City firm's vehicles run on cooking oil

JOHN HAWKINS/Southland Times/Image ID 110239

BARGAIN FUEL: Clean-Biz owner Frank Thomas holding a glass of his homemade biofuel.

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The work vehicles of Invercargill businessman Frank Thomas sometimes smell of fish and chips but who cares, he never has to pay for petrol.

He operates Clean-Biz and makes his own biofuel for the firm's vehicles.

For the past year Mr Thomas has been making biofuel and uses it to run the six vehicles in the Clean-Biz fleet.

It's a cost-saving measure – biofuel costs 44c a litre to make, he said.

Something of a handyman, Mr Thomas put together his own biofuel plant after doing some research on the internet.

He combines unwanted cooking oil, collected from various food outlets, with methanol and caustic soda, to make the biofuel.

"Our vans and trucks do smell of fish and chips occasionally because that's the smell going out the exhaust pipe." During summer the firm's vehicles run only on biofuel but in winter it is mixed with fossil fuel because it can get a little bit gluggy in the cold, Mr Thomas said.

"It works very, very well." The project started with some experimentation and a recent upgrade saw the plant's capacity grow in batch size from 120L to 500L. Each batch takes about an hour to make and provides enough fuel to run six vehicles for three weeks.

Glycerine, a byproduct from the process, is sold to a biodiesel company in Christchurch that recycles it.

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