We already know that everything in Australia is trying to kill you. If the (admittedly awesome) V8 chainsaw doesn’t, the aggressive kangaroos will. Yet with the average price of diesel at the equivalent of seven U.S. dollars per gallon, some Australians are taking matters into their own hands and converting cooking oil into biodiesel, reports 9News. While this process involves common household products, the combination of them can be dangerous, to the point where 9News refused to identify them.
Less than a minute of internet searching revealed several websites and videos with the recipe. While it’s easy to find, we don’t recommend trying it at home, either. Ingredients include methanol, which is poisonous and burns invisibly, and there is some heating involved in this process. Sodium hydroxide, another additive, can cause severe chemical burns to skin and eyes, according to the CDC. It can even be deadly when inhaled.
Still, some Australians may be tempted to try it anyway. Diesel prices are going up faster than gas and oil, and may soon exceed the price of vegetable oil. If you’ve seen any “Mad Max” movie, you know the measures Australians will take to keep their engines running.
A safer option
There is another way to run a diesel engine on veggie oil that doesn’t require all that work and risky chemistry. Waste vegetable oil conversion kits were all the rage in the early 2000s. Rather than converting the oil before pouring it into your fuel tank, you could pour used fryolator oil directly into a secondary fuel tank.
Once installed, the system was easy to use. You started the engine on traditional diesel fuel, then drive until the engine warmed up. That heat warmed up the secondary tank using additional coolant lines and liquified the waste vegetable oil. A flip of a switch changed fuel tanks, sending the veggie oil through a filtration system and into your engine to burn. Yes, the exhaust would even smell like french fries. Shortly before reaching your destination, you’d switch back to regular diesel to purge the veggie oil out of the lines, then park it, having paid for almost no fuel at all.
Companies like GreaseCar and PlantDrive used to sell complete conversion kits for popular used diesel cars of the day, like the Volkswagen Rabbit and Mercedes W123. These cars aren’t nearly as common today as they were then, and conversion kit companies like these seem to have faded away. Dieselgate pretty much killed diesel vehicles in North America other than big trucks over 10 years ago, leaving few on the road today.
But like V8 muscle cars, diesel cars never died in Australia. As of 2021, diesels accounted for one out of every six cars on the road there, according to Drive. Since high fuel prices will be sticking around for a while, perhaps waste vegetable oil conversion kits are an idea whose time has come, without the dangers of making your own biodiesel.
