I’ve seen it done before and was wondering if it’d be worthwhile investment to add kitchen oil removal to my existing family’s trash service and basically get paid to collect fuel for my garbage trucks.
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The real downside is the modifications that you’ll need to make to your fuel system to get this to work.
Vegetable oil is a lot thicker than diesel fuel, so while you technically can filter the oil and throw it straight into your fuel tank, it’ll slowly clog the engine because it’ll have a hard time atomizing it in the cylinder.
Instead, what you want to do is have a two-tank design: you’ll use regular diesel to start your car up and before you shut it off, and you’ll have a second, heated tank to thin out the vegetable oil. (Additionally, you’ll want to install new injector nozzles to make it work even better.) Partway through driving, you’ll flip a toggle switch that will start drawing oil out of the secondary tank.
For most people, this isn’t worthwhile because the cost of vegetable oil runs close to that of diesel, so it’s hard to recapture the cost of the engine modifications. If you can reduce that cost, though — or even, as you say, get paid to collect it — and you don’t mind the labor of filtering the oil before you use it, you could actually get somewhere with this.
I’d do some serious market analysis before you embark, though.
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