Cooking fries and gaining miles

Kyle Gronley and Scott Smith pulled into Jasper after the long drive down the Alaska Highway, in search of what most travellers just passing through are – fuel for their vehicle. 

They didn’t stop at Shell, Esso or the Petro station, though. They hit up local restaurants and collected unwanted used vegetable oil from deep fryers and began the four-hour process of filtering it multiple times until it could be run through Smith’s Ford diesel truck. 

Smith was driving to Long Creek, South Carolina, and dropping Gronley off in Kalispell, Montana. On Sept. 24, they stored extra diesel fuel in their truck and loaded up jerry cans of filtered vegetable oil and headed out of Hope, Alaska for the journey that would cost them no money in fuel. 

Smith converted his old Ford truck to run on biofuel, a type of oil made from used vegetable oil that was previously used to deep fry everything from potatoes to mozzarella sticks. The truck doesn’t just run on biofuel – it can switch between diesel and biofuel if it runs out. 

In the 1900s, a diesel engine that ran on peanut oil was presented at the Paris Exhibition by the Otto Company. Smith said the trend moved away from biofuels and onto fossil fuels in the 1930s, but diesel engines are still easily adapted to run on biofuels compared to a gasoline engine.

Smith’s truck is a far cry from a perfectly convenient and eco-friendly ride. It takes electricity to run the filters needed to clean the fuel enough to run the filter. The entire process takes about four hours to filter enough to travel on. 

“We could make it a lot more efficient,” Smith said. “This is a real crude process.”

One way would be to convert the filters to be able to run off of the truck’s electricity, instead of having to find an outlet. 

Smith said right now running his truck on biofuel isn’t that much cheaper, but saving money isn’t his reason for trying out biofuels. 

“In the long run it’s probably cheaper, but it’s more the environmental thing.”

Smith did have to spend money to convert his truck, and for the most part they have been lucky enough to use other people’s electricity for free when filtering the oil. The pair have not purchased any diesel since leaving Alaska – a trip that is more than 2,500 kilometres. They ran out of biofuel about 320 kilometres outside of Jasper, and switched to their reserve of diesel. 

When it comes to finding oil, Gronley and Smith ask local businesses if they have any used deep fry oil laying around. The last time they searched for oil before Jasper was in Whitehorse, Yukon, and Seward, Alaska. 

“It’s something that’s being thrown away,” Smith said. “I like to find junk and make it good again.”

The first step after finding used oil is to heat it up until it stops crackling, indicating that all the water has evaporated out of the oil. This step is called polishing. The hot oil is then poured through a cheesecloth, which can be bought at most grocery stores, then poured into a bucket and siphoned up into two electric filters. 

Smith said oil with a high enough quality to run his truck needs to be honey-coloured. 

“The more it looks like your honey bear, the better your oil is,” he said. 

Once that process is over, there are two more filters inside the engine that filter the oil further.

Biofuel can only run in a hot engine, so Smith’s truck is warmed up using diesel and then switched over to the vegetable oil once it is fully hot. Living in Alaska with a biofuel-converted truck is difficult, but to overcome the intense freezing temperatures, Smith uses a block heater in colder weather. The biofuel is run for the main running time. 

Smith and Gronley planned to take their time in Jasper National Park – which would make the four hours it took to create the fuel to drive through it worthwhile.