Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

Sayonara Subaru, Hello Veggie Oil Ford: Greasing the Path Toward Letting Go

When you’ve driven (and at times lived in) a maintenance-free Japanese vehicle for all of its 204,000 miles over 12 years, it’s an action almost like trying to counter gravity, a motion like trying not to breathe, to ditch it in favor of a (brrr) American vehicle.

And not just any vehicle: one of those three-quarter-ton trucks that transformed me instantly from the lowest rig on the road to the highest. I had to get a diesel truck because only these can be converted to straight veggie oil, or SVO, the next step beyond bio-diesel. This is, as it sounds, simple filtered waste oil. No processing necessary. And I needed a four-wheel-drive vehicle because the last dirt mile leading to the Funky Butte Ranch is maintained with the frequency of the highway system in Somalia.

So unless I planned on importing a smaller truck from one of the wrong-side-steering wheel countries that offers more options, my truck would come in one of two sizes: XXXL or XXXXL. I went with XXXL.

The experience of buying a used truck in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 2007 is a quaint throwback to every cliché about used truck sales. At one point I heard the manager, from behind the half-open “private” door, yelling at my salesman that he would never budge on the price for such a “cherry” vehicle as the six-year-old one I was considering. Frankly, I’m impressed that I left that day unsure if I was snow-jobbed or not. I was the one with the Stanford degree. They were the ones with my money. Over Blue Book.

I named my used Ford F-250 the ROAT (The Ridiculously Over-Sized American Truck). Suddenly people in tiny Suburbans and Silverados were bowing deferentially to me as I edged into their lanes on New Mexico’s Interstate 25, which Southbound at sunset is one of the most beautifully expansive drives on the planet.

When I had to nudge my ol’ reliable LOVEsubee, whose engine probably has another 300,000 miles of easy start life in it but which is struggling in the transmission realm, down to nearby Mexico to return my Mexican driving permit after driving the ROAT for a month, the effect was that of go-carting. I couldn’t believe they let such small vehicles on the public roads. I slid unseen under giant Suburbans and Silverados. They couldn’t even see me. I felt like a field mouse darting between the real vehicles.

The ROAT is a V-8, which is twice as many V’s as I’m used to, whatever that means. All I know is suddenly I can accelerate up hills. Even when carrying four bales of goat hay, eight solar panels and a peripatetic puppy named Sadie.

And the best part is, I can do such an obscene vehicle without guilt: I’m cruising on vegetable oil, and the only downside, so far, is that I find myself mysteriously drawn to Chinese take-out places at odd hours. It’s a fact of my life now that my exhaust smells like King Pao Chicken. Pedestrians notice it. People who have the mixed fortune to drive behind me wind up passing me dangerously to pull into drive-thru fast food lines.

The conversion of the ROAT to SVO was about three day’s work for the good folks at Albuquerque Alternative Energies. My truck looked scary there for a couple of hours that weekend – wires hanging out everywhere like a severely wounded neuro-surgery patient.

And the Albuquerque Alternative Energies warehouse, understandably enough, is dangerously greasy for a dreamy guy like me not prone to watching where I’m stepping. I was skating around the floor from my first step. Note the grease on the floor in some of these photos.

Kevin Forrest, the 27-year-old proprietor at Albuquerque Alternative Energies, is no tree-hugger. He’s a two-tour Iraq vet and still on active duty with the Air Force. He’s definitely in the No Forgiveness for Jane Fonda demographic. I know this because I always like to ask military folks why they tend to support a coke-head draft dodger for Commander in Chief (Bush) over a guy (Kerry), who at least WENT to Vietnam. And they generally have coherent answers, surrounding feeling betrayed by Kerry’s anti-war stance after returning. (He appeared at demonstrations with Fonda. Before Kevin was born, but nonetheless.)

So why is a decidedly right-leaning fellow like Kevin Forrest a pioneer in practical alternative fuels?

“I’m a patriot,” is how Kevin explains his role at the forefront at helping America kick fossil fuels. “The people over there firing at our guys are financed by the oil that we buy and put into our vehicles. It’s a ridiculous loop. I just thought we should see if we could put something else in.”

We can. It’s not even that big of a deal. Rudolph Diesel, the fellow who invented the engine that bears his name, in fact intended for farmers to grow their own fuel. Today most Early (Re-)Adopters pick up their waste oil at restaurants. Hence the Kung Pao redolence.

I’m finding waste oil is becoming a big business: before SVO vehicles, most went into animal feed. Soon after returning to the desert with the ROAT, I called up the one café in my remote New Mexico valley.

“I’d like to take your waste oil off your hands,” I told the owner with a sense of generosity in my tone. “For free.”

“Get in line,” she said. Turns out my SVO powered neighbor Asher already had dibs on the place. More on SVO collection (AKA “Grease Dumpster Diving”) in a future posting.

