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Here Comes the Grease Car!

As the price of gas keeps ratcheting up, cooking grease -- readily available in large quantities for free for anyone willing to get a little dirty collecting it and filtering it -- is looking better all the time as an alternative fuel, according to a couple of young entrepreneurs who have formed a company that makes kits that allows diesel engines to also use cooking oil as a fuel Read More

As the price of gas keeps ratcheting up, cooking grease — readily available in large quantities for free for anyone willing to get a little dirty collecting it and filtering it — is looking better all the time as an alternative fuel, according to a couple of young entrepreneurs who have formed a company that makes kits that allows diesel engines to also use cooking oil as a fuel.

Justin Carven, who graduated last year from Hampshire College, and Leif Forer, who is graduating this spring, say they also plan to market a used vegetable oil filter system, now under development, to make that part of the process simpler and cleaner.

The two met in a class called “Design for Sustainability” at Hampshire College taught by John Fabel where they got involved in converting a tractor at the school farm to run on store-bought cooking oil and fresh-pressed sunflower seed oil.

The idea for their business may sound far-fetched, but the business plan for Greaseco, as the company is called, was solid enough to take away first prize in the Sustainable Ventures category in the business plan competition held last week under the sponsorship of the Five College Entreclub and Mass Ventures.

In pitching their product, Carven and Forer are emphasizing equally the economic advantage as well as the environmental benefits of their product, which they claim are threefold. They say their system recycles a renewable resource, helps reduce the amount of throwaway oil in the waste stream, and is far less polluting than the petroleum-based diesel fuel.

Called cost effective

“The difference between us and some other folks” in the renewable and alternative energy arena — including people who are making and selling a higher grade of chemically treated used vegetable oil called “biodiesel” — “is that the solution we are providing is cost-effective,” said Forer, who last week was putting the finishing touches on his final thesis at Hampshire on the topic of socially responsible business.

Greaseco has “serious implications” and healthy revenue potential, according to Michael Garjian, an inventor and former manufacturer and currently director of business at the Valley Community Development Corporation in Northampton.

Garjian consulted with Carven and Forer on the business plan, including helping them work up a highly detailed three-year cash flow projection.

According to Craven’s and Forer’s research, more than 4 billion gallons of “organically derived waste oils” are disposed of annually by 1.2 million restaurant and institutional kitchens and meat processing plants.

The most promising market for their kits, especially at the start, they say, are farms that have diesel tractors and educational institutions and resorts that have both large kitchen facilities generating lots of vegetable oil waste and fleets of convertible diesel-operated vehicles.

An eye on Europe

The also are eyeing the European market where there is a higher percentage of diesel-powered passenger cars than in the U.S.

The Greaseco kit consists of a heated circular tank designed to fit into a tire well, a heated vegetable oil filter, various hoses and hardware, an electric switch and a manual. The purpose of the equipment is to apply constant heat to the vegetable oil to prevent its congealing and to get it hot enough to combust under pressure. The heat is applied through hoses wrapped around the fuel filter and fuel lines through which hot water cycles from the engine’s cooling system.

The conversion kit is designed to be installed alongside of the existing fuel system in vehicles using diesel engines, such as light-duty trucks and non-road vehicles. (A “dual fuel” system is needed because petroleum-based diesel fuel is still needed on board to start up the engine when cold.)

Diesel engines, because they are based on combustion by compression rather than by a spark igniting volatile fumes, can operate on vegetable oils that are not as volatile as petroleum, Forer and Carven said.

Dr. Rudolf Diesel, whose original vision, Forer said, was to promote development of industry in agrarian societies throughout the world, designed a new kind of engine in Germany in 1895 to run on a variety of alternative fuels, including vegetable oils. Unfortunately, adds Carven, Diesel’s invention was soon co-opted by the petroleum industry, which was looking for a market for its low-grade refinery byproducts

Now that Forer is ready to graduate, he, as marketing director and chief financial officer, and Carven, who is both chief technical and executive officer, are getting ready to shift into full gear marketing their product.

They’ve posted a notice on their Web site, www.greasecar.com, that production will begin as soon as the first 10 orders are received. In a couple of weeks they will be hitting the road to promote their kits. They’ll be traveling with, although not competing in, the annual Tour de Sol, a regional road “race” of alternative cars.

Making the kits

The “tooling” for manufacturing the kits is being set up in the Belchertown barn workshop of Robert Grey, who is listed in the business plan as director of manufacturing. Grey is a well-known local industrial fabricator with a versatile array of credits, ranging from rock crushers to windmills. He formerly was a partner in his own engineering company called Callaway-Grey, now Callaway Engineering.

The kits are priced for retail at $795, for wholesale at $495. There are a few other items on the company’s product list, including a “restaurant filter unit,” priced at $97, for filtering used vegetable oil, although this item is still under development. The prototype for the filter is standing in the sun against the side of the porch of Carven’s house on Route 9 in Hadley near where three Volkswagen vehicles sit with their hoods open, all in various phases of being converted. The prototype filter is a black 55-gallon drum with solar tubes and a hand crank on top, and a hose leading into two canister filters hanging at the side.

The conversion kit in its current form has evolved through several generations of prototypes and a lot of testing. Five prototypes have been sold and five have been given away.

The big test — and what turned out to be a huge, if premature, marketing splash — took place last summer when Carven and a childhood friend made a 10,000-mile cross-country road trip in a VW van that Carven had retrofitted with a turbo-diesel engine and rigged up with an earlier prototype of the conversion kit. Some of the expenses for the work involved and for the trip were paid from a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

For about two-thirds of the cross-country trial run, the Grease Car, as they called it, ran on used vegetable oil the duo panhandled at Burger Kings and MacDonalds and diners and greasy spoons along the way. Most of the restaurant owners were glad to get rid of the stuff, although Carven said a few of them thought the they were crazy and told them to go away. They rejected some offers of grease that was simply too nasty and would have taken too much work to filter through the simple filtering cones they had brought along for the purpose.

The Associated Press picked up the story early, and before long the journey “to test systems” had become “a media fest,” said Carven in an interview last week. “It got completely out of hand.”

Carven and his friend kept a travelogue updated on-line. Thanks in part to the media coverage, their Web site got discovered by fans of alternative energy and many just curious, and in August alone received 500,000 hits, Carven said.

The shame of that was, Carven says now in retrospect, “we didn’t have a product and we didn’t have a company. If we had, we’d be in a lot better shape than we are now. We’re not going to waste an opportunity like that again.”

The cash flow projection in the business plan for Greaseco shows $5 million in sales in the third year, 60 percent of this through “distributors.

Carven and Forer are starting out with just a few thousand dollars between them. And they have no investors.

“We’re bootstrapping’ it,” said Carven. They are looking for early sales to create seed money to expand production. Theoretically, they could attract an investor “angel” or two, but they say they don’t want to be beholden to investors.

Carven sold his car for $5,700. Forer has been squirreling away earnings from two on-campus work-study jobs. The two made $1,500 for winning their category at the business plan competition.

Both Garjian and Bob Grey in Belchertown have offered their services to the fledgling company “pro bono,” said Carven. If it hadn’t been for this support, they wouldn’t be in business, Forer said.

This story written by Judson Brown, staff writer, GazetteNET. © 2001 GazetteNET, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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RELATED LINKS:

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