Pitt Student Fuels His Car at a Chinese Restaurant

Transcript

OPEN: The holiday season means many people are driving to see family and friends. That usually means burning a lot of expensive gasoline or diesel fuel, but it doesn't have to. One University of Pittsburgh student will be using free fuel to get to wherever he needs to go. The Allegheny Front's Tim Palucka hitched a ride with this free-wheeler to find out what moves him.

NAT SOUND: Mary Liang talking to her father Chi Liang in the kitchen of his restaurant.

PALUCKA: This afternoon Pat Lambert and Mary Liang are visiting her father's Chinese restaurant in Bridgeville. [NAT SOUND: Pat and Mary walking through kitchen, Mary talking to her father in Chinese, vegetable oil boiling, door opening and closing.] They're here for takeout, but not the traditional kind. They have to walk past the cash register, through the kitchen and out the back door to get to their order - six clear plastic containers of golden brown used vegetable oil

LIANG: As you can see my dad has collected oil, well it's been, probably about a month, maybe.

LAMBERT: They're five gallon jugs, and they're what we SVOerÔø?s, or 'straight vegetable oils,' we call it 'cubies,' because they're square. You can see I can pick this up easily, no problem, and I can load it into my trunk.

PALUCKA: Lambert has been running his 1984 Mercedes diesel on used vegetable oil for about a year now. But he isn't doing this just for the free fuel. It's all part of his undergraduate research project. Dr. Eugene Wagner, a lecturer in chemistry at Pitt, helped Lambert write a research proposal, shop it around, and land $2,000 in funding from the University's Honors College.

WAGNER: This project has gone far beyond just mechanically hooking your car up so that it can run on waste vegetable oil. We're interested in seeing what the performance is on the car, the gas mileage, what sort of emissions you get from your car running on waste vegetable oil as opposed to diesel oil. So it's more of trying to see how it would affect society or the environment if people were to turn their cars into vegetable oil cars.

NAT SOUND: Cars going by on street.

PALUCKA: On the street outside Wagner's office, Lambert proudly shows off what he calls his 'veggiemobile.'

NAT SOUND: Opening trunk.

PALUCKA: While you have the trunk open here can you tell me something about what we're looking at?

LAMBERT: Sure. We've got an auxiliary fuel tank here that's a 24-gallon aluminum tank. We have an on-board filtration unit and we also have an auxiliary fuel pump for when it's really cold in the winter time we can help the fuel move along to the front part of the car.

PALUCKA: Keeping the vegetable oil hot enough to move through the fuel system to the engine is a big challenge. Vegetable oil is a lot thicker than diesel fuel, so it can clog up the works if it gets too cold. That's why Lambert keeps two tanks on the car. The original tank contains a gallon or two of diesel fuel to start the car and heat up the engine. The new one in the trunk contains up to 24 gallons of vegetable oil. Lambert gets 30 miles per gallon on the highway.

LAMBERT: We ready to roll?

PALUCKA: Yeah.

NAT SOUND: Car starting up.

PALUCKA: Once the engine runs on diesel for a few minutes to heat up the engine block, Lambert changes over to vegetable oil. He just flips a switch on a control panel inside the car. You can't tell by listening or riding in the car when this change happens. And the only way you can smell it is by standing next to the tailpipe.

NAT SOUND: Cars going by.

LAMBERT: I don't know if you would just go to the back of the car and say that it smells like a Chinese restaurant back here, but you can definitely notice a different scent in the air versus conventional petroleum products, but personally I find it a little bit easier on the nose.

PALUCKA: According to the data he's been collecting, it's also easier on the environment.

LAMBERT: The emissions are much better running on vegetable oil than on diesel fuel. The sulfur dioxide emissions are much lower, which is what makes acid rain, and the nitrous oxide emissions are approximately 25% lower on vegetable oil. So really, it's definitely a win-win situation because you're helping the environment by doing this and also having free gas.

PALUCKA: Dr. Wagner likes to take a broader view of Lambert's work.

WAGNER: The thing that I like about the project is it makes us think beyond being captive to an oil economy. I think people are used to thinking about battery operated cars or electric vehicles, but I don't think the idea of using a waste vegetable oil car is something people know much about.

PALUCKA: Even avid vegetable oil car owners will learn a lot from this project. The data that Lambert is collecting is currently not available elsewhere, and getting the word out is the next step. Lambert has signs ready to go on his car to advertise what he's doing. He'll be driving around the Pitt campus in the next few months to promote the project. Lambert is also talking to the Pitt administration about running one of their student shuttles on vegetable oil - the Pitt VeggieBus. For the Allegheny Front, I'm Tim Palucka.