Golf course powers mowers with cooking oil

WASILLA — Despite the naysayers, Settlers Bay Golf Course thinks it’s onto something.

“People don’t think it works,” Equipment Manager John Bayne said.

For the past few years the course has combined diesel fuel with used vegetable oil in a 2-1 ratio and used the concoction to power its mowers and tractors.

“I think the diesels are running better and quieter,” Bayne said.

And there is another unexpected benefit, when they fire up a mower in the garage it smells like French fries, he said.

Course Superintendent Amos Stephens said the idea to do this came from Bayne. All of the oil comes from the nearby Settlers Bay restaurant. Stephens said the relationship is symbiotic. The course consumes a third less diesel fuel and the restaurant doesn’t have to pay to haul away and dispose of its used fryer grease.

Bayne said when they came up with the idea the restaurant was using hydrogenated soy oil. Hydrogenated oils don’t work in diesel engines, so they had to talk the restaurant into using higher-quality peanut or canola oil.

And there was a bit of capital outlay for the course. Bayne started his experiments in the maintenance shed before Stephens gave him a connex to use.

“I was initially using a 75-gallon hot water heater,” Bayne said. “That didn’t make him happy.”

The oil has to be filtered before it gets anywhere near an engine. That process happens out in the connex. Once it’s clean it’s mixed in the course’s fuel tank.

Stephens said Bayne started testing the concoction in a tractor that had crashed into a tree, ripping off the whole front end.

“We started running the veg oil through it to see if we had any problems and we never did,” Stephens said.

They were mixing the oil and diesel in mason jars and tried things like putting it in a freezer to see if they’d get separation. Everything went smoothly.

Bayne said vegetable oil isn’t exactly a new fuel source. Indeed, the inventor of the diesel engine intended to run it on peanut oil. But most people go one of two ways; biodiesel or all vegetable oil.

“Initially, we were going to make biodiesel, but working with that stuff is like working with a bomb,” Bayne said.

And all-vegetable oil engines aren’t exactly cheap. To run on vegetable oil requires an expensive engine conversion process.

Bayne said that his diesel-oil mix acts like a detergent in an engine, flushing out any gunk that’s in them. If they hadn’t addressed that problem they would have been chewing through fuel filters pretty regularly. Bayne said some of the tractors take fuel filters that run $50 or more.

To combat that they’ve put less expensive $3 filters in the fuel lines to keep gunk from getting as far as the main filter. As conversions go, that’s cheap.

Which, of course, is what the project is all about. Stephens said Settlers Bay cares about the environment. It recycles, but these programs are also big money savers. Recycling, he said, has cut the course’s solid waste bill in half.

“We’re using it to reduce our costs instead of increase our costs,” he said. And, with gas fast approaching $5 a gallon, it’s looking more and more like a very smart move.

“We’re going to run on some sort of fuel no matter what,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.