At some point in human history we figured out how to mill, press, and filter plants like olives, peanuts, and soybeans to extract the oil hidden inside of them for cooking. Heat this oil above the boiling point of water, toss some bits of potato in there, and a minute or two later you’ve got yourself a French fry. Delicious.
Heat the oil up over three-hundred and twenty degrees, toss a tiny spark in there, and now you’ve got yourself a grease fire. Disastrous.
Why does the oil catch on fire?
As the solid structure of the soybean surprisingly hid liquid oil inside of it, the liquid oil miraculously hides energy inside of it. At some other point in human history, some folks started to think of liquid oil as a system for transporting units of energy around, and it made them very rich. Yet, to this day, behind most restaurants, out by the dumpsters and the rats, if you take the top off of a barrel of grease, you’ll see two dramatically opposing things at once, waste, and energy.
You see the ‘gross’ and useless waste from frying French fries, sure. However, if you’ve converted a diesel motor to feed on it, you also see energy from the sun, processed through photosynthesis, and stored in liquid form. It’s just crazy.
SHORT HISTORY
The diesel motor was actually designed to run on organic oils from its first inception. Rudolph Diesel, who lived from 1858 to 1913, had a bunch of amazing quotes about how organic oils would someday become as important to our economy as fossil fuels. So to run any diesel motor on waste French fry oil, which restaurants often pay to get rid of, you don’t really have to convert the motor, so much as convert the fuel system.
If you can filter, heat, and de-water this domestic renewable resource within the fuel system, then you can cruise around for free while maintaining a closed-carbon cycle (since plants pull CO2 out of the atmosphere as they grow). Unlike ‘diesel’ fuel the emissions don’t cause cancer and smell like wonderful appetizers from your favorite pub.
I put the word ‘diesel’ in quotes because it wasn’t until years after Rudolph Diesel’s mysterious, and untimely death that the petroleum industry found a way to refine crude oil into something that acts more like vegetable oil and coin the term ‘diesel’ fuel. Poor guy must be rolling over in his grave every time a semi-truck goes to fill up.
THE CAMPER
One summer day in two thousand-four I was looking for parts for my Geo Storm, out in the junkyards on Columbia Boulevard, in North Portland. Sitting on display, in front of B&R Auto Wrecking, was a crappy old slide-in camper priced at one-hundred dollars. I opened the spring loaded rear door and stepped into a tiny world of cracked linoleum, peeling wood veneer, and golden-vinyl seat cushions. It was great. It had the little dinette that dropped down to a bed, a sleeping loft over the cab, a propane stove and a tiny bathroom.
“I’ll sell her to you for sixty bucks!”
A voice suddenly called from the back door. This was Curtis, the scrappy older gent who towed vehicles to the yard. At first I tried explaining to him that I didn’t own a pick-up truck, so I wasn’t about to buy a camper and try and fit it onto the Storm, although the thought probably crossed my mind.
He said he could tell this was the camper for me and seemed confident that I’d figure something out. He signed over the title, I gave him three twenty dollar bills, and he told me I could leave it there for a month or so, while I got the whole truck-component sorted out.
The next weekend I happened to fly to see my ol’ pal Jonathan Rummel at the Telluride film festival, in Colorado. His boss, Glen Harcourt, heard me explaining my ridiculous horse-before-cart scenario to Jon at the bar over shots of Patron. He leaned in and completely changed the course of my life by saying, “You should get yourself a diesel truck and run it on vegetable oil from restaurants. It’s free.”
Could this possibly be true? How have I not heard of this? Back in Portland I started looking online and found out that it was most definitely true and the conversion didn’t even seem that complicated!
(In theory anyways)
WHERE TO?
Before I even got my first truck converted, I think I had the goal of driving across the country without paying for fuel in mind. Throughout the next decade I would enjoy / lament that journey over a dozen times. What started as an experiment became a campaign, which grew into public service announcements, editorial features, mobile marketing campaigns, a conversion shop, and culminated in a bus service.