Thanks to a nifty control panel, called the VO (for Veggie Oil) Controller on the dash made by this fellow Ray Ackley in his garage in Michigan, the ROAT starts on diesel (or bio-diesel). But it only runs on these old-school fuels for a few minutes. When the engine heats up to the magic number of 140 degrees, the controller switches my fuel source over to the 80-gallon veggie oil tank in my truck bed. When all is working right, I don’t even have to think about it.

The problem at first was learning that I do have to think about it. Often.

There have been a few minor glitches at the start, most notably some early start-up coughing and an impressive, Batmobile-like unintentional smoke screen redolent of a certain Chinese dish, probably caused by incomplete veggie oil removal upon “auto purge.” That’s this cool, eerie feature wherein when I pull out the key, the engine keeps running for 30 seconds while the veggie oil leaves my fuel lines. All I have to do is remember to put the ROAT in neutral and engage the parking brake, which after some scary near-deaths, I do an increasing percentage of the time.

Another issue is I wasn’t at first always sure if the VO Controller had really switched the ROAT over to veggie oil, despite what the readout said. The diesel gauge still seemed to move. During one of these moments about a week after the Conversion, I pulled over on a remote stretch of New Mexico “road” and called Veggie Oil Mechanic Kevin for some distance mechanical advice.

“Smell the exhaust,” he advised.

The problem is, that morning, the juniper pollen had exploded, causing my sinus passages to expand to the size of small balloons.

“I’m not sure. I can’t really smell. I’m not hungry for Chinese, which I normally would be at this point.”

“Stuck your head in front of the tailpipe,” Kevin instructed. “If it’s diesel it’ll burn your throat.”

I did it, in the name of Helping America Kick Oil.

“It doesn’t burn my throat,” I reported. “And now I have a mild urge for won ton soup.”

“You’re on veggie oil,” Kevin diagnosed.

That night, I scanned with interest a British news article about prolonging-your-brain-power, because I felt I’d needed it with all my carbon monoxide exposure of late.

My vegetable powered life got much easier and efficient when I realized that the VO Controller wasn’t the primary controller. I was. Especially when it came to that “purging” mechanism that was now such a major part of my life. I learned to watch for oil and coolant temperature, and would switch manually from one to the other fuel source after short trips or when I had stalled (still learning the unfamiliar Ford manual transmission) and thrown the auto-purge function into higglety-pigglety.

I become of necessity my own engine diagnostician. This a guy whose previous auto mechanics were limited to tire changing. Within two weeks of my March conversion to SVO, in an age when everything’s digital, I began to intuitively understand why I was quite manually producing my Batmobile-like Kung Pao Smokescreen some mornings. See, Kevin had explained that every time I shut off the engine, that auto-purge mechanism kicks a liter or so of fuel back into the 80 gallon SVO tank his dad and employee Gary had mounted in the bed of the ROAT. What I needed to do was increase the purge time and the post-purge diesel run time, to make sure the fuel lines were clear. The smokescreen was caused by solidified VO in the system. (Think about what your frying pan looks like on a cool morning when you leave oil in it overnight.) Kevin had been explaining this to me, repeatedly, since the conversion, but I’m a bit impaired when it comes to grasping things that I should have learned in shop class.

Conversely, I learned to override the purge mechanism when I made short stops. That was so I wouldn’t constantly send fuel back into the VO tank (wasting diesel and risking overflowing said VO tank) when I was just going to re-start after an errand. It was just a matter of pressing a button. On a town trip this month after this lesson clicked I repeatedly overrode the auto-purge mechanism at the appropriate time and felt like Rudolph Diesel when he invented the engine.

As so often happens when the circumstances of one’s day gets one’s personal serotonin flowing, everything and everyone in Silver City was smiling the day I made this discovery. And I had to make it on a town run because short trips are really the drawback to VO driving as of early 2007.

Maybe it was because it was so undeniably spring. But Silver City, at 23 miles the closest town to the Funky Butte Ranch, in addition to being a place where Billy the Kid was once imprisoned, really DID seem to be grooving this day. Mothers shopped in bare feet. I ran into a fellow I knew (he told me) in college. Even my shade parking karma was spot on (no small feat in a vehicle the size of some small states) – something I thought a mystical occurrence until I remembered that to keep the veggie oil hot and un-purged I needed to counter-intuitively park in the sun. In the desert.

I carried this good vibe into my accountant’s office, where I was to pick up my taxes. I didn’t have to break it to her until next year that she’ll need to calculate my fuel taxes on the honor system (21 cents per gallon to the State of New Mexico, 18.4 cents to the Feds) now that I’m on the untaxed veggie oil. This in addition to figuring out my solar tax credits in an increasingly labyrinthine return.

My mood remains good bordering transcendent as March draws to a close. And I’m driving green. And hungry. The ROAT is basically a munchies machine. My exhaust could be used for chemo patients. People comment on it in the street in Silver City. The fellow that owns the sprawling Antique Mall approached the idling ROAT and commented, “It smells like french fries around here!” Best of all, I thought briefly that’d I’d made my last diesel fill-up for months, just as pump prices crossed back on the wrong side of $3 per gallon.

