Jesse Buckwalter
The Mercedes 300D was an old, beat-up, high-mileage car with a diesel engine – just what Jesse Buckwalter ’04 was looking for. Jesse, then living in Fairbanks, Alaska, bought the thing and converted it to run on vegetable oil. He’d read that diesel engines were originally designed to run on peanut oil, and says the engineering required to run on vegetable oil wasn’t terribly tricky. And so, during the three years he was in Fairbanks, he’d swing by Wasabi Bay, a sushi place in town, every week or so to pick up 10-15 gallons of leftover cooking oil.
Wasabi Bay was glad to have it off their hands, and Jesse was glad to be fueling his car for free. Almost free, that is – the car had to start on diesel fuel; once it was warmed up, Jesse flipped a switch on the dash to begin drawing the oil out of a tank he’d monkeyed under the hood. He once drove the thing the entire way from Fairbanks to Harrisonburg, Virginia, and back. The few barrels of vegetable oil he hauled on the return trip got him halfway to Alaska.
Jesse, his wife Jill, and daughter, Adah, now live in Boone, North Carolina, where Jesse is pursing a master’s degree in Appalachian studies from Appalachian State University. Before leaving Fairbanks, he sold his first 300D. In Boone, he already has another one, also rigged up for vegetable oil.
“It’s cool to think that you’re not depending on foreign oil,” he says. “[And] that you’re using a waste product [for] something.”
In Harrisonburg, Jesse’s brother, Bruce Buckwalter ’91, and Jeremy Good ’03, EMU’s network systems manager, also drive cars fueled by used vegetable oil.
