Forget cooking; priest uses vegetable oil as car fuel

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (CNS) — What’s silver, goes 70 mph and smells like a Fry Daddy in Lent?

In Jefferson City, it could be Father Tom Alber’s car.

Just as gas prices started going through the roof, Father Alber accepted a new assignment requiring extensive travel. Covering for sick or vacationing priests and celebrating Spanish-language Masses in far-flung parishes meant he was driving, on average, about 200 miles each weekend.

"Add the meetings ... and a trip home once in a while and I was spending $200 a month on gasoline," said the priest, who is in residence at Immaculate Conception Parish in Jefferson City.

The cost and his own curiosity led him to investigate affordable alternative fuels. Before long, he was looking into the renewable resource technology offered by the diesel engine.

When Rudolf Diesel began working on a new engine in the late 1890s, he envisioned something that could be powered by an array of fuels. "His prototype could be fed coal dust suspended in water, heavy mineral oil and vegetable oil," Father Alber told The Catholic Missourian, newspaper of the Diocese of Jefferson City.

When Diesel started up his engine at the World’s Fair in Paris in 1900, he had it running on 100 percent peanut oil. After Diesel’s death in 1913, his engine was soon running exclusively on the cheap and abundant petroleum-based diesel. However, the basic design of his engine was never extensively altered and today’s diesel motor requires little more than a timing change to run on biodiesel, a fuel made from vegetable oil.

About 20 percent of vegetable oil is glycerin. When the glycerin is removed through a simple process of adding a mixture of wood alcohol and lye — sodium methoxide — to the vegetable oil, what remains is biodiesel. It can be used undiluted or mixed with conventional diesel fuel in any ratio without adversely affecting the power of the engine.

Father Alber’s initial interest in biodiesel was cut short because, as he said, he "didn’t think it would be such a great idea to run an experiment involving fuel and chemical agents in a room underneath our church."

But he soon found out that he didn’t have to manufacture biodiesel to get a cheaper fuel.

By the time he finished reading Joshua Tickell’s book "From the Fryer to the Tank," he was convinced he could reconfigure a car to run on waste vegetable oil. He even talked his brother Otto, an engineer, into helping him with the project.

The priest did a lot of research and then bought a 1978 car "with only 384,000 miles" and a diesel engine that seemed to suit his needs. For fuel, he was given 250 gallons of vegetable oil from Father Joe Hoi after a parish fish fry in Owensville.

Father Alber set up a filtering system that cleans the oil to the same level that is standard at the pump. He also built a special adapter kit for the oil and placed a second 25-gallon tank in the car.

The greater challenge was the fuel temperature. Because of its thickness, vegetable oil must be heated to about 170 degrees before it enters the combustion process.

Initially, Father Alber rerouted cooling-system hoses to use the heat from the radiator fluid to warm the vegetable oil on its way to the engine. After experiencing flow problems with the compacted hoses, he began using a 12-volt heated oil filter.

The vegetable oil does not work as well when it comes to starting the engine. It leaves a residue when the engine is turned off, so the priest put valves into his fuel lines so he can start the engine on diesel and then switch to the vegetable oil after about five minutes. He switches back to the diesel five minutes before shutting the car off to burn out any remaining oil.

Right now he wants to make his car’s use of vegetable oil more efficient and practical. Recently, he went on a weekend jaunt that took him more than 600 miles to Kahoka, Cedar Rapids and Milan before returning to Jefferson City.