Pair cook up a deal with vegetable oil fuel for cars

Rob Washburn uncaps a half liter soda bottle filled with a gooey sludge that could never be mistaken for diet pop but maybe, just maybe, turkey gravy cola.

“You wanna smell it? Go ahead and smell it,” Washburn says. His black baseball cap, turned backward, seems to hide a shaved skull. The hatband hugging his forehead is embroidered with the words “Defy Ordinary.” He makes one pass with the bottle under his own nostrils before offering the rest of the room a snort. “See, it’s not bad.”

It smells, to the untrained nose, like soft Crisco with just a hint of Jo-Jo spud. But Washburn smells something different, as does his boss, Doug Bartlett, who’s been through this presentation before and passes on Washburn’s invitation. To them, the subtle bouquet is the nascent plume of the future, the promise of $1.65-a-gallon fuel.

“I started kicking this around about a year and a half ago when the cost of diesel was climbing,” said Bartlett, who also sells cars wholesale. He had heard about cars that ran on used cooking oil, started asking around about who offered the best conversion kit and settled on a company in Florence, Mass.

It cost a little money, but soon Bartlett was the local dealer for Greasecar, which promises not only motors that run on vegetable oil but also motors that run on used vegetable oil, the kind bubbling in vats at Krispy Kreme doughnuts or the corndog wagon at the summer carnival.

Bartlett Greasecar, as the Spokane Valley enterprise is known, consists of a 2,000-gallon holding tank teeming with restaurant crude, a proprietary micro-filtration system of Bartlett and Washburn’s creation and their fine-tuned process for removing any undesired moisture from the fuel.

The whole operation is very hush-hush. Bartlett is hesitant even to allow photographs to be taken inside the garage at 9608 E. Montgomery Ave. for fear of revealing his trade secrets.

Of course, there are the cars, too. Under the hood, a grease car doesn’t look much different from a regular diesel engine.

There are a few extra hoses, a fuel filter the size of a peanut butter jar and the appropriate fuel valves to switch from diesel to vegetable oil on the fly.

In the trunk, there’s a circular stainless-steel tank stowed in the cavity normally reserved for a spare tire. The tank is heated to keep the grease flowing like melted butter. The feat is accomplished by running a line of hot coolant from the car’s radiator.

On the car’s dashboard, there’s a fuel gauge specifically for the grease tank and a James-Bond-style switch to change the fuel source from diesel to grease and back again. When the switch is made, the carbon-laden fog of diesel exhaust emanating from the tailpipe is replaced by a sweet french fry smell and no visible emissions.

Parts and labor combined, the whole conversion costs about $1,595 for a car and about $2,900 for a truck.

Bartlett and Washburn are banking on Spokane’s discount-driven culture to propel their business. They hope as much as 1 percent of the area’s driving public will make the switch to grease, which has the potential to cost half the price of diesel.

The idea of vegetable oil as a fuel is not new. Rudolph Diesel, creator of the engine that bears his name, toyed with vegetable oil as a fuel nearly 120 years ago. But diesel fuel, a crude byproduct of the refining process necessary for making gasoline, won out. Rudolph Diesel, perhaps, smelled the future in petroleum rather than restaurant grease. He probably didn’t detect an eventual price of $3.20 a gallon.