2005 Veggie Oil Van “Ad-Van-Ture” aka “The Great Canadian Canola Caper”

In 2005 I  decided I would be needing a vehicle to provide massage all over Cape Breton Island.My mode of transportation in San Francisco was a customized funky, colorful old Schwinn bicycle with big package carriers and streamers! Being a peace activist I cannot condone what I see happening on this beautiful planet in the quest to procure oil.

I am one of those folks who would like to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem so I chose to purchase a “Veggie Van”. My Toyota Town Ace is a right hand drive mini van that has been converted to use new and used cooking oil to run the engine in conjunction with either biodiesel or regular diesel as a start up and end up fuel.

Plant based renewable fuel sources are reliable alternative fuel for diesel vehicles. The original diesel engine created by Rudolf Diesel was designed to run on peanut oil! We use an onboard filtering and heating system created by Neoteric Biofuels (www.biofuels.com) to prepare the oil for use so it is warm and thin enough to be used efficiently and keep the engine running smoothly.

We start the engine with a small amount of regular diesel or biodiesel which is a blend of chemical components including methanol and renewable oil usually soy or canola or even fish oil. A 20/80 blend of fish oil is actually used in the buses in Halifax, Nova Scotia! Once the engine is warmed up, in about 5 minutes, we push a toggle switch and start running on vegetable oil for the majority of the trip. When we near our destination we switch back to diesel to purge the veggie oil line.

                         

You can follow our trip on a forum/blog at my dear friend, fellow Cape Bretoner and co-pilot Charlyne Chiassion’s web site www.fengshuidesigndiva.com! We will be joining the Canada Day Celebrations in Nelson on July 1st, and demonstrating how our vehicle works. We’re inviting people to bring us a bottle of Canadian Oil, aka canola oil and register their name as one of our supporters all along our 3000 mile route  across  Canada from British Columbia (BC) to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia (CB)