Good or Bad Solution to rising Gas Prices?

[TexasStooge]

Man runs car on used grease

By DON WALL / WFAA ABC 8

A local man may have found a solution to rocketing gas prices.

He can run his vehicle on something that is plentiful and doesn't cost a dime - grease.

"I use up to 30 gallons a week," says Pat Webb.

That's 30 gallons of grease not gasoline - in this case, soy oil from a Chinese restaurant.

"It's a little greasy," he says.

Greasy but it's money in the tank for Webb, an environmental engineer.

A light in his SUV shows that it is running off vegetable oil.

"Everyone laughed about it. I was laughing about it myself for a long time," he says.

But no one laughs about it now.

"I can save between $200-300 a month."

Webb gets some of his fuel from the cafeteria at Texas Instruments, where he works.

The cafeteria manager saves the fry oil for Webb.

"It's useful to him, useful for us, both ways it works."

Webb pours recycled veggie oil through a paint filter into a drum, and then he filters it again.

His vehicle has two fuel systems for one engine - one for diesel fuel, and one for vegetable oil.

Shouldn't everyone be doing this?

"There's not enough space in the United States to grow enough vegetables to do this for everyone," he says.

His kids like it too.

"I think they like it coming from the standard hamburger grill, they're not big on Chinese yet." That's because the exhaust smells like food.

[gtalum]

Grease is a great solution for a small number of vehicles. When the warranty runs out on my wife's VW Passat TDI (diesel) we will convert it to run on grease. It's about a $1500 conversion to change a diesel car to a grease car. We don't produce enough grease to run a large portion of the cars in America, though.

Biodiesel and ethanol are good interim solutions until the electric car is perfected and enough nuclear plants are built to cleanly provide teh electricity. The problem is such alternatives will never be expored in the foreseeable future because of the strength of the oil lobby in the federal government.