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Running on cooking oil
Grease could replace gasoline
By DANIA AKKAD
Herald Salinas Bureau
DAVID ROYAL/The Herald
Daniel Fernandez, left, and Swarup Wood converted their Mercedes to run on used cooking oil. A Mercedes cruising around the Peninsula is hardly noteworthy.
Most of them, of course, don't smell like lunch.
Running in front of CSUMB's Chapman Science Center on a warm Tuesday afternoon, the exhaust puttering out of associate chemistry professor Swarup Wood's 1984 Mercedes smells like beef patties sizzling on a hot grill.
Nine months ago, Wood and his neighbor, associate physics professor Dan Fernandez, bought kits from a company in Maryland to reconstruct their cars' engines. With shipping, the kits cost $850. It took a weekend of dawn-to-dusk tinkering. Not an easy task, mind you. But by Sunday, the pair had successfully set up their cars to run on grease -- and found a way to take control of their gas habit while gas prices spin off the charts.
One tank of vegetable oil will run a 1984 Mercedes for a good 300 miles, sputtering out less pollutants than regular gas or diesel, at a savings of about $50 a week, they estimated.