By Jennifer Gunther
Jennifer Gunther, writing for the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology as part of her summer 2005 internship, is a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, studying both Digital Art and Political Science. A former VDC student, she is committed to doing technology for community.
Imagine driving somewhere, maybe along some picturesque Northern Califoria coastal highway, you zoom past a cyclist in your shiny ultramarine-blue VW Jetta TDI. That’s Turbo Direct Injection Diesel for the uninitiated, and the biker, huffing and puffing on a steep climb, lifts their helmeted head in surprise. That wasn’t your typical carcinogen-enhanced automobile emission. Was that the smell of French fries? Or the faintest scent of tempura sizzling a long way off? Hunger inspires the bicyclist to pedal harder, thinking, .Maybe there’s an In-and-Out Burger on my ride’s horizon today.. Little does the Tour .de France enthusiast know: both of you are doing your part to decrease the demand for foreign oil in your choice of transportation today. Because today, you are driving a car not powered by fossil fuels, not by bio-diesel, but by used vegetable oil you got from your local restaurant’s deep fat fryer.
Sound familiar? Probably not, because there aren’t a lot of people doing this. Jill Fuss, owner of the attractive veggie-fueled Jetta, is a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and now she’s an unintentional ambassador of veggie oil. More than that, however, she’s an engaging, smart, hip, woman scientist who gave me my first lesson in understanding the mechanics of a diesel engine and how using veggie fuel is beneficial.
The first time I heard Jill speak about her vegetable-oil-powered car she was holding an oddly shaped stuffed-animal in her hand gesturing towards a rapt crowd of 13-16 year-old girls. The cute toy was actually E. Coli. .The good kind!. Jill said, explaining how these bacteria help her Life Sciences team produce human proteins in their cancer research. The girls were there as part of the Techbridge program, a summer and after-school program designed to encourage girls in technology and science. Jill, a role model for the day, came in after they spent the morning discussing the anatomy of two-stroke and four-stroke internal combustion engines, complete with their own colorful-plastic models of the process.
The Basics
With some conversion a diesel engine will run on a wide variety of things because it doesn’t have a spark plug, so it’s not igniting the fuel the same way a gasoline engine does. A diesel engine compresses the air in a 14:1 or even 25:1 ratio whereas a standard gasoline ratio is 8:1 to 12:1. The increased compression and heat sets a small spray of diesel – or whatever else you’re burning – on fire, causing the internal combustion. A conversion system is needed to run a vehicle on straight veggie oil (SVO). These can be purchased from a variety of ready-made retailers, or you can build your own. To run bio-diesel, a diesel engine needs no conversion kit.
Jill’s car is a single-tank system that can run on diesel, bio-diesel, or waste vegetable oil. There are also two-tank conversions where you start and finish on diesel, or bio-diesel.once the engine’s hot, you switch over to vegetable oil. Two-tank conversions work best in colder climates where the vegetable oil would have a tendency to gel in the wintertime, allowing the engine to warm up on diesel or bio-diesel before switching to the veggie oil. In the San Francisco Bay Area last winter, Jill only had to thin out the Jetta’s fuel with about thirty-percent bio-diesel. This turned out to be a good thing, because they got to buy bio-diesel at the BioFuel Oasis in Berkeley and meet a lot of people and support those running on bio-diesel. In the summer it runs on 100% waste vegetable oil compliments of a local Japanese restaurant.
Although .driving for free. . meaning not having to pay for gas – is appealing, there are some costs. Conversion kits run $700-4000. The initial price for a filtration and pump system in Jill’s case was less than $100. And of course maintenance costs, like getting the motor oil changed, still apply,
With my curiosity piqued I went to Jill’s neighborhood of Rockridge near Berkeley to ask her a few more questions.
Driving Guilt-Free
Jennifer : How did you first find out about running a car on veggie oil?
Jill : Someone just mentioned bio-diesel to me, and I wondered, .Hey, what’s that?. And then I started researching it on the Internet. It just seemed to really fit into a lot of things that I’m interested in. It’s better for the environment. It was also during the time that the war in Iraq was starting and I really wanted to get away from using foreign oil. My original idea was to buy a Volkswagen TDI and then run it on bio-diesel. During the course of looking for a diesel Volkswagen, I found this car that had been converted to run on vegetable oil. One thing about the TDI that is great, it has fantastic fuel economy . 40-45 miles per gallon. It’s as good as a Prius. And I thought, .Oh, I get the same gas mileage as a Prius, but I can run it on bio-diesel.. So then I’m using zero petroleum diesel, or petroleum gasoline, so that seemed perfect.
I saw the car advertised on craigslist , and thought, .Oh, my God. It runs on vegetable oil.. So I started researching vegetable oil in cars, thinking maybe I should get an old Mercedes and convert it myself and looked into those options. Two really helpful online forums are . SVO Forum . which stands for Straight Vegetable Oil, and WVO forum, which is Waste Vegetable Oil.
