In the interests of not being a complete plagiarist I won't copy this entire article which is very interesting, informative as to the technical stuff and also very funny.
I've only copied about half of the article the whole article can be found here:
http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/featur...h/biofuel.html
FRY AND DRIVE
Monday January 20, 2003
The Guardian
G2 section, pp. 2-3.
Original here
When staff at a Welsh supermarket first noticed dramatic increases in the sale of cooking oil, they thought the locals were doing a lot of frying. They weren't. They were filling up their cars with it - not surprising, as it's only 42p a litre. Trouble is, if you don't pay duty, it's illegal. Jim White reports
According to Mike Hebson, the manager of Asda's store in Swansea, south Wales, there was no reason to be suspicious that sales of the company's cheapest bottles of cooking oil were running 20% higher than the previous year, way above any other store in Britain. "We just thought it was one of those things," says Hebson.
Why should he and his staff have been remotely questioning, he suggests, if men in overalls and lived-in denims had started buying Smart Price vegetable oil in batches of six, eight and 12 litres at a time. When one customer came in and filled a trolley to the brim with plastic containers of the thin, urine-coloured liquid, the checkout operator barely gave him a second glance.
"Naturally, we assumed they were buying on price," says Hebson, an Asda man to the soles of his own-brand brogues. There was another reason that his staff were unlikely to see anything untoward in bulk-buying cheap vegetable oil. "We just thought they were doing a lot of frying," he says. "You have to remember, healthy eating has not hit Swansea in a big way."
It wasn't until the Department of Transport began a series of trial tests in the city last March that staff realised something odd had been going on. In an attempt to take diesel vehicles belching out illegal emissions off the road, department inspectors introduced experimental spot checks on roads in Bristol, Westminster, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, Canterbury and Swansea. It was in the latter that they found something surprising: a car with a fuel tank half full of cooking oil.
"The funny thing was," says Hebson, "the driver told them he had been getting it from Asda Swansea for four or five months, because it was the cheapest around. When we read the report in the local paper we began to put two and two together."
The enterprising motorist was, so the reports suggested, running his diesel-engine motor on a mix of Asda cooking oil and standard fuel. At 42p a litre, the supermarket chain's oil is considerably cheaper than the 73p a litre that even a discounted retailer charges for diesel. The astonishing thing was it worked. Without any need to modify the engine, the motorist could run his car on the mix with no discernible difference in its performance.
What's more, instead of diesel fumes, the engine gave off a rather pleasing odour - like frying time at the local chippy.
And if Asda's sales figures were anything to go by, unless he was running a fleet of buses across south Wales, the driver who had been pulled over by the emissions inspectors wasn't the only one. Wind your windows down in a Swansea traffic jam last spring, the rumour went, and the chances were you would think someone was having a barbecue. The local joke was that the whiff was particularly prevalent around the DVLC, the government's national car-licensing department, which is headquartered in the city. It was a nice irony, because, as the cooking-oil driver discovered when he was fined £500 and had his car impounded, the government is not amused by cheap alternative fuel. Diesel is relatively pricey because a large chunk of the cost is made up by duty. Cooking oil carries no such tax. But if it is put to use in a petrol tank, duty is due.
Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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