Greased lightning

Vegetable oil can do more than clog arteries; it can also fuel cars

By Jonathan Bloom

ON A HUMID day last summer, two men in a VW van pulled up to a Burger King in upstate New York. They weren't looking for burgers or fries, or even free Pokémon figurines. What they wanted was used vegetable oil.

They had been stopping at fast-food joints and greasy spoons across the country, begging for the residue from deep fryers and griddles. "We'd try to find a restaurant that had a bunch of oil in their dumpster and we'd ask them if we could take it," says 23-year-old Justin Carven. "Some wouldn't let us take it because they were just weirded out by the whole thing."

With good reason. Carven and his friend wanted the grease for purposes stranger than any fryolator jockey could've imagined: they needed it to power their van.

Vegetable-oil-powered automobiles are nothing new. Engineers have known for more than a century that vegetable oil can run a diesel engine, but Justin Carven's Grease Car runs on used oil, a substance heretofore untested as fuel. For Carven, his invention is the perfect union of a love for tinkering and an interest in renewable fuel sources.

Growing up on Cape Cod, Carven was always building something with Legos and Construx, and later fiddling with guitars, bikes, and go-carts. When he was two years old, his father took a job at a pharmaceutical company in Kenya, and the family moved to Africa. It was there that Carven developed the sense of social responsibility that would later inspire his automotive invention. As young as he was, the poverty he saw during his five years there stuck with him. "One of the original reasons I got into alternative fuels was the thought of using them in Third World countries as a cheap and local fuel source," he says.

But the real impetus for the Grease Car came when Carven was a student at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Hampshire has a reputation for being a little . . . green. So it's no surprise that the Hampshire College Farm Center is completely organic: even the tractor runs on vegetable oil made from material grown on the farm.

It was this "organic" tractor that most interested Carven. He wondered, why not apply the principle to a car? "I'm not a vegetarian and I'm not a super-activist, but I am really interested in the sustainable-energy field," Carven says. "I really liked the idea of running a car with vegetable oil, because it burns so much cleaner and it's a renewable fuel." But Carven says there was one major impediment: "The vegetable oil was expensive -- about $4 a gallon."

Expense is the main objection to organic things: plenty of people may like the thought of organic food in principle, but only some can justify paying $2 for an apple. So Carven took the organic-car idea one step further. "I thought, if you can use used cooking oil to power a car, and it's free -- hey, that's cool," he says. After reading Joshua Tickell's instructive book, From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank: the Complete Guide To Using Vegetable Oil as an Alternative Fuel (GreenTeach Publishing, 1999), Carven found his true calling: powering cars with used fryer grease.

The production of the prototype Grease Car became Carven's senior thesis. He even received a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance; his project was rumored to be the only grant proposal not focused on potential advances in marijuana use. With the money, he bought an old VW Rabbit, and the Grease Car was born.

A GREASE Car works by having two fuel tanks: one for diesel gas and one for vegetable oil. The car starts on gas, which heats up the vegetable oil. When the grease is hot enough, Carven flips a switch and the car changes over to vegetable power. The car must be a diesel: diesel engines, it seems, are not too picky. Says Dan McCosh, automotive editor at Popular Science, "Diesels will run on just about anything. I've seen them powered by both powdered coal and grain alcohol." Says Carven, "It's kind of like a Gilligan's Island attitude -- trying to use whatever's around you. There are plenty of sources of energy just floating around you."

Once he got the system working in the Rabbit, Carven was ready for a new challenge. After he graduated from Hampshire in the spring of 2000, he and his childhood chum Skip Wrightson decided to hit the road. Says Carven, "We decided it would be cool to take a cross-country trip to really test it out and prove it, to work out any problems that came up."

But the original car was too small, so Carven acquired a VW camper van and rigged it up, complete with decals proclaiming it to be "powered by vegetable oil." With a little economic help from his parents -- the van was his graduation present -- he and Wrightson were off. They even set up a Web site to allow vegetable-fuel enthusiasts and nervous grandmothers to follow their progress.

The trip had an inauspicious start when the Grease Car broke down in New Hampshire, after just 100 miles. After the van was towed back to Hampshire College, it was time for take two. "When we first got started we blew out the first engine, so we were pretty nervous at that point," says Carven. "We didn't know what was gonna happen next." But the second time was the charm, and they were off and running.

All across the country, they sought out fuel for their van. A journal entry from their Web site sums up the grease-collecting process:

July 13, 2000 -- On the way to Buffalo, NY we stopped in Utica to grease up. McDonald's warned us their grease was too nasty to use (too many bits of burgers and fries). Wendy's was out of grease, so we hit a local place called "Lotta Burger." They said we could have all we wanted but as we were checking it out the cook came out and warned us that there may be lots of water in it so we said, "Bag this," and hopped over to see the Burger King. We scored 5 gallons of their grease. It was very thick.

"Everyone was just surprised that this waste product they're dealing with all the time could actually be used for something," says Carven. But some weren't so interested in helping the guys. "There were some people who started making excuses for why we couldn't use their oil even though they were just paying someone to get rid of it. Some said they were busy, some didn't understand what were talking about, and some didn't want to deal with us."

When they did score grease, the car performed well, averaging about 28 miles per gallon. But on the second-to-last day, near Des Moines, Iowa, the second engine decided it had seen enough of our fine country. It gave out. Justin and Skip were demoralized, writing on their Web journal that they "wondered if the Smithsonian would be interested in taking the Grease Car off our hands." They added: "Two days to go, 1400 miles away from the Cape, aaaaaaaand, we're done."

When the Smithsonian declined, they rented a U-Haul and towed the car home. Unfortunately, that meant no grand entrance to their welcome-home party, although Carven says they toyed with one idea: "We were joking about towing the van to the top of a hill right before the finishing point and coasting into the parking lot."

Carven blames breakdowns on the van's parts, not on the grease fuel. But automotive experts tend to disagree, citing the strain grease fuel puts on the engine. Don Chaikin, the automotive editor of Popular Mechanics, says, "There are many possible problems, like residue in the lines and deposits in the fuel injection. Not to mention the fact that your exhaust could smell like you're cooking French fries."

And though there will certainly be plenty of grease to go around, given that we Americans seem to be in little danger of abandoning our fast-food habits, other automotive lifers aren't exactly eager to convert their plain old autos to Grease Cars. "There's almost nothing more expensive to repair than a diesel engine," says Popular Science's McCosh. "I don't think warranties would cover [using vegetable oil]."

"Oh yeah, I'm definitely worried about vegetable oil cutting into my gas business," scoffs Elias Audy, of Audy's Mobil of Brookline. "That's why I've commissioned a study to explore the feasibility of switching to grease pumps by 2006."

In all seriousness though, says Carven, "I'm not sure vegetable oil could ever replace petroleum, but it could take over for it in certain sectors. And you never know -- fuel prices are just gonna keep going up.... "

NOW, MONTHS after his failed cross-country trip, Carven still has no plans of trading in his wrench for a briefcase. Instead, he's come up with a plan to sell conversion kits on the Web. For around $800, you can have your very own Grease Car! "We definitely weren't the first ones to make a vegetable-powered car," Carven gushes, "but we're the first people, at least in this country, to make a product available for people to have their own Grease Car."

And would-be road-trippers should take note. "We'd like to be able to sponsor someone to do another big trip to get interest rolling again," Carven says. "We were hoping we could find someone who was planning on driving cross-country and we could set them up with a Grease Car."

In the meantime, Carven welcomes visitors to Grease Car's "worldwide headquarters" in quiet Hadley, Massachusetts, and has already had a few curious souls drop by. Just don't expect anything too fancy. "There's not much of a showroom," Carven warns. "We've got a house and a driveway; come check it out if you want."

Jonathan Bloom is a freelance writer living in the Boston area. He can be reached at jbloom76@yahoo.com. Learn more about the Grease Car and purchase kits at www.greasecar.com.