Redford charter school is turning cooking oil into cheap biodiesel

If the future is biodiesel, might as well get the future involved. Students at Michigan Technical Academy, a charter school in Redford, are turning cooking oil from a tortilla factory into biodiesel to fully power to school buses at a mere 80 cents a gallon. Excerpt: The program is the brainchild of Depowski, a master certified automotive technician who manned the technical hotline at Ford Motor Co. before becoming a teacher. Depowski recruited Garden Fresh Foods, the Ferndale-based maker of salsa and tortilla chips, which agreed to donate the oil left over from producing its chips. The students are working on solving a problem with the fuel: how to keep the biodiesel warm. Right now, two of the district’s five buses are running on 100 percent biodiesel; warranty rules limit the other three to no more than 10 percent. Once the temperature drops down to about 40 degrees, they’ll have to switch to about 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent regular diesel, because the biodiesel will start to congeal. Read the entire article here.