Transcript

Katherine Youngblood: I’m Katherine Youngblood. My husband, Danny, and I work for Premiere Global Services and this is our story on how we converted our diesel wagon to run on vegetable oil. Merzola is half canola oil, half Mercedes. We coined the phrase and it just kind of stuck so from now on when we talk about the Mercedes it's the Merzola. Danny Youngblood: The diesel engines were originally designed to run on vegetable oil. There are absolutely no engine modifications that have to occur. The oil is available everywhere. Every restaurant in American runs vegetable oil in their kitchen. We basically brought it down to three things; one, environmentally friendly, very little carbon output from running vegetable oil, a virtually endless supply for us for vegetable oil for running this fuel, and a cool science project to boo. The process for converting the Mercedes Wagon to run on vegetable oil was surprisingly easy. I think it took the course of a couple of days for somebody who would know mechanical skill can do. Katherine Youngblood: We don’t spend any money on gas now. We maybe fill up the diesel with actual diesel once every two months and the rest of the time we run it on vegetable oil. Well, we have a four-year-old son who Danny plans on giving this car to when he turns 16. Danny Youngblood: Yeah, he'll probably be the only kid in his high school driving in 1984 Mercedes Wagon. Katherine Youngblood: Would you do it again? Danny Youngblood: Absolutely. Absolutely, I would. Realizing how simple it was in hindsight to actually do the conversion, relatively inexpensive, I would certainly do it again for the financial benefits as well as the environmental benefits.