I’m so glad I bought that camper from Curtis and that I ran into Glen when I did. So many interesting experiences were due to tapping into the endless flow of waste vegetable oil, through the back alleys of America.
I broke the chapters of the grease-years up into these distinctive sections and gave them each their own page because, why not?
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This page is dedicated to answering some of the most common questions people have about grease. Let’s be clear though, I’m not on the crusade the way I once was, but I’ll try and be thorough.
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I called my project ‘Grease Not Gas’ as a nod to the Food Not Bombs program, which redirects energy in a similar fashion, out of the waste stream. All I really wanted to do was travel around and show people how this interesting relationship existed between the diesel motor and French fries and that’s just what I did.
Page under construction
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There was a time when I offered diesel-to-grease conversions as a service out of a two-bay garage on Interstate Ave, in North Portland. Between, Aaron, Jared, Farhad and myself, we probably converted close to a hundred vehicles.
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When a former high school friend heard that Aaron and I were doing grease conversions, she stepped in to help us broadened our reach. The ‘Grease Brothers,’ was a series of Public Service Announcements which aired on Mtv, back when that was still a culturally relevant thing.
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Four of my cross-country adventures were with some of my best friends, and favorite musicians, who play in a band called Piebald. They helped me educate tons of people about using grease as fuel.
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The first official ‘Grease Not Gas’ Tour was with Snowboarder Magazine taking athletes from Oregon to Vermont, for the US Open. With stops throughout the country we ended up making a subsequent film, which released at the time of the editorial piece, written by Ben Fee, who filmed and edited a lot of the movie as well.
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After the Snowboarder Magazine article ran I got an inquiry from a supporting sponsor, Clif Bar, as to whether we could take on a bit of a mobile marketing campaign for them. For two winters we covered thousands of miles, hitting tons of ski areas across the western states. Along the way we made a movie and premiered it at Patagonia’s ‘Wild & Scenic’ film festival.
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When Adidas released Dennis Busenitz first pro-model shoe we hit the road with them both on a tour all around the American Southwest.
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For this west coast tour we started in Oregon, dropped down to San Diego and came back up with Jeron Wilson, Chris Haslam, and the DaKine skate team. Their manager, Scott Koerner, and myself travelled with a writer and photographer from Skateboarding Transworld and released a DVD that came out in the magazine as a promo item.
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When Jeremy Jones first started his ‘Protect Our Winters’ campaign we were on a west coast tour supporting his Teton Gravity Research films. Along the way we stopped at colleges, and movie theaters, and even tagged along on a first decent in the Sierra Nevadas.
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Clif Bar hired me to tour manage this project which involved a giant old bus that had been outfitted to burn 100% biodiesel. The ‘challenge’ was in getting folks to commit to riding their bikes anywhere within a two-mile radius of their home. We travelled all around the western states with a merry band of pranksters, but administered zero electric kool-aid acid tests. At least, as far as I recall.
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Somehow Paul Mitchell, the famous hair stylist, paid for me to do a west-coast tour with Elle, the fashion magazine. The concept was a rolling, pop-up salon, which could drop into ritzy places around Hollywood to promote a soy-based shampoo product they had just released. I mostly drove the bus and stayed out of their way, but it paid really well.
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One of the earliest Greasebus endeavors was running kids from Government Camp, OR up to Timberline ski area in the summer of 2004. Supported by 32 snowboard boots we shuttled campers for High Cascade Snowboard Camp.
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Greasebus was the crown jewel of all my vegetable oil experiences and though it was a challenge, it was a worthy one. The program was a ski and snowboard shuttle, which ran a seasonal, daily trip from Portland, to Mount Hood Meadows for five years. We had an amazing crew and tons of hilarious experiences along the way.
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With the crew from Greasebus and the Nike pro snowboard team, we did two separate tours for the Swoosh, back when they made snowboard boots. The first was a west-coast tour called, ‘Feed Me’ and the second was a nationwide movie premier tour called ‘Never Not.’
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We got hired by DC Boots to run a shuttle service at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC.
