Vegetable oil for wounded eco-egos?
Not so fast . . .
Chris Solic
The allegorical battlefield was bloody and brutal. Broken weapons and bombed-out pits littered the abandoned landscape. It wasn’t supposed to be like this; there shouldn’t have been a battle at all. What then, had gone so wrong? How had the recent conversation between my friend and me digressed from healthy discourse to unguarded, rampaging emotions, where suddenly holstered arrows were sent flying in fiery arcs across both sides of the great MSN Messenger cyberspace divide?
Simple: we were talking politics again. This time, however, the topic had shifted to the environment, or, more precisely, the burden of responsibility we each carry in regard to the affect we have on it. A perfunctory, angry conclusion to the debate came with the troublesome matter of SUVs, the plight of nature and plant oil as an alternative source for engine fuel.
On one side it was stated that to use public transport as much as possible and to convert one’s vehicle to plant oil was to partially and satisfyingly excuse oneself from the aforementioned environmental burden. It was further stated that the neighbour over there driving the SUV was a particularly poor example of the attitude needed to combat environmental issues.
The other side reasoned that, while environmental actions were to be commended, they certainly did not absolve the participant from their fair share of the environmental burden, which, it was contended, was reduced by only a fraction as a result of those actions.
The argument continued that simply being a participating member of this society and its infrastructure disposed the participant to a guessed, average baseline resource usage of 95 per cent, leaving only five per cent to be influenced by one’s choice in transport or recycling or whatever. It was further asserted that to judge someone by whether or not they drive an SUV was to discriminate against a person who may be undertaking different, unseen actions to reduce their energy usage to similar or even lower levels than those of the finger-pointing judge.
I suppose I cannot hide my partiality forever. It was I who challenged my friend’s claim when he told me that because he rode public transit as often as possible and was going to run recycled vegetable oil in his car next summer that he should think himself as environmentally superior to his SUV-owning neighbour and to much of the public as well. Seeing as how I really didn’t know anything about the possible pollution benefits of plant oil as an engine fuel, in the post argument vortex I went searching for those answers to see if perhaps my friend could partially justify his stance.
Was I ever surprised at what I discovered! A quick Internet search revealed multiple studies showing that, although free of sulphuric constituents, plant oils can actually increase, in some cases substantially, many other pollutants, like CO, NOx and particulates (compared to diesels, the engine type in which plant oils are used).
A general conclusion from the wildly varying data is perhaps best summarized by the “straight” vegetable oil (SVO)-related statement, that, “environmental tests on modified engines indicate that SVO has somewhat lower emissions of most pollutants, but with a tendency towards equal or slightly higher NOx emissions as well as ultra fine particles.”
For sure, plant oils are less toxic, and therefore they decrease the likelihood of acid rain, among other things, but with that comes a price of potentially exasperating smog and ozone effects. On the plus side, recycled vegetable oils are cheap (anywhere from free to basically the store price of vegetable oil) and in theory can reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. But that theory breaks down as soon as recycled oil usage grows beyond its current outlier context.
Imagine if everyone converted to plant oils? How expensive would the oils be then, and how many new fields would have to be tilled from the forests or appropriated from other crops to supply the demand? It seems to me that plant oils are simply not a viable engine fuel alternative on the scale required.
Of course we, as a people, must do all that we can to make our environment as good a place as possible in which to live, for us and for all future generations. For that, anyone who makes any effort to lessen his or her impact is doing a good thing. But with the global population exploding, particularly in third-world countries where a modernizing population brings with it a corresponding increase in resource consumption, and with the developed world’s continued attachment to a high energy-use lifestyle, regardless of whether one owns a car or what type it is, the end result appears all too obvious to me.
It begs the question: “Does anyone really know what’s right for the future?”
Chris Solic is a fourth-year geology student.
