A round trip from Orillia, Ont., to Toronto is 270 kilometres, and William Cox recently made the drive in his 1979 Mercedes. Total fuel cost: $1.25.

How is this possible? Cox runs his car on used vegetable oil he gets for free from local restaurants, along with a little diesel fuel at the start and finish of each trip, which accounts for the $1.25 expenditure.

"Since I converted my car to run on veggie fuel a year and a half ago, I've put 55,000 kilometres on it, and it's cost me in the neighbourhood of $500 for fuel," he says. That's only because of the diesel Cox has to purchase when he's on long trips away from home.

Cox is so positive about veggie oil fuel that he has a part-time business developing fuel conversion kits and installing them. In large part, he uses equipment purchased from PlantDrive Canada, of Salmon Arm, B.C.

PlantDrive's co-founder, Edward Beggs, developed the conversion technology as part of his Master's thesis at Royal Roads University. Recently returned from Germany, where he was part of the first Plant Oil Fuels International Congress, he says it's hard to track the number of people fueling their cars and trucks with veggie oil. "A lot of them are do-it-yourselfers," he says, but he estimates there are approximately 50,000 in North America, with several thousand in Canada.

Beggs has run his '92 Volkswagen Jetta on veggie oil for five and a half years and estimates it's cost him "a couple of hundred dollars for some diesel fuel" to go the 120,000 kilometres he's traveled.

Simpler procedure
If you're interested in switching to veggie fuel, you need a diesel-engine vehicle. You can then buy a kit with all of the necessary parts you need for the conversion, including an oil tank and equipment to thin the oil (which is thicker than diesel) so it can move into the combustion chamber and burn as fuel to run your car.

Of course, you also need a source for the veggie oil itself. Cox and Beggs get theirs from local restaurants only too happy to give it away, as it saves them having to pay a company to dispose of the left-over fryer oil sitting in barrels out back of their restaurants. But you can also purchase oil from dealers or processing plants.

From there, it's a straight-forward procedure: you simply siphon the oil into containers and haul it home. There, you must put it through a filtering and water-separating system and then store it in water-tight storage containers until you're ready to fuel up your car.

And then you're ready for take-off. A word about that: regular diesel (or biodiesel) fuel must be used to start the engine until it's sufficiently warmed for the veggie oil to take over. Diesel is also required before turning off the engine to clear the fuel lines. Many veggie fuel users purchase small alarms to remind them to switch to diesel before turning off their cars.

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While veggie oil can be classified as a bio-fuel, it really belongs in a separate category since biodiesel, whether from animal or plant sources, requires processing to turn it into fuel, while vegetable oil goes straight into the converted engine.