"The Big Green Bus" visits Houston

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

(7/3/07 - KTRK/HOUSTON) (KTRK) -- "Change your fuel, change the world."

That's the slogan of a group of visitors and their unusual wheels in Houston on Tuesday.

If you're at a fast food joint, don't be surprised if you see a big green bus pull up and order a vat of used cooking oil!

"This is some of that black gold you're always hearing about," Brent Butler, a student at Dartmouth College, said.

Eight Dartmouth students are criss-crossing the map in "The Big Green Bus," a 1966 school bus that has been converted to run on waste vegetable oil. The students are on a mission.

"[We are] traveling around the country, talking to people about alternative energies, trying to get a dialogue started in communities," Butler said.

Students say it's not a difficult modification: used cooking oil only needs to be filtered and heated to run a diesel engine. Since the students live on it, the bus is impressively outfitted, and the green doesn't stop at the fuel.

"All of our electricity comes from a solar panel and a wind turbine we run on top of the bus that powers our laptops, our TVs, our George Foreman grill," Butler said.

When they stop, the students hand out literature and start discussions and even rest. But then it's back to work, to secure fuel. A willing restaurant is found, then gallon after gallon of grease is pumped into the Big Green Bus.

Tuesday's fill-up is "going to take us from [Houston] to Austin and pretty much halfway up to Colorado, so it's a good stop. It's nice to find this much grease at one stop," Frances Vernon, also a student at Dartmouth, said.

And from here in Houston it's on to the next stop of the very green 10,000 mile journey.

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