Closer To The Ideal

The Up And Clean crew stayed over at my house for the weekend. They were a delight to have as guests. (Their name derives from the bicycle group they used to belong to, the Down And Dirty club. ) The newspaper article that describes their adventures misses the most important fact about their travels: that they eventually overcame all mechanical difficulties. They now travel the country without needing fossil fuels (save for start-up).

The newspaper article emphasizes the trouble they had getting their bus out to Portland, Oregon, and then getting back home to Minnesota. But what happened after that article was written is that they fixed the remaining problems with their filtering system. They then drove down to Greensboro, North Carolina, and up to Charlottesville, Virginia, with no mechanical difficulties.

They get about 7 MPG on used kitchen oils. Which is not much less than what diesel would get pulling a big, old bus like that.

It’s worth mentioning that in the year 1892, when Dr. Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine, he thought it would run on peanut oil. The problem with peanut oil is that it was expensive, relative to fossil fuel. That has remained the main problem with all vegetable oils: relative to fossil fuels, they are expensive.

But the Up And Clean crew run their bus entirely on waste oil that’s already been used for cooking. As such, they’ve gotten all their oil for free, for their whole entire 7,000 mile trip. Clearly, if millions of people started using bio-diesel, it wouldn’t all be free, but the cost of waste oil will always be less than the cost of unused oil. I suspect waste oil is, in every sense of the word, economical relative to fossil fuels.

If bio-diesel interests you in the slightest, you should read their blog to keep up with their adventures.