Think about it. Vegetable oil. Is powering. My Car. My 3/4 ton ROAT.

It’s just one of those amazing phenomena that while theoretically possible, seems almost magical when it occurs, like a supernova, or the Rangers winning the Stanley Cup.

And, I found to my surprise, veggie oil causes a diesel engine to run more quietly and smoothly. Yep, the ride is quieter – I can almost hear the Goats’ “mmbah” back to me from a 1/4 mile away when I greet them from the top of the canyon rim on a drive back into the FBR.

“It’s all about the BBs,” Gary Forrest, Kevin’s inventor genius father and first employee, explains. By this he means the ideal size for the veggie oil molecules that make their way through the engine. Ideal for viscosity or something.

I can’t quite calculate fuel efficiency yet because as I was learning the system I was driving on diesel more than I now will be. Gary says that on SVO I’ll get about the same, maybe slightly better than the 18 MPG I was getting on fossil diesel. No one knows the long term effects of SVO on the engine. Some systems, not those designed by Albuquerque Alternative Energies, have clogged fuel injectors. It’s easy to see why: think again about that cold Morning After Frying Pan. Gary, of course, believes that his company’s system is foolproof.

“Because of the BBs,” he explains. I believe him.

I take solace in the belief that the world needs what economists call “Early Adopters,” if untried technology is to seep into the mainstream. I’m proud to be one in this case, even if it’s out of necessity and environmental conscience. Especially if it means more Chinese food in my life. (“Sorry, Doc, my all-fat diet is necessary for work.”). I in fact feel it is my obligation to survey and test every Diabetes Factory in Silver City, and regularly, to be both a knowledgeable and loyal customer before I start asking the owner to take me out back for a tour of the waste oil tank. This generally a place rivaling the men’s room for the Most Disgusting Part of the Restaurant award. Especially with regard to smell and Places You Don’t Want to Touch.

VO Mechanic Kevin is really a fabulous human and said he’d be glad to take a look at the whole system next time I’m in Albuquerque to make sure everything keeps running smoothly and without The Kung Pao Smokescreen. At that time I’ll mention to him my only other complaint about the prototype cutting edge SVO system: the VO Controller itself could be placed a little more visibly. It’s Velcroed right under the steering wheel, requiring a prayerful lean forward to view its readout, which can be unsafe and is definitely not ergonomic. Balance, grounding, ergonomics. All huge themes for me these days.

I’m looking forward to working with the Forrests again. For one thing, they’re eager to speculate about the worldwide ramifications of the current ”alternative” energy craze. This is a topic that’s important to me. During the conversion, we spent half our time agreeing that the world needs to get off fossil fuels, and half the time arguing about whether Fox News or CNBC should be nuked. And we discussed topics like whether converting food acreage to fuel acreage a good idea. (Eventually there won’t be enough waste oil for everyone on SVO to use, and as we’ve seen I’m already being told “get in line” when I offer to take the waste oil off the hands of New Mexico restaurant owners.)

These questions bear asking. I recall one discussion I had with Gary and Kevin after we had been driving in Gary’s own SVO Volvo on a parts run for my conversion (yes, it’s an almost religious experience, getting off fossil fuels). Gary, Kevin and I were deconstructing corn economics, the Chinese Yuan and world food sustainability theory over the roar of the noise in the AAE warehouse. It is almost impossible to avoid broaching at least two of life’s supposed three inevitables (politics and taxes) in the course of an SVO discussion.

“Look at the boom this whole ethanol thing is creating for Iowa and Indiana,” I observed.

“No more Farm Aid,” Kevin agreed.

“Nope, and Brasil, they’re set,” Gary chimed in.

“Except for the ol’ rainforest. And the street kids and everything,” I said.

I also like the Forrests because they are fun guys who appreciate family and enjoy life. I remember during Day Two of the conversion at Albuquerque Alternative Energies headquarters – which three days for me really reflected a metaphorical conversion to true green lifestyle (read: thinking all day about my power and if I’m utilizing it in a sustainable way), asking Kevin and Gary what they wanted me to bring back for lunch from yet another parts run I was making.

“Something greasy,” Kevin said. “Gotta support the industry.”

Indeed, the Forrests are working with a waste oil collection company and have opened the first state approved Vegetable Oil Gas Station in the U.S. I filled up my first 80 gallons there, soon after filling up the diesel tank for what I hoped would be the last time for many, many, months. At the same 18 MPG I was getting on diesel, I now had enough fuel in my crunchy green ROAT to get me 1,500 miles.

Once I figured out the auto (read: semi-manual) purge system.

And, in the usual kind of contradiction facing my life as the oil age merges with whatever’s next, I brought back “Panda Express” Take-out for lunch.

In styrofoam containers.

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