The other day I met with a family friend, Aron. I’ve been thinking about alternative markets, implementing your ideals into reality, your utopian visions or whatnot, and I thought that Aron has been doing something I could learn from. He had someone convert his diesel suburban into one that runs on vegetable oil. Aron showed me the rig; the suburban can store about 120 gallons of vegetable oil. The vehicle needs to warm up for a few minutes with normal diesel, then he flips the switch that allows the vegetable oil into the system. If he’s driving somewhere on veggie oil, he needs to allow about 90 seconds of running diesel through the engine before he turns the car off. This purges the engine of the veggie oil. He gets the oil from restaurants. They actually have to pay to get rid of their used oil, so he asks them for it and they gladly give it away. He said he only spends a couple hours per month getting his grease. He has a hose connected to the tank in the back that helps filter the oil into the tank. He also says that for some reason he feels guilty for never needing to get gas.

Now he does occasionally have to stop at a diesel station because he does run the car on diesel for a few minutes each time he drives – this is necessary. Portland is home of Sequential, which sells bioethynol and biodiesel to customers. You can get their fuels at Jay’s Garage, Jubitz and many other locations in Portland and in Oregon. Anyway, Aron takes it to a station that sells their stuff. There is also the first full-service Sequential gas station in Eugene. Anyone with a car can fill up there. The great thing is that if you save your receipts you can get 55 cents back per gallon through tax deductions.

I was talking to one of my mechanic friends – this guy’s name is Aren (not Aron) – and he said that he would think the best type of car for this would be one of the 80’s Mercedes diesels. He said there really wouldn’t be too many problems as long as you heated the oil up to the right temperature and purged it all out before the engine cooled down. He also estimated that you would lose about 5-10% fuel efficiency, but hey, if you aren’t paying for it, who cares! You can install an entire system for as little as about $500, maybe cheaper, or you can have a more advanced one that would tell you when the oil has been heated to the correct temperature. I’ve heard of them going for $2500-$4000.

Let’s do some math. Let’s pretend that gas is $3.50 per gallon. At this point, gas is almost 50 cents more per gallon than that, but let’s just say hypothetically…If you drive a diesel that gets 15 miles per gallon and you drive about 250 miles per week you are spending about $58.31 per week on gas. Let’s also pretend that you buy the most expensive kit, the $4,000 one. Through the money you save by not buying gas, you will have your $4,000 back in about a year and a half (give or take a couple months). This is keeping in mind that you will need to run the car on diesel for a few moments each time you use the car.