In the end I decided the car from craigslist would be perfect, and ended up buying it from a woman in Half Moon Bay who knows one of the US Elsbett representatives. This car is a 2001 Volkswagen Jetta that had an Elsbett conversion kit installed in the Spring of 2004. Elsbett is a German company that, according to their information, has converted 10,000 Volkswagens in Germany to run on vegetable oil.
Jennifer : How many miles per gallon are you getting in veggie oil?
Jill : We get 40-45 miles per gallon on vegetable oil, and that’s the same fuel economy that the TDI would get on diesel or bio-diesel. That’s compared to the hybrids: the Prius gets 40, the Civic gets 36, and the new Ford Escape or Toyota Highlander get maybe 30.
The other thing that’s been really interesting in running off of vegetable oil in the last year is that when you make your own fuel, you really realize how much you use. We pick up 9 gallons a week from a Japanese restaurant in our neighborhood. We put that into a 55-gallon drum and we know exactly how much we’re taking out. If you drive a gas car, when you pull up to the pump it just disappears into your car and you don’t really get a sense of how much fuel that is.
It’s been interesting to realize how much of our economy relies on petroleum fuel. If we stopped getting foreign oil tomorrow, basically one of the aspects of our lives that would be affected the most would be our food supply because everything in this country gets shipped around by trucks using cheap gasoline. It’s opened up a whole new area of thinking about how our economy works and how much we take for granted. Of course I didn’t really think before about the semi-trucks that bring me my apples from Washington State . Now I have a broader perspective.
Jennifer : What other kinds of vehicles do you see running on alternative fuel besides your Jetta?
Jill : Volkswagens are common, the TDI’s, old Mercedes diesels, even new Mercedes diesels too. Mercedes has pretty consistently sold diesels in the U.S. , so there’s quite a few of those around. We just bought a 4-wheel drive Range Rover that has a Chevy 6.2 liter diesel engine installed that we’re going to run on vegetable oil and that’s only going to get 20 miles per gallon on vegetable oil. But it’s better than getting 25 miles per gallon in our gasoline powered Subaru.
You can also run big pickup trucks on vegetable oil, so there’s the F-250 or F-350. They get maybe 15 miles per gallon. The diesels are much more efficient than gasoline engines, on their own. They usually get about 30% better gas mileage. We’ve heard about converted semis, refrigerator trucks, school buses, and even motor homes.
Basically diesels are, in this country, used for heavy vehicles because they’re more fuel-efficient. Any of those vehicles can be converted and they’re usually easier to convert then our little Jetta because there’s so much room up in the engine.
Something that’s really interesting about vegetable oil and bio-diesel is that it cuts across all political alliances, it can be a big uniter. There are conservative people in the South that are running their big huge trucks on vegetable oil. This is because they don’t have to pay for gas and they are also not interested in using foreign oil. And then there are the environmentally-minded people in the Bay Area. There are some pockets in Oregon and Washington and the Northeast.
Jennifer : How did taking this route for your transportation needs fit into your values?
Jill : I got into it because it fit really well into my environmental values and my political values. Also, I’m a biologist that studies cancer and running on vegetable oil reduces carcinogen emissions by 95%, so that’s fantastic. And environmentally, it cuts particulates in half versus regular diesel and there’s no sulfur emission. It’s carbon-neutral, which means that you’re not adding any additional carbon into the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is a major greenhouse gas. Plants take carbon out of the air, then you burn those plants and you put that carbon back into the air. So you’re not pulling the carbon from underground as you would with traditional gasoline or diesel, and putting that back up into the atmosphere. Petroleum comes from carbon that was in the atmosphere millions of years ago but it’s sequestered and so it’s not contributing to global warming. That happens on a geologic time scale, whereas, when you’re referring to plants and veggie oil, it’s on a human time scale. That’s what we mean by carbon-neutral.
Jennifer : Do you find that this topic in general is a conversation starter?
Jill : Oh, absolutely. I’ve gone to parties where we spend most of the time talking about vegetable oil. I had no idea when we bought this vehicle that it would become an interesting topic for everyone and that I would become so involved in educating people about bio-fuel. We’ve really become ambassadors for the bio-fuel movement. It’s something I didn’t anticipate.
Particularly working with TechBridge has been fantastic.now I’m teaching girls about science and technology. It’s renewed my interest in my field, because they’re so excited about what I do.
It really is perfect because it has all elements of science and engineering. It’s got the physics behind diesel and then it’s got the chemistry of making bio-diesel. It has the biology, the bio-fuels and the carcinogens in the environment and all of that. It has engineering behind converting our cars to run on vegetable oil and how diesel engines work.
And so it’s been really amazing to me to see how much added value the car has. Not just in terms of running around on vegetable oil and it’s great for the environment but also educating lots of people on the elements of the bio-fuel. And it really gets me thinking about how my research impacts society
This is What Technology Looks Like
Meeting people like Jill Fuss makes the world seems full of possibilities and unconsidered realities. Jill is an inspiration not only because she is brilliant (which she is) and not only because she has a cool car (which she does) but because she relates what she does at her job to how she spends her life living responsibly And does it all with style, passion and conviction.