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| Tuesday, Jun 5 2007 10:05 PM
Last Updated: Tuesday, Jun 5 2007 10:33 PM
That smell isn't hot tempura. It's Richard Malicdem's social conscience.
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Richard Malicdem's '83 Mercedes runs on used cooking oil, and its gets the same mileage as any older diesel-engine Mercedes. His "veggiemobile" seems to run fine - even if it smells vaguely like old french fries.
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Yes, a ride in the front seat of Malicdem's 24-year-old Mercedes Benz might conjure up visions of the luncheon special at Tokyo Garden, but he's not driving a catering truck.
He's driving a statement.
Malicdem, a Bakersfield real estate agent and data processing analyst, is the proud owner of a veggiemobile -- a diesel-engine vehicle converted to run on used cooking oil. On either or both fuels, actually.
While you're at the gas pump, filling up on $3.70-a-gallon fuel, he's out in back of the neighborhood Thai restaurant, humming the theme song from "Veggie Tales" as he pumps a different sort of crude oil from the kitchen's rendering bin into a plastic container. Miles per gallon: about the same as a regular diesel sedan. Price per gallon: zilch.
Well, until you factor in the start-up costs. Malicdem (pronounced muh-LICK-dim) bought a conversion kit for about $850 and installed it himself in his chocolate-brown 1983 Mercedes Benz 300 D. He had to obtain special insurance to protect the restaurants that allow him to take their oil, and a special state license. The tax man still has his number, too: He's liable for 18 cents a gallon in state fees, presumably on the honor system. All told, he figures it'll take a couple of years for the system to pay for itself. But then he didn't do it to save money.
"I wanted to do something for the environment," says Malicdem, a 34-year-old Illinois native. "This produces absolutely no sulphur. It's considered carbon dioxide neutral. And it sends fewer particulates into the air" than gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles.
Fine, but doesn't that make him the only soprano in a chorus of environmental baritones? If almost everybody else is using gasoline and other fossil fuels, how much impact can his wonton express have?
"It doesn't matter," said Malicdem, who believes his Mercedes is actually one of three or four veggiemobiles operating in Bakersfield. "At least I'm doing my part. We're the types to recycle everything anyway. There's basically one or two small bags of garbage in our can at the end of the week. Everything else is separated out."
You've got to have that sort of patience to operate a veggiemobile. Malicdem, who's married to Cal State Bakersfield religious studies assistant professor Liora Gubkin, first gathers a few gallons of used oil from one of a couple of Asian restaurants he frequents anyway.
He takes the oil home and pours it into a storage drum, where it sits for about two weeks, its contents heating, settling and separating. After removing the sediment and unusable liquids from the bottom, he pours the contents through a 25-micron filter, followed later by a 5-micron filter and eventually a 2-micron filter. Can't have any chicken bones in the fuel line.
"The convenience factor is not there," he admits. "I spend hours on this stuff. You give up all the trunk space in your car (for the oil collection and fuel tanks) and then there's all the drums at home. A person who lives in an apartment complex is going have a hard time doing this."
He's only been running his car on cooking oil for a couple of months, so he doesn't have the battle wounds just yet, but he knows what to watch out for.
"You can get salt in your lines if you don't filter properly," he says. "You can get water in there, which can damage your engine. There's a risk I'm taking just by using this stuff. That's why you try it on an older car. I don't know if you want to do this on a $50,000 car."
But he's got good company. The inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolph Diesel, was a big advocate of vegetable-oil fuel, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is among the modern-day celebrities interested in its potential. Malicdem believes about 1,000 people are collecting used cooking oil for fuel statewide, and he may have recently won a new convert to the cause.
Just the same, if Bakersfield had a biodiesel refueling station, Malicdem says, he'd be taking that approach instead.
If he did, though, he'd miss out on that distinctive aroma. "To me, it smells like barbecue," Malicdem says, "but some people say they can smell Chinese food."
Most would agree it also smells like principle -- deeply instilled, and deep-fried too.
Robert Price's column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach him at 395-7399 or rprice@bakersfield.com.