Cooking oil helps Clyde man Go Green
By Roland Micklem

Lee Blake of Clyde makes a daily round trip of 100 miles to his work place in Syracuse. With the diesel fuel he uses in his Dodge pickup hovering near $5 a gallon mark, and a vehicle averaging about 17 mpg, running back and forth was getting pretty expensive.

The solution was right under his nose. He'd been collecting vegetable oil from a Syracuse restaurant for use by a third party, and finally got around to realizing he could use the stuff himself to trim his over-the-road fuel bill. Having done some reading on the subject, he knew about veg oil technology, and knew that the same oil that frizzles fries can be used to power a diesel engine.

Instead of passing along the retrieved oil, he now mixes it with the petrodiesel he puts in his truck. With veggie oil making up 20 percent of the mix, he now realizes a savings of $25 with each full tank. The only processing required is filtration; the oil must be passed through a 10-micron and a 15-micron filter before going into the tank.

Blake's endeavor represents the least complicated use of veggie oil as a fuel source. Units which run entirely on veggie oil require petrodiesel from a separate tank to warm up the motor prior to switching to the heated veggie, as veg oil congeals at very low temperatures. There must also be a valve system between the two tanks to prevent mixing of the fuels.

Almost anyone with a truck or auto with a standard diesel engine can duplicate Blake's successful experiment. There are several all-veggie vehicles in the area, plus trained mechanics who can add the accessories needed for an all-veggie system. As recently as 2006, veggie oil was as plentiful as autumn leaves, and restaurants were happy to have someone take it off their hands.

But with the growing realization of its potential, one without an inside track now has to pay for it, even though the cost is peanuts compared to the fossil fuel counterpart. And any diesel engine can run entirely on veg oil without preheating, providing the glycerine is removed before the oil goes into the tank.

Gasoline-powered vehicles cannot go the veg oil route; unless one is willing to trade in their gas buggy for one that runs on diesel, they can forget about all alternative fuels except ethanol ... which comes with its own headaches).

Blake is a backyard tinkerer, who in the face of climate change and other problems, is working toward a greener America.

He and his wife June lead quiet and unassuming lives in their modest, comfortable digs along Clyde's Genesee Street. He'd be the last to acknowledge that he's part of the cutting edge of a technological revolution. But with the creation of a simple fuel recipe that substantially improves his vehicle mileage, he has managed to bypass the research labs of the auto manufacturers and come up with his own answer to rising gas prices - and to the problem of an increasingly polluted atmosphere.

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