WREX.com – Rockford’s News LeaderGoing Green: Vegetable Oil Truck

Going Green: Vegetable Oil Truck

By Justin Gehrts

ROCKFORD (WREX) - Nick Schuer's truck is a shining example of the saying that appearances can be deceiving. It doesn't exactly look like a vehicle that's "going green," but it runs on vegetable oil. Yes, vegetable oil, and Schuer knows just what you're thinking.

"'Does it smell like french fries?' That's kind of the universal joke. Or 'does it smell like fried fish?'"

He says the answer is "no." Regardless, he got the idea a few years ago when reading up on the VW Rabbit and ran across information on the conversion to a vegetable oil engine. He made the modifications himself and filters his own vegetable oil. So how well does his truck run?

"Its specialty for us is to haul my boat cross-country on long vacation trips. This year we went to Cape Cod, last summer we went to the south coast of Texas, the Gulf coast of Texas. That's thousands of miles running on vegetable oil."

Nick says he gets about the same fuel economy as using gasoline, but burning vegetable oil is a lot cleaner. "People like to say that it's carbon neutral because the CO2 you put back in the atmosphere is absorbed by plants and grows into vegetable oil."

The truck does use some diesel to start and stop the engine, but otherwise, the vegetable oil does all the work.