, petty man happens to look a lot like me.”
Melville will motor his grease-mobile to Atlanta on Oct. 7 for an appearance at Wordsmiths Books in Decatur.
Perhaps vegetable oil is a stopgap solution, a small way to go green, he said. But he insists that if “two goobers” like himself and his friend, Iggy, can make it across the country without stopping at a pump, then “surely the many, many smarter people who are working on solutions” can come up with better answers.
‘Voodoo’ engineering?
For Padrick Handley, that answer may be biodiesel, but it won’t be vegetable oil.
He tried retrofitting his 2005 Dodge Ram 2500 to burn waste oil, but after three days on the road, one of his injectors clogged and destroyed his engine. The cost? About $10,000.
“It sounded good to me, but at this point in my life, it’s not worth it,” said the Chamblee/Doraville resident. “The vehicle was never designed for that as a fuel, and even with that as a second system, it’s still voodoo.”
There are few statistics on drivers of waste vegetable oil vehicles, but Jeremie Spitzer, general manager of Holyoke, Mass.-based Greasecar, which sells conversion kits for diesel cars, estimates there are probably 10,000 to 15,000 grease-mobiles in this country.
Most manufacturers will void a vehicle’s warranty if the owner uses vegetable oil as a fuel, despite the fact that in 1893 Rudolf Diesel ran his newly invented engine on peanut oil.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency also frowns on grease-cars. Though the exhaust has a sweet, french-fry smell, it can contain toxic fumes. Waste oil is considered an unregistered fuel, subject to fines, which Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger discovered when he turned his Hummer into a canola cruiser.
Fuel for thought
These and other concerns prompted former veggie-oil driver Rob Del Bueno to begin brewing his own biodiesel, a product created by using methanol to chemically alter vegetable oil. Del Bueno soon learned that home-brewing fuel also was illegal, for a variety of reasons, and he went through the complex, and expensive, process of going legit.
Eventually, he joined the National Biodiesel Board, had his fuel certified and began selling it from a station on Arizona Avenue, near Kirkwood.
After running into
difficulty expanding, he joined up with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, partnered with Emory University, Ted’s Montana Grill and others.
He now sells about 250,000 gallons a year, with plans to expand in Illinois and Tennessee.
That’s a drop in the 500 million-gallon biodiesel bucket, but it’s 250,000 gallons of clean fuel replacing a dirtier alternative.
Even more vehicles run on ethanol, a corn-based alcohol, which now sells in the billions of gallons. Mounting demand for soybeans and corn, the rapid rise of food prices around the world, and biofuel’s role in that process have all complicated the issues.
“Are we shooting ourselves in the foot here?” Del Bueno wondered. “This is not a simple matter, it’s all interrelated.”
In the meantime, engaging spokespeople continue to say grease is the word, by embarking on cross-country trips in alternatively powered vehicles. Atlantans Nik Bristow and Brian Pierce just completed a “Cannonball Run”-style 38-hour trip from New York to L.A. on biodiesel. Musicians such as Maroon 5, Dave Matthews and Counting Crows tour in biodiesel buses; Blue Turtle Seduction’s bus runs on straight vegetable oil.
Public awareness is good, said Melville, but “in the long term, the solution is creating more fuel-efficient cars, and combining that with biofuels that are not competing with food, like cellulosic ethanol.”
Or, suggests Knop, bike more, drive less, and use a waste product for your fuel. It may be short term, but it feels good.
“When I have to drive, I drive a grease car,” he said.
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