How We Do It: From fry grease to biodiesel

"Almost a year ago I started hearing more about biodiesel. I did some research on how to produce it and learned for a $3,000 investment we could save enough in fuel costs to pay that off in less than nine months. After that, we could save about $5,000 per year in fuel costs.

"What we were hoping for is about 40 gallons per week, or one processing a week from the used fry oil from the club house kitchen. The process works out to about an hour to an hour and a half of labor time for our golf course mechanic. We transformed a shed that used to store gardening supplies into our biodiesel shack, which is real close to our fuel tank. So there was no cost there.

"We pick up the used cooking oil in a 55-gallon drum with a fork lift from where the kitchen dumps it. We bring it down to the shop and gravity feed it through a filter into a tank. We then heat it up and add lye and reaction agents and then brew it for a few hours. Then it goes through a cleaning process where we add water which separates everything out, leaving you with the biodiesel.

"For the most part, we’ve been using it 100 percent into several mowers, as well as in our backhoe and mini excavator, our tracked skid steer and our tractors ranging from 45 to 91 horsepower, and equipment ages anywhere from a 1975 tractor to a 2008 tractor.

Using biodiesel has helped us out quite a bit. There’s no more black smoke and it smells like French fries. We’ve had no problem starting the vehicles, even in low temperatures. On the maintenance side, we haven’t seen any adverse effects or any unusual wear on the equipment running on the biodiesel, so there hasn’t been any additional maintenance. We’ve also noticed that the machines using the biodiesel are running better and have better power. So not only does the biodiesel save us about $3 a gallon – we’re pricing it at about $.90 a gallon – it’s working better for us.

"We’re now looking to secure a consistent source other than our kitchen. In fact, our kitchen staff was actually considering changing out their oil more frequently to produce a better product and now they can do that because of the costs savings associated with us converting the used oil into biodiesel.

"There are a couple of initiatives that we’ve tried to take on to make our facility greener, and using biodiesel was near the top of that list. We’ve promoted that to our members and let them know that while we want to do things that are better for the environment, they have to make sense economically, too."