Grease traps to gas tanks

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Michael Carman has a special relationship with used fat.

He often drives 40 minutes to pick up a dozen gallons or so of old grease. He has 100 more gallons of used cooking fat in his garage, stacked precariously in plastic cubes wrapped in oily cardboard.

For Carman, each gallon of old oil means free money — and as fuel prices creep higher, the grease grows only more valuable. Carman gets 50 miles per gallon on the stuff.

“Our fuel’s free. What more can you say?” Carman said.

As climbing petroleum prices squeeze household and business budgets across the nation, the demand for alternative fuels also climbs. For most people, technology leaves few options: Drive less or pay more. A few people like Carman create their own alternative — biodiesel. Made from fats, biodiesel is efficient, safe and environmentally friendly.

Although some say it’s not ready for the mainstream, one Kansas institution hopes to help change that.

Insufficient infrastructure

But the development of alternative fuel infrastructure has fallen far behind the rise in petroleum fuel prices. Ilya Tabakh, an engineering graduate student and cofounder of KU’s Biodiesel Initiative, said that the lack of biodiesel infrastructure corresponded to a lack in demand.

“There’s no retail access, or at least not that much retail access to biodiesel. And very few people actually have diesel cars — consumer diesel cars,” Tabakh said. “Unless I wanted to go buy a Jetta or a Mercedes-Benz, there’s very few things out there that I can use diesel in.”

But Tabakh suspects that may change as people realize the savings that can be had. Things certainly changed for Carman.

"Rise early, work late, strike oil"

After learning about the possibilities of using biodiesel, Carman bought two diesel vehicles, a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta and a late-model Ford F250 truck. With a few modifications to keep the fuel warm, Carman’s vehicles run on straight vegetable oil. His Jetta boasts fuel efficiency that puts modern hybrids to shame.

“They’ll get 50 miles per gallon, city-highway driving average, day-in, day-out, year- round,” Carman said.

Coupled with a spare tank in the trunk, Carman could drive about 2000 miles without refueling.

Carman figures that he saves about $60 for every hour spent gathering and filtering the oil. His primary source is La Parrilla, a restaurant in downtown Lawrence. Carman prizes the oil he hauls from the restaurant because it is unusually clean. That makes it easy to filter.

Many biodieselers find that striking up relationships with restaurants is about the same as striking oil. Plus, it’s an arrangement that benefits everyone. La Parrilla owner Alejandro Lule said his staff no longer uses the grease trap in the alley. Carman collects all of the restaurant’s waste oil, about 16 gallons per week.

One Topeka restaurateur actually sought out Carman because he didn’t want to pay for grease disposal. It’s a growing trend not just for restaurants, but for institutions as well.

Feedstock to tailpipe

KU’s Biodiesel Initiative now collects waste oil from KU's Ekdahl's Dining Hall, which students know as "Mrs. E’s," to process into biodiesel. The initiative’s method of processing the fuel is much more technical than Carman’s. It has to be.

“It’s not technically a legal road fuel unless you have a standard — unless it’s a regulated road fuel,” Tabakh said. “You can’t even run it legally on the road, in some states.”

Running straight vegetable oil isn’t an option for the initiative because straight vegetable oil has no standard. Instead, the vegetable oil is filtered and put into a chemical reactor where the oil is transformed into B100, a nationally standardized fuel.

The process adds complication and expense, but Susan Williams, the initiative’s director, said it’s necessary if the University is going to use the fuel. Someday, she hopes biodiesel will power campus buses.

“We want to make sure that what we’re putting in the buses would be an on-spec, legal fuel,” Williams said.

The largest obstacle that the initiative faces involves the fuel’s chemical makeup. Because the exact fuel chemistry can vary from batch to batch, campus organizations are hesitant to dump it into the tanks without assurance that it will work.

“If a lawnmower stops on campus, that’s one thing,” Williams said. “But if a bus stops on campus, or all the buses stop on campus, then that’s another thing altogether.”

Williams and Tabakh said they hope to soon have the expensive instruments necessary to test the initiative’s biodiesel for the 19 fuel specifications for B100.

At that point, processing large amounts of fuel would become practical. With the volume of waste oil that the University’s dining halls churn out, the initiative could produce about 7,000 gallons of B100, enough to offset nearly 17 percent of the university’s fuel usage.

Williams also hopes the initiative could serve an important function to help facilitate the more widespread adoption of biodiesel.

“Having a testing facility here on campus would be great, from the standpoint of being able not only to test our own fuel,” Williams said, “but also to be a service to the people of the state of Kansas.”

But even if biodiesel becomes standard at the pump, Carman suspects he would still pick up La Parrilla’s used fat and filter his own oil. For him, it’s a hobby that benefits everyone.

“You’re doing the atmosphere and the environment a favor,” Carman said. “And yourself."