Dartmouth students bring home the bacon

Veggie oil-powered bus trip a model of fuel independence

John Aguilar, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, July 28, 2006

VAIL - Notice to metro-area restaurateurs: Don't be surprised if a group of Ivy League students knock on your back door this weekend asking for your used cooking oil.

"We take whatever oil looks good," said Forrest Hanson, a Colorado native and one of a dozen Dartmouth College students traveling the country this summer on The Big Green Bus - an old school bus converted to run on used vegetable oil.

The last fill-up for this crew of road scholars was in Flagstaff, Ariz., where they talked the manager of a Denny's restaurant into giving them enough bacon and sausage grease to top off the bus' 120-gallon vegetable oil fuel tank and propel them into the Rocky Mountains.

"We hit the jackpot there," said Hanson, 22, from a parking lot Thursday in Vail, where the bus was stopped for the night before heading on to Denver and Boulder to spread the gospel of alternative fuels.

By the time the Big Green Bus rolls into Denver today, where it will be parked from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Whole Foods in Cherry Creek, it will be in need of a fresh injection of hot cooking oil collected from the grease traps, skillets and frying pans of a local fast-food joint or greasy spoon.

The bus will be at the Boulder County Fair in Longmont on Sunday.

Hanson, who attended Cherry Creek High School before earning his history degree from Dartmouth in June, said it doesn't really matter what kind of restaurant the oil comes from, as long as the place isn't afraid of fried foods.

"This bus will smell like bacon one day, fries the next, Szechuan chicken the next," he said, describing the odor emanating from the tailpipe of the once diesel-powered Blue Bird school bus.

The students, who started their journey from their campus in Hanover, N.H., June 14, have driven to the West Coast and are now headed back east through Colorado. They expect to put about 12,000 miles on the bus by the time they end their trip in late August.

"We're trying to raise awareness about the energy crisis happening today - with gas prices so high, this is the perfect time for us to be going out and talking about alternative fuels," Hanson said.

While The Big Green Bus runs almost entirely on used vegetable oil, which is virtually sulfur-free and emits fewer hydrocarbons and less carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide than diesel - the greenhouse gases partly blamed for global warming - the bus is not entirely petroleum-free.

Because vegetable oil won't flow through an engine properly until it is warmed up, the engine has to be started up with diesel. Once the vegetable oil reaches about 170 degrees Fahrenheit, the driver flips a switch from "diesel" to "The Good Stuff" on the bus console, shutting off the diesel and sending vegetable oil to the engine.

Diesel is necessary once again to cleanse the system before the engine is shut off. Vegetable oil, if allowed to cool, risks gumming up the engine's mechanism.

The bus gets 8 to 9 miles per gallon on the vegetable oil, slightly better than the 7 to 8 miles it gets on standard diesel fuel.

Ed Lewis, senior deputy director with the Colorado Governors Office of Energy Management, applauds the college students' ingenuity, but says creating an energy marketplace for used vegetable oil is elusive.

"There's no manufacturer out there that could make much of a dent," he said. "People using it are generally tinkerers. It's not something you'll get much acceptance for from the general public."

Some critics don't feel vegetable oil is the best alternative fuel to focus on, given its relatively high emissions of nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter. So far, the technology hasn't been certified by the Environmental Protection Agency, which considers its use as a fuel a violation of the Clean Air Act and subject to a $2,750 fine.

Hanson admits that used vegetable oil "isn't a monolithic solution" to the world's energy needs, but using it even on a limited basis would lessen the country's dependence on foreign oil supplies and provide new sources of income for American farmers, including those in Colorado.

Jeff Probst, president and CEO of Westminster-based Blue Sun Biodiesel, lauds the group for its efforts to raise awareness in the alternative energy field. Blue Sun makes a fuel consisting of a vegetable oil/diesel mix that can be pumped into any diesel engine without need for fuel system modification.

"From a grass-roots perspective, it's cool," Probst said of vegetable oil fuel. "We've got to find ways to get off our dependence on foreign oil."

Running on vegetable oil

Conversion kits for diesel engine vehicles are available from several companies.

• Greasecar, www.greasecar.com 413-529-0013

• Frybrid LLC, www.frybrid.com 206-322-6242

• Golden Fuel Systems, www.goldenfuelsystems.com 866-473-2735