Another option: french fry oil

CORNWALL— While members of the Cornwall Energy Task Force are checking each and every household in town to be sure residents have signed up for energy from renewable sources, others in town are making different contributions.

For instance, Dan Horan has a vegetable oil car.

Horan lives in Brooklyn. On weekends he and his wife and three children come to Cornwall by train.

"This is where I drive my car," he said. "It’s is an ’83 Mercedes Turbo Diesel. I got it for $700. It has gone 160,000 miles and I feel it has a long way to go, maybe 500,000 miles."

Horan said the car runs on straight vegetable oil (biofuel has diesel mixed in with it) and that he gets it free from a nearby diner, in 5-gallon jugs. It’s advantageous to the restaurant, which would otherwise have to pay to have the used oil carted away.

Off his driveway is an outdoor stone fireplace. It is where he heats the oil and then pours it through a filter drip (like a huge coffee filter) to remove bits of food. Once it is heated, the oil is less viscous and filters through fast. In the trunk of his car is a tank into which he pours the filtered oil.

Though he starts the car with diesel fuel, once the engine is warm he presses a button on the dash board and it switches to the vegetable oil. A minute before he stops the car, he pushes another switch and the vegetable oil is drawn out as the diesel takes over.

"I could use new Wesson oil, which could be poured in directly," he explained, "but it costs about $3 a gallon — just like gas. Another thing, with diesel fuel, one has to change the filter quite often. With vegetable fuel, even more often."

How did he adapt the car to the oil system?

"Well," he said, "to start, one has to buy a kit which costs between $700 and $1,000 and a mechanic has to install it. It’s not hard to find a mechanic. They’re intrigued."

Horan added that there is another advantage to using vegetable oil.

"It keeps the used corn oil out of landfills. Instead, it emerges from the car as a neutral carbon emission."

He pointed out that towns could adapt their diesel trucks to this system and they could set up sophisticated filtering systems to purify the used oil.

Enthusiastic and a marvelous salesman for the system, he downplayed the suggestion that when he drives by, people claim they smell french fries. He loves his car and that it costs him nothing at all to run makes it a real homerun in the energy game.