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On April 20, I sat down with Christo Corsaut and Danielle Stinson, students at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi and alternative fuel activists. Corsaut and Stinson made local headlines in 2004, when their group Earth Tribe converted a school bus to run on SVO, or straight vegetable oils. Two years later, they’ve left Earth Tribe, started a new business, and their bus is still running. Below, they talk about their new business, Organic Mechanics, as well as discuss the merits of veggie fuel technology. (This is an extended version of the interview that appeared in the March/April 2006 print edition.)
 What is Organic Mechanics?
Corsaut: It is a company that works on the cooperation between nature and technology, so we’re going to work on development of new products that fill needs for energy in environmentally focused ways.
Stinson: Presently, we’re working on vegetable oil vehicles.... Right now, we’re selling the filtration units that are necessary to filter your oil before it goes into your tank. By May 1st, we should be launching our VeggieQuest Kits, and it’s basically the actual conversion kit that you install in your vehicle, a diesel vehicle, to run on vegetable oil.
Corsaut: Our new location on Agnes is large enough to have office space, and we’re going to have a warehouse where we can build all of the stuff we need and package and ship it. Also, a garage where people can come in and do installations.
What happened with Earth Tribe?
Stinson: Well, we started out as Earth Tribe. We wanted to do sort of a non-profit organization type thing. We did pretty well with that, and then we did our traveling. We went and stayed in Missouri on the Greasel compound, which is one of the major conversion companies out there. We stayed there, we learned some of the trade, and we decided we wanted to take it our own way and not necessarily work in the shop anymore. So we came back to Corpus, and we sort of established ourselves here, and then grew from there, and then decided to go into a company.
What are some of the merits of using SVO rather than petrochemicals?
Corsaut: Well, it’s renewable, meaning you can grow more. If we were to try to replace all of our diesel fuel use with vegetable oil, it wouldn’t really be viable, at least with the technologies right now, like soy. But there’s other plants that are being researched that yield higher product. So the point is, once we figure out which plants do yield high enough, it is a renewable fuel, so it’s not just using up a resource that’s going to run out. It also is non-toxic. If you have a big vegetable spill, it’s not going to kill anything. It cuts the emissions in half.
Stinson: It stays within the same carbon cycle. Basically, you’re not pulling carbon from underneath, which is what fuel is doing right now, and introducing more of it into the atmosphere, into the environment, but you’re recycling it within the same carbon cycle. So again, it contributes less to green house effect and global warming.
 Corsaut: Plus, people don’t fight wars over vegetable oil. Yet, anyway. Another thing is that people always ask, “What about the power? What about how well it runs your engine?” There’s different reports of +/- five percent efficiency. Some people say it runs better, some people say it’s a little bit less, but it’s only in the five percent range where people have measured it. As far as lubrication goes, in diesel fuel, they add sulfur to it. They’ve been doing that for a long time, because sulfur has a good lubricating property. Thing is with sulfur in fuels, when you burn it, you have sulfur particulates, which are incredibly poisonous. So environmental regulations have brought down the amount of sulfur they’re allowed to the fuel in order to bring down the sulfur particulates, which makes the fuel less lubricating. It’s necessary because we need to make the environment healthier, but with the vegetable oil it’s more lubricating than the sulfur added to the diesel. If the vegetable oil is heated properly and you’re running a good system, then you’re going to have healthier injectors and a more lubricated, healthy, working engine.
But I know that when you grow crops, a lot of petrochemicals go into growing crops. Pesticides require petrochemicals and so on.
Corsaut: Well, one thing about this is it’s using waste vegetable also, so it’s recycling. So the crops have already been grown and the waste oil is already there. So if you filter it and use it as fuel, it’s taking advantage of something another time around.
Stinson: Essentially, if the SVO industry was to expand, you wouldn’t be able to use recycled oil all the time. Right now, we get it from back of restaurants. But you’d have to grow it to actually use it, because we’d run out of waste vegetable oil or the industry would crack down and not let it be free anymore.
Where do you get the oil typically? What oil is best?
Corsaut: Chinese food restaurants. They cook a lot of stuff. They seem to start with a pretty good quality of oil, and I think it’s something about the tempura batter they use or something. Maybe it’s light. I’m not sure how it works, exactly, but it’s always pretty clean.
Stinson: They use it less. They start off with a better quality—I think they start with peanut oil or something like that—and they use it less, so it gets less water in it. If you go to McDonald’s, they use it repeatedly. And the more you cook with something, the more water gets into it, and the more hydrogenated your oil is going to be, which means it’s not good for your engine. No engine likes water.
Have the restaurants you’ve approached been receptive?
Stinson: Absolutely. We’ve never really come across any restaurant owner that’s not been even enthusiastic about it. Lots of people even come out and watch us do it, and they’ll be excited about it. Everyone’s pretty generous. They have to pay to have it removed, so they like when we come take it, for the most part.
So do you guys just keep big drums of cleaned-up oil?
Stinson: We have in our bus the ability to hold 234 gallons worth of oil, so we go to a couple different places whenever we go on a road trip. And we’ll just fill up the tanks, and we’ll be all set for a long time. But if we were to have a smaller vehicle or planning on getting a truck or something, then we would probably have 50-gallon drums in our yard.
How does cleaning the oil out work? I saw a video of you guys doing it on the news a few years ago.
 Stinson: There are a couple ways to do it. One is the sock filter, which you saw on the news, which is really just a pain. It’s dirty and it’s slow. So while we were traveling, Chris did a bunch of research on a better way to do it, which is basically an inline filtration system, which is powered. We use a pump that sucks the oil through these filters, like water filters for a house. And it goes through the filters, and that’s how we do it, instead of letting gravity do it.
Corsaut: It’s exciting because, with this technical guy we just hooked up with, Rayven, an experienced diesel mechanic, an electrician, and computer engineer for years, so he’s got some really innovative ideas on how to incorporate some advanced technology into some of the basic needs that people are looking for, for filtering vegetable oil. We’re going to (produce) heated filtration pick-up systems, so that in the winter time, when it’s more difficult to collect the vegetable oil and filter it on the spot—since when it’s colder it’s thicker—we’re going to be able to transfer waste heat from the engine. You’ll be able to plug your GreaseBeast (a filter kit) right into our conversion kit and be able to heat your filtration process. (People) will be able to drive in the winter a lot easier.
Stinson: Which is relatively innovative in the industry. No one else, to my knowledge, has that ability yet. None of the other competitors actually seem to provide a filtration unit until recently, and I don’t think any of them are heated. It’s not that bad for us, because we live in Texas. But in the north, their oil is solid. They’ve got to take it home and warm it. But with the innovation that Rayven’s coming up with, the heated pick-up for the GreaseBeast, we’ll be able to fill the empty filter on the spot, just like it was summertime.
How many locals do you think use SVO technology?
Corsaut: I don’t think too many yet.
Stinson: I’d say less than half a dozen in Corpus. But once we have the shop up and get some word out to Corpus, I imagine it will pick up. We’ll have our own fill station and that sort of thing, so I imagine that Corpus will become relatively veggied. Visit the Organic Mechanics online at: Photos courtesy of DC Tedrow and TheOrganicMechanic.org Only registered users can write comments.
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