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Fill up with vegetable oil? A new shop will fix you up.

BRETT CLARKSON

Tacee Webb uses space-age analogies to describe getting around Portland. Tram cars, she says, look like "little silver-steel spaceships floating above" Interstate 5.

So, of course, Webb thinks Portland is ready for cars powered by vegetable oil. Webb is CEO of Lovecraft Bio-Fuels, which is opening an outlet at 1216 S.E. Division St. The shop, the company's first outside Los Angeles, will convert diesel-engine
vehicles to run on pure vegetable oil. Lovecraft does conversions for about $725 and sells DIY kits for $425.

Doors open Saturday at 6 p.m. for an opening party, with drinks and a DJ. After that, the store will be open 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. seven days a week.
The company launched in January 2006. Founder Brian Friedman has converted more than 1,000 engines, with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and singer Mandy Moore among customers.

 Aldona Watts, a 20-year-old student at the University of California at Los Angeles, bought a converted Mercedes from Lovecraft last year. "I was interested in biodiesel and biofuels. I didn't have a car and just moved to L.A., and realized I would need one -- definitely. I'd been bicycling," said Watts. "It actually runs pretty nice."

The notion of fueling diesel engines with vegetable oil isn't new, says Webb, who will run the Portland shