Typhoon Yolanda and the Vegetable Oil Connection

I was just thinking about the plight of my countrymen in the Visayas who were hit by the supertyphoon “Yolanda”, or “Haiyan” as it is known internationally. Things are well, pretty bad down there. There has been looting, people are generally without shelter and thousands have died. Villages and even cities are cut off from government help, and there are no telecommunications and electricity.

I was like a “Zombie Apocalypse” and politicians were blaming each other and some claiming that there was a “Complete Systems Failure”. But the good news is that at least the downstream oil industry remains “deregulated”, i.e. prices of petroleum shot up.

This may not be the best place therefore, to kick-start a discussion of alternative energy, but please bear with me. After seeing all these reports, I thought to myself that if I were one of the victims of this disaster and I wanted to get out, I'd “loot” some 20 liter cans of vegetable oil, pop it into my old diesel car and off I go into the sunset.

This is not as incredible as it sounds. It is generally agreed that any old indirect injection diesel car will run on vegetable oil provided that the oil is viscous enough.

I own an old car. A 1987 Mitsubishi Pajero. It hs a 4d56 naturally aspirated diesel engine. And I've run it on vegetable oil. There's also this man who owns a similar car, converted to run on vegetable oil. His name is Chips Guevarra and he's pushing that the system be installed in Jeepneys. Pretty good idea if you ask me. Better than electric/hybrid cars and biodiesel.  Here's the official website.

The problem with electricity is the batteries. It would need to be charged, they are heavy, they tend to go flat after a few years. Hybrid cars still, technically, run on fossil fuels. The problem with biodiesel is that animal and vegetable fat would still have to be chemically altered in a process called transesterification, which uses methanol.

Straight vegetable oil on the other hand does not have those drawbacks. Once you have vegetable oil, you can just pop it into the car. You don't need to waste time and resources with transesterification. Waste vergetable oil (WVO) would be the most environmentally friendly since it just uses waste by-products. The problem is that you would have to collect the vegetable oil. I've tried, I can't get anything from fast food companies since they have standard operating procedures with oil disposal and it is rather unreliable to depend on the oil coming from family restaurants. Furthermore, you'd have to try and filter the oil to make sure that only clean oil gets to your car's injectors, anything less could clog the fuel delivery system and possibly damage the engine. In short: biodiesel – wasteful; WVO – Dirty and fiddly. Thus straight vegetable oil would be the way to go in an apocalypse where there is no price or market forces whatsoever.

Back to reality. If there has been a breakdown in law and order and theres no more fuel, I'd loot some vegetable oil use it as fuel and just go. I'm honestly surprised that nobody there has tried it.