Fryer Fat as Fuel

Fryer Fat as FuelStraight vegetable oil can be a viable fuel with equipment modifications

Part 1 of this series published in August explained how to produce biodiesel from vegetable oil at your golf facility. But some people aren't big fans of handling all the necessary chemicals necessary to induce the transesterfication process, which converts the raw vegetable oil into a usable diesel fuel by lowering its viscosity through replacing the glycerol bond with an alcohol bond. Don't worry if you fall among this group, there is another option: straight and waste vegetable oil. Using straight vegetable oil in your diesel equipment poses no more risk to the machinery than regular biodiesel and is actually more environmentally responsible and cost effective.

Vegetable oil is an easily obtainable and cheap resource that a lot of us already have available in the kitchen at our golf facility. Last year alone, the United States generated more than 9 billion gallons of waste vegetable oil. So it's available in mass quantities across the country. The really cool part about using waste vegetable oil as an alternative fuel is that we are taking a by-product that restaurants would normally have to pay to have discarded, and we are making it productive and valuable. With diesel fuel prices at an all-time high, exploring this alternative fuel option makes economic sense in addition to the environmental benefits it offers.

It's not too difficult to sell this idea to your general manager, board of directors or course owner. Here's a little history lesson: This concept is, in fact, the original concept Dr. Rudolf Diesel had in mind when he first developed his engine. He demonstrated his first engine at the 1900 World's Fair using peanut oil as the fuel. His futuristic vision was that biofuels would become the dominant fuel due to the lack of sustainable petroleum supply. He certainly was ahead of his time. After his untimely death in 1913, the Cummins Corp. altered the fuel intake to accept less viscous fuels than his biomass fuels. Thus the new diesel engine was born with a modified fuel intake, but the underlying principle of using biomass fuels in the engine remained possible.

Quick Tip

Vegetable oil has many properties that make it an attractive substitute for diesel fuel, except for one: It has a much higher viscosity. The vegetable oil must be made thinner to make this system work. This is accomplished by applying enough heat to the vegetable oil to reduce its viscosity to pass into a diesel engine with no problems. That principle is the basis for the rest of the processes discussed in this article.

What temperature is that exactly? There is no precise answer, but the generally accepted minimum range is between 140 degrees Fahrenheit to 180 F. With this temperature, the viscosity of the vegetable oil is reduced to resemble that of petroleum diesel, which will allow it to atomize properly and operate the engine. We will not be able to ever match the exact viscosity because that would require heating the vegetable oil to 302 degrees F, which is too hot for an equipment application.

Quick Tip

There are two types of conversion systems that allow you operate diesel equipment with straight and waste vegetable oil. Both of these systems have been used extensively for the past 30 years in the automotive industry without major incidents. These systems have proved themselves reliable and economical over the past three decades. All I have done is borrow the technology and apply the component modification to turf equipment. These two systems are simply referred to as a "two-tank conversion system" and a "one-tank conversion system."

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