UNTAXED FUEL – Otherwise known as “red fuel, farm fuel, ag fuel, red diesel, off road diesel, home heating oil, fuel oil, stove oil, etc…” We’ve all heard of this stuff and many of us have tanks of it sitting in our basements or just outside which we’re burning for heat. All of the abovementioned things are in fact diesel fuel with three distinct differences. First, this fuel does not have a road tax applied to it, which means it is usually about $0.20 to $0.25 cheaper than on road diesel fuel. Second, the sulfur content is usually higher, since the EPA more strictly regulates on road diesel fuel sulfur content. Third, the fuel is dyed red in order to differentiate it from on road fuel. That is it. There is no question that untaxed fuel will work just fine in any diesel vehicle. Any diesel engine that does not travel over the road can legally use off-road fuel. Off road fuel runs our construction equipment, generators, boats, etc…every day.
That being said, there is the question of “Should I run off road fuel?” I won’t get on a soapbox, but here’s the short version. Highways don’t build or repair themselves, and they don’t do it for free either. Not paying the road tax is like not voting-if you don’t pay the tax, don’t complain about the pothole that just threw your alignment out of whack. Likewise, if you didn’t vote, don’t complain about the crook who just got elected Mayor, Councilman, Senator, etc… However, if the moral argument isn’t compelling enough perhaps the legal one is. Most states have stiff penalties for running off road fuel, and if you’re driving a diesel truck and you are stopped for a moving violation you can be “dipped” which means the officer can insert a long stick through your filler neck and see if your fuel has a red tint to it. If it does you’re in trouble. Frequently, large numbers of diesel trucks in one place (equipment/livestock auctions) are dipped in the parking lot and you can come out to find a summons on your windshield. Search and seizure arguments aside, if you don’t want to get caught and/or fined, don’t run untaxed fuel.
This is the point where some of you are saying, “But you said it’s ok to run biodiesel/SVO you produce yourself-that’s not taxed!?” Here is my other moral argument. Biodiesel is many orders of magnitude better for the environment than petroleum diesel and as long as you’re not selling it to anyone, I don’t see a reason to pay tax on it. Plain and simple. This is besides the fact that the tax forms required just to pay the tax on biodiesel you make yourself are by no means easy to obtain, understand, or complete.
USED ENGINE OIL – This also tends to be a pretty popular one since many people look at the stuff left over from an oil change and say “Wow! Five gallons of free fuel!” I used to work summers for an excavating company and like any heavy equipment company we had some old stuff. My personal favorite was a 1961 Mack Tri-axle. In the old trucks we would change the oil and it would go into a holding tank that would either feed the waste oil burner to heat the shop, or get filtered and pumped right into the trucks’ tanks. My boss’ rule of thumb was never more than a ¼ tank of waste oil, but no matter how much you put in you could tell from the extra black and extra pungent smoke coming from the stacks. Also, we would NEVER put waste oil into any of our newer Deere or Caterpillar equipment.
Here’s the bottom line. Waste engine oil is full of nasty stuff including dissolved particles of bearings and iron from the block, not to mention it usually has an extremely high ash content (the amount of solids left over when it burns), and it wasn’t formulated or designed to be burned-it was designed to lubricate. You wouldn’t pour 16 quarts of # 2 into your oil fill would you? Personally I would never put a drop of waste oil in my PSD, but I could be persuaded to run some in an older, mechanical DI engine. The same goes for any other type of waste oil out there. I’ve heard everything from engine oil, to ATF, to cutting oil, to transformer oil! One other caveat is to consider what ELSE is in the oil and what you’re putting into the atmosphere and possibly your lungs. Many of these things contain nasty chemicals that were never meant to be burned.
CONCLUSION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS – Some of you may notice that I made no mention of jet fuel. Much of this information was shamelessly stolen from the infopop biodiesel forums during countless hours of “research” (read: zoning out on the internet at work), as well as just accumulated through personal experience around diesel vehicles. That being said, I don’t know much about the different grades of jet fuel, but I do have an air force buddy I could ask. The only thing I do know is that I’ve HEARD it doesn’t have much in the way lubricity, so it could be risky to use without a lot of additives. Anyway, special thanks go to Clay Henry for being Powerstroke.org’s ambassador for SVO, as well as the infopop forums.