Waste vegetable oil

WASTE VEGGIE OIL

That's right. You can actually run your car on vegetable oil. The same stuff your local Chinese restaurant is using to whip up your order of General Gao's compressed chicken parts.

The use of vegetable oil — either straight vegetable oil (that's "SVO" to the self-righteous, eco-cognescenti) from the grocer's shelf, or waste vegetable oil ("WVO") obtained from local restaurants for bupkes — was pioneered by environmentalists in the "greasecar" or "veggiecar" movement.

Diesel engines are designed to run on "diesel fuel". Diesel fuel is much thinner than vegetable oil. Used cooking oil is generally thicker than new vegetable oil.

To use Vegetable Oil in a A Diesel Engine as FUEL, it must be made "thinner", so that it can be moved, by the "lift pump", from tank, to filter, to injection pump, injectors, and into the combustion chamber, and burned successfully.

As of 2000, the United States was producing in excess of 11 billion liters (2.9 billion U.S. gallons) of waste vegetable oil annually, mainly from industrial deep fryers in potato processing plants, snack food factories and fast food restaurants. If all those 11 billion liters could be collected and used to replace the energetically equivalent amount of petroleum (an ideal case), almost 1% of US oil consumption could be offset.