Diesel – it used to be the cheap alternative to gas but since the start of the year the price of a gallon has soared from about $7 to now $9.08. So diesel is an alternative but it’s no longer cheap. And that’s where Bruce Carroll from Jabiru Bamboo Limited comes in. He’s pioneering the use of an alternative to diesel which is not only efficient, he says it’s as good as free! In the second part of our story on alternative energy sources, Keith Swift shows us how the used cooking oil from your kitchen – can fuel your car.
Bruce Carroll, Jabiru Bamboo Limited
“With the price of fuel, people can’t afford to drive. Now they can.”
And Bruce Carroll can afford to drive because instead of going to the gas station to fuel his Mitsubishi pickup truck, he goes to restaurants.
Bruce Carroll,
“I convert diesels to run on vegetable oil which is how they started 100 years ago when Rudolph Diesel designed the motor.”
That’s right used cooking oil like this which we would normally discard, he collects and converts into “veggie diesel.”
Bruce Carroll,
“I usually get the oil given to me in container or I give them a pigtail bucket or whatever. This is waste fryer oil. This comes from the little flower school and this comes from one of the local restaurants.
When I get the oil the first thing I do is run it through a big filter to get the chicken chunks, the small rodents, and anything nasty that’s in there. This is oil that is direct from a fryer, nothing has been done to
it. As you can there are some big particles left over.
And then I will take this and run it through an air filter, this gets it down to 10 to 30 microns. So I just pour this thing and you can see it going down. And what I’d do is fill that up, set it on like a water bubbler and it does five gallons without me being there. At home I have 55 gallon drums so I set it up and overnight it cleans. And you can see it is coming through.
It takes a while because if this came right from the fryer and it was hot hot hot, it would go right through because there are animal fat in that and chicken and bacon grease, it starts to clog the filter a little bit. You can see this gunk line right in here.”
Keith Swift,
Any kind of cooking oil works?
Bruce Carroll,
“Any kind of vegetable oil or animal fat will work. Lard will work, the problem with lard is you got to heat it up to make it moveable because it is solid.”
To make the oil into veggie diesel, you need one of these converter kits. They cost $2,000 and Carroll says installation is easy.
Bruce Carroll,
“We have a kit and a package deal that you can do the install yourself or we can do the install or recommend you to a certified mechanic. It takes one to two days to convert it. Once they buy the kit they come with about a 30 page instruction manual so they can do it themselves and they can call me anytime during their installation. If they want me to set it up, it is a $350 and there are certified mechanics throughout the entire country. I got a guy in Cayo who wants to do it, a guy in Orange Walk, and a guy in Belize City. So they could buy the kit; I could put it on a James’ Bus or I could put it on Tropic Air or Maya Air and then their mechanic can install it.”
And once converted Carroll says this switch inside your vehicle will allow it to run on either regular diesel or veggie diesel.
Bruce Carroll,
“This is the electronic switch. This is the diesel line and this is the vegetable line. When you switch it, it switches between diesel and vegetable and this is right to the fuel pump and that is the only switch over. And then on the return line, what I do is I loop it around so I don’t put vegetable oil back into the diesel tank. And you set it once and you never have to deal with it again. But the main thing is you got to heat it and you got to clean and filter and dewater it.”
So how does it run? He says the difference in mileage and horsepower is negligible – and you’ll be saving money and the environment
Keith Swift,
How does it burn compared to regular diesel?
Bruce Carroll,
“Power wise it is about the same, you maybe get one or two miles less per gallon. The CO2 that it omits, the greenhouse gases are reduced to almost neutral, meaning what the plant brings in over its lifetime – this puts less CO2 out than what the plant brings in.”
Keith Swift,
How practical is it?
Bruce Carroll,
“If you drive for free it is very practical. Do I have to say more? It is a little inconvenience if you collect your own oil but you got to roll your sleeves up and know how to filter it properly. You get 85% to 95% of the same BTU, the heat energy exchange from vegetable oil compared to regular diesel so you might lose a little bit but I can’t tell the difference.”
Bruce Carroll says that your vehicle on veggie diesel will perform as well as it would on regular diesel with one exception –and depending on how you look at it – this could either be a good or a bad thing. There will be a lingering smell of fry chicken from your exhaust.
Bruce Carroll,
“It smells like fry chicken. If you have fish oil it smells more like fish but for the most part it smells like a fryer.”
Keith Swift,
So you’re driving around and people will be smelling fry chicken?
Bruce Carroll,
“Oh yeah and we were at the Belize City airport two weeks ago, collecting oil from one of the restaurants and two dogs made a beeline to the center of the airport. There are a hundred cars and trucks there and they came to smell my exhaust.”
Keith Swift,
What has been the reaction of people?
Bruce Carroll,
“Mostly first disbelief. They tell me I am full of it or it is not going to work until they smell the exhaust and then they are converted.
You get the oil for free you drive for free. If you buy oil right now in quantity in bulk, you can buy it at $7 a gallon – brand new oil, vegetable oil. You go to the pumps diesel is $9? I forget, I haven’t been to the pump in months. I just read it to the newspaper. I went to the gas station to get a new battery and she asked if my truck was broke because they hadn’t seen me in a long time. I told her no, I don’t need you anymore.”
And that’s because he has veggie diesel. Both environmental and economical – so it’s left to be seen if other drivers will be “converted.”
Jabiru Bamboo is based in Toledo but he distributes the kits nationwide. You can contact him JabiruBamboo.com. And we must stress that the technology isn’t new and Bruce Carroll didn’t invent it. Conversion kits are available widely in the United States and farmers in Spanish Lookout have been using – but not marketing - the technology for some time.
