Many vegetable oils have similar fuel properties to diesel fuel, except for higher viscosity and lower oxidative stability. If these differences can be overcome, vegetable oil may substitute for #2 Diesel fuel, most significantly as engine fuel or home heating oil.For engines designed to burn #2 diesel fuel, the viscosity of vegetable oil must be lowered to allow for proper atomization of fuel, otherwise incomplete combustion and carbon build up will ultimately damage the engine. Many enthusiasts refer to vegetable oil used as fuel as waste vegetable oil (WVO) if it is oil that was discarded from a restaurant or straight vegetable oil (SVO) or pure plant oil (PPO) to distinguish it from biodiesel.

"The car now has two fuel tanks - one for diesel, which you need to start and warm up the car, and the other tank contains the used cooking oil. I installed a filter for the vegetable oil and two valves. One valve cuts the diesel fuel off and the other turns the oil on. The whole job took a day and a half."

Something's cooking 17,000 feet over the Nevada desert, and, despite what passing geese may smell, it's not french fries. It's Green Flight International's BioJet, a 39-year-old Aero Vodochody L-29 Delfin with a single-stage turbojet that was engineered to burn anything from pump gas to home-heating oil.

Engineering folks have long since been powering their automobiles with less than scrumptious liquids, but Green Fuels is hoping to make the usage of homegrown biodiesel entirely more common.

They're making progress, and soon, jet engine exhaust may smell like french fries.

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba, Nov. 2, 2007 – A century ago, Henry Ford ran his first car on ethyl alcohol and Rudolf Diesel fired his single piston engine on peanut oil. Both manufacturers realized quickly that the vegetable oil they were powering their motors with held far less bang for the buck than ‘rock oil’ that required minimal refining and was compa