Rice University students have developed an experimental bio-diesel fuel processing plant:
Could the road to relief at the pump be paved with French fries?
That might sound crazy, but it’s a real theory being explored by students at Rice University.
Ron Perez fills his mower a couple of times a week and if you look closely, you’ll see he’s using biodiesel.
“It works great actually it’s cleaner and it smells like food actually,” said groundskeeper Ron Perez.
That’s because as Perez mows up to 10 acres of the Rice campus each day, what’s in his tank was once cooking oil in Rice cafeterias.
“Anything from frying your shrimp in the cafeteria to French fries, anything like that,” said student Lizzi Clark.
Rice students built a closet-sized processing plant, put the used oil in and let it settle.
“It comes through this pump and we pump it through these filters to take out anything else,” Guyton Durnin.
If you could look through the equipment it would look like this test lab where the oil goes in, add some chemicals, it cooks at about the temperature of bathwater, ends up in a water wash and biodiesel comes out.
Laura Ingraham recently had a guest on her show who does something very similar. He has modified his personal vehicles’ engines and powers them with used cooking oil from local restaurants. He said he has to have gasoline to start and stop the car (if I am remembering the interview correctly) but that’s it! The rest of the time the cars run off the used cooking oil. Pretty neat, eh?
It’s certainly more plausible than this.
