Is vegetable oil a sound alternative to petro-diesel?
Pure Plant Oil (PPO) and Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO), are complicated names given to plain old vegetable oil, like the kind you would find a restaurant’s deep fryer, when it is used as fuel in an internal combustion engine. Amazingly, except for vegetable oil’s higher viscosity (thickness), it has very similar fuel properties to petroleum diesel fuel. As a matter of fact, when Rudolf Diesel invented his first engine, he designed it to run on peanut oil; it was only later that Diesel discovered that his engine would also operate on a cheaper petroleum based oil. Both new and used vegetable oils can be used in a diesel engine. Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) refers to oil that has previously been used in an industrial or restaurant fryer, while Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) is new oil that has never been used. What’s the difference between vegetable oil and biodiesel? Vegetable oil (SVO, PPO and WVO) is different from bioidiesel in that biodiesel was originally vegetable oil that has been chem
