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Is $4 a gallon gas getting you down? Take a tip from Greg Melville who uses leftover cooking oil to power his 1985 Mercedes diesel station wagon (read his article “Greased Lightning” in The New York Times).

Melville converted his wagon back when gas was hovering just above $2.00/gallon. Now, friends who laughed then, are asking to look under the hood now. “Of course,” Melville wrote, “what they find there isn’t entirely pleasant. Waste vegetable oil power is a dirty business.”

How does he do it? Apparently, Melville has a supplier at a local restaurant who saves him five-gallon containers of oil, with French fries and meat scraps suspended in the slime, for pick up once a week. He then heats the oil and pours it through a filter back, working in his garage that smells as good as any fast food restaurant. Then, he pours the oil into a 15-gallon tank, part of the grease-power kit he purchased for $1,000, that heats the grease so it will move quickly. So far, he gets about 20 miles to the gallon, and has reduced his carbon footprint by more than half.

Melville recently took his grease-guzzling car on a cross-country road trip that we’ll all be able to read about in the forthcoming Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil-Powered Car and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future (to be released this October).

The lesson: (fortunately) we don’t eat enough French fries to power the entire U.S. fleet of cars on leftover oil, but with grease at the ready, we may have some real alternative fuels.

Photo from Studio2f.com.