But get him inside the backyard shed, with the Rube Goldberg–contraption of pipes and pumps and tanks that’s his homemade biodiesel processor, and he lights up.
It’s a process at once simple and complex. An old electric water heater to hold and heat the vegetable oil. Another tank for methanol and lye. When contents of the two tanks commingle and circulate for about an hour, a chemical process far too complicated to describe here occurs. The end result: a mixture of biodiesel and glycerin. In a settling tank, the biodiesel rises to the top, the darker, heavier glycerin sinks to the bottom. Voilà. About 50 gallons of diesel fuel — all thanks to onion rings and egg rolls.
There are processors you can buy, too, but Staunton swears by his jury-rigged system. “Making biodiesel for yourself, you’re not gonna wanna spend four or five grand on the processor,” he says. “Because it’ll take you a while to make up that cost. Stuff like this, you spend a couple hundred bucks, make a few batches, and you’ve broken even.”
To state the obvious, however: don’t try this at home unless you know what you’re doing. Methanol is explosive and lye is caustic. Read up (try Joshua Tickell’s From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank). Be smart. Be careful.
Moving back out to the driveway, where an ’82 Volkswagen Rabbit and a two-door ’85 Mercedes wait to be converted, Staunton walks up to his own car to demonstrate how to power a diesel engine with straight vegetable-oil grease.
If you’re interested in getting yourself a greasecar, your options are somewhat limited. You’ll need a diesel model, of course, and most of what you’ll find will be VWs (Rabbits, the older Jetta models, and, if you can find one, the ’05 Passat).
Because the diesel engine is much sturdier than its gas-powered cousin, the cars are usually still in great shape, even if they’re a quarter-century old.
“Diesels run great,” says Schneider, who drives a Jeep Grand Cherokee with a Mercedes 300 engine. “It’s like a lawn mower.”
One minor inconvenient truth, however: “Here, you have to deal with cold weather,” says Staunton. “That’s gonna be your biggest problem with a veggie car.”
Veggie oil, you see, must be heated to 160 degrees to power an engine. Otherwise, it’s about as thick and congealed as a tub of Crisco. So starting a car on a frosty November (let alone a frozen February) morning presents some challenges. Luckily, they’re easily overcome.
“This car’s 22 years old, and it’s still in great shape,” says Staunton as he lifts his trunk to reveal a rectangular, red plastic tank that takes up about a fifth of the space. To run on grease, one needs two tanks for two fuels, he explains. One for the veggie grease, and the second for diesel — or, if you want to avoid petroleum products entirely, for biodiesel.
To heat the veggie to the proper viscosity, Staunton installs a heat exchanger inside the grease tank, a coil of copper through which the engine coolant, warmed by the engine, runs back and forth. The car is started using the stock tank, filled with diesel, which heats the veggie oil. Under the hood is a filter for the veggie oil, warmed by another heat exchanger. Once the veg has passed through, it’s clean and hot enough for the engine.
