Driving cheap and greasy

J. Michael Sharman
Published: June 23, 2008

Note: My son, Korey Bonser, offered to write a column for me as a Father’s Day gift about his passion for “driving down” his fuel costs from $600 month to nearly zero by using a blend of waste motor oil and used restaurant cooking oil. His work truck is a fuel guzzling 1996 Dodge 4WD three-quarter ton Cummins 12-valve diesel pickup. Following is his article:

A gallon of fuel or a gallon of milk? This is the very real question facing all of us as oil and gas prices reach record highs every single day.

The price of fuel is driving up the prices of everything from that gallon of milk to office supplies.

Virtually all of our consumer goods are hauled by over-the-road trucks, freight trains, or ships, and sometimes by all three. Each one of these transportation methods is fueled by diesel, whose technical term is No. 2 fuel oil.

No. 2 fuel oil is the most common fuel in the world: when it is used for light trucks/cars and big trucks, it is referred to as “road diesel;” in trains and ships it is called “bunker fuel” and in our homes No. 2 fuel oil is our home heating oil.

Now that we’ve all found out there seems to be no upper limit to the price of a barrel of oil, we are faced with some tough decisions.

A likely summertime question is: Can I go on vacation this year? OK, forget vacation — can I even afford to drive to work to earn the money I need to pay for the fuel that I have to have just to get to work?

Do we consumers have any options?

We need some, fast.

Consider this quote from the American Trucking Association: “For every one penny increase in the price of diesel it costs our industry $392 million. In the last month it has gone up 50 cents.”

One option for us is to buy a hybrid vehicle that gets lots of miles per gallon, but doing that means we would have to spend money we don’t have to replace the fuel-guzzling vehicle we can no longer use. And then we’d have to try to sell our gas-guzzlers which in this economy would be like trying to sell a house that had been bought during the sub-prime mortgage boom.

Maybe it is time to go back to the inventor of the diesel engine for some ideas on how to break our cycle of dependency on No. 2 fuel oil.

Rudolph Diesel built his new engine just before the turn of the 20th century as an alternative to the gasoline engine. He designed his diesel engine to run on peanut, soybean, and vegetable oils. Rudolph’s prototype ran on peanut oil.

If the diesel engine was originally designed to run on plant-based liquids back then, why not do it now?

We would not only be “going green,” we would be “saving green.”

We can run our diesel cars or trucks on all kinds of biodiesel fuels. (These blends are labeled B5 to B100. The “B” stands for biodiesel blend and the number represents the percentage amount of natural to petroleum fuels. A B5 biodiesel, for example, would have a blend of 5 percent natural oil and 95 percent petroleum fuel oil.)
The Internet is full of options and ideas about relatively simple ways to operate your vehicle on alternative fuels.

Could you imagine driving without the fear of prices at the pump all the while using non-foreign fuels?

I am doing it now and with some time, understanding and patience you can do the same thing.

Do some research so that you are taking the necessary precautions legally and environmentally to protect yourself and your engine.

After a short time you can also be “riding greasy” and smiling while your truck smells like popcorn.

Good luck and go save some green.

J. Michael Sharman is an independent columnist who practices law in Culpeper. His column appears Tuesday in the Star-Exponent. E-mail