Pitt student runs car on veggie oil

The last 1,000 miles Pitt student Pat Lambert put on his 1984 Mercedes 300 SD cost him no… The last 1,000 miles Pitt student Pat Lambert put on his 1984 Mercedes 300 SD cost him no gas money.

That’s because this summer, with help from a University grant, Lambert converted his car to run on vegetable oil.

“The good thing about it is that essentially it’s free because no one wants this oil and it’s a renewable resource because it can be grown,” he said. “So the idea behind it is that it decreases our dependency on oil and it’s better for the environment.”

The oil — straight vegetable oil or SVO — comes from his friend, Mary Liang, who owns a Chinese restaurant in Bridgeville. After collecting it from her restaurant, the oil is heated and filtered and put into the car.

The story begins when Lambert, now a sophomore, was visiting Pitt before he decided to attend.

“When a pal and I first looked at Pitt, we went to the Honors College and I remembered that when [Dean Alec Stewart] spoke to us, he said that any time we wanted to come down to his office and talk about ideas, he’d have the coffee pot ready,” he said.

Lambert’s idea was to convert his own car — not only to save money, but to spread the word about the SVO-run car.

“I hoped to figure out if it was feasible for the average Joe to have this done,” said Lambert. “Because to the individual, saving money is going to be a huge enticement but to the population as a whole, it’s more about the environmental picture.”

His project focuses on the economic perspective of using SVO, said Lambert’s adviser and former chemistry professor, Eugene Wagner. Not only did he want to determine whether conversion to SVO would be cost-effective and efficient, he is also in the process of testing the car’s emissions to determine its environmental effectiveness.

“The idea is not a new thing, it’s not novel in any respect,” Wagner said. “The thing that makes it new and interesting nowadays is that gas prices are so high so the idea is very realistic.”

In March of this year, Lambert capitalized on the offer that he heard about a year before. After writing a proposal, the Honors College awarded him a $3,900 grant.

“When [Stewart] handed me the check, he told me it was an unusual project but they invest in people and not ideas,” Lambert said.

With another $500 from Pitt’s Office of Experiential Learning, Lambert was on his way.

“I felt that it was very much a research project,” said Wagner. “My goal was to find different ways to guide him through the process, but Pat was very much the principal investigator on this project.”

Throughout the summer, Lambert collected oil from Liang’s restaurant and stored it in his parent’s backyard. After spending time researching and collecting parts, he assembled a tank with an onboard filtration unit in about three days.

Lambert spent slightly over $1,000 on the tank and estimates that an at-home filtration system for the used vegetable oil would cost a person between $200 and $500.

“If you paid someone to do it for you, you’re looking at about $2,000,” he said. “In the long run, though, you make that money back relatively quickly.”

The catch? Because a gasoline engine uses spark plugs inside its cylinder instead of heat compression, only a diesel car can be converted to use SVO.

Lambert’s next vision is to convert a Pitt shuttle to vegetable oil.

“The 10A uses 35 gallons of gasoline each day. With all of the inner campus shuttles, Pitt spends over $100,000 on fuel each school year,” he said. “If you could take even a small portion of that away, it’s something that could excite people.”

Most restaurants, said Lambert, want to give away the waste vegetable oil because it is both useless and costly to dispose of. And Pitt’s food services have plenty of SVO to spare.

For now, Lambert is content with his own step away from oil dependency. Both he and his adviser are questioning whether SVO-run cars could ever become the norm, though.

“We’re so used to oil, that using it is what’s easiest,” said Wagner. “If it was just as easy to buy a car that ran on vegetable oil and drive it up to a gas station that dispensed vegetable oil, we would.”

Lambert plans to display his car outside of the Cathedral in the coming weeks so that other students can have a chance to take a look and ask him questions.

“What I did takes a solid bit of mechanical engineering,” Lambert said. “But doing it and then passing on that knowledge will make it easier every time.”