Even though government agencies are exempt from the tax portion of the price of motor fuel, they are feeling the pinch of high fuel costs.
Motivated in equal measure by budget considerations, environmental concerns and the desire for US energy independence, a handful of local governments have begun to fuel their vehicles with waste vegetable oil.
Westchester County, north of New York City, has converted 15 of its vehicles to run on waste vegetable oil, ranging from a garish green Veggie Van used for educational purposes to heavy equipment like a garbage truck and a farm tractor.
“This is one of those things that’s so much fun to show off,” Andrew Spano, a Westchester County executive, said of the Veggie Van, a shuttle van that was converted into a mobile classroom to teach environmental awareness to small groups of students.
“And the old vegetable oil from the county’s Glen Island Park would have been thrown down the drain,” Spano said, referring to food concessions at the park.
In addition, county-owned sites like an amusement park in Rye, a restaurant in New Rochelle and hospital and correctional complexes in Valhalla all save their used cooking oil for the county, said Ralph Butler, the Westchester commissioner of public works.
Not only that, Butler said, the county has set up three collection sites so restaurant owners can bring their used oil “and do the right thing instead of the illegal thing” — clandestinely dumping the oil.
In one recent month, restaurants contributed more than 757 liters of old cooking oil to the 1,135 liters or so that the county gets each month from its own sources, Butler said.
“We can use all the oil we can get,” he said. “We’re always looking for more oil, and we have plans to convert even more vehicles. Right now, we’re working on a second Veggie Van, because we just can’t keep up with demand for the first one.”
The diesel-fueled vehicles were all converted to run on vegetable oil at a total cost of about US$25,000, Butler said, under contracts with V.O. Tech, a business run by Wally Little, a mechanic-turned-inventor in Mahopac, New York.
“It’s money well spent,” Butler said. “We expect payback in one to two years.”
Butler said tests conducted by the county showed that the vegetable oil burned more cleanly than the diesel fuel that had been used in the vehicles and gave the same power and fuel economy.
Spano said he got the idea to run vehicles on vegetable oil when he was eating in a restaurant in the northern part of the county and was commiserating with the owner about the high price of gasoline. The restaurateur, Jon Pratt, mentioned that he was using his cooking oil to run a truck, “and I thought, `Why not us?”’ Spano said.
The idea turned out to be contagious. Valerie O’Keeffe, the town supervisor in Mamaroneck, said she was in a meeting with Spano last year and saw the county’s Veggie Van.
“I admit I was jealous,” she said. “I had to have one for the town. I thought, ‘What’s bigger and better?’ and I came up with the idea of a garbage truck.”
As a result, she said, mechanics in the Mamaroneck Department of Public Works began converting a 300-horsepower Mack garbage truck that had previously run on diesel fuel.
The truck has been collecting trash for more than three months, she said, saving the cost of about 141 liters of diesel a week. She said the town paid about US$7,000 to convert the truck and would recoup its money within a year.
The county subsequently put its own converted garbage truck on the road.
Government experimentation with vegetable oil as a motor fuel is not limited to the Northeast. Agencies in California and Florida have also converted vehicles from diesel.
Craig Dodson, the superintendent of facilities and equipment for the Golden Gate Bridge, said the agency responsible for bridge operations gave him permission to investigate alternative fuels several years ago “in response to rising fuel prices and California’s strict smog requirements.”
Now, Dodson said, he runs a pool with 24 vehicles — along with four air compressors — that use only waste vegetable oil as fuel. The vehicles include 18 Italian scooters that use single-cylinder diesel engines, four tow trucks and two forklifts. (The scooters are driven along the sidewalk to take workers and materials to work sites along the bridge, he said, so that traffic is not impeded by trucks stopping in the road.)
Initially, Dodson said, he used a kit from Greasecar.com, a manufacturer in Massachusetts, to convert one scooter, equipping it with separate tanks for pure vegetable oil and a mix of vegetable oil thinned with additives. But all the rest of the scooters run on vegetable oil blended with cetane boosters and other commercially available additives in a single tank. The tow trucks are running on a mix of diesel and vegetable oil, and as they age and get closer to the end of their service life, Dodson said, he experiments by increasing the vegetable oil component.
“So far,” he said, “they are doing just fine with heavier concentrations of vegetable oil.”
“We use between 100 and 300 gallons [378.5 liters to 1,135 liters] of vegetable oil a week and not a bit of diesel, and it costs us 72 cents a gallon [US$18.1 a liter] to make it ready to use,” he said.
Moreover, “whether it’s a batch of 50 gallons or 500 gallons [189 liters or 1,893 liters], it takes us 40 minutes to do,” he said.
Like most other agencies and private users of vegetable oil, Dodson’s agency counts on regular collections of oil from restaurants. But unlike other veggie burners, the agency has access to resources like centrifuges salvaged from county buses that were headed for the scrap heap.
“We can use the centrifuges to clean this oil down to one micron, which is extremely fine,” he said.
In Florida, Tim Beyrle, the director of systems operations for the New Smyrna Beach Utilities Commission, which runs the local electric utility, said that a predecessor had converted a 1993 Ford F-Series pickup truck to run on vegetable oil, using a kit from PlantDrive.com, a California-based company.
“But it’s not a normal fleet vehicle,” Beyrle said. “We use it as a demonstration vehicle for things like alternative energy fairs, but not much else.”
Beyrle said he would not convert a second vehicle for his fleet.
“We’re an electric utility, not a vegetable oil collector,” he said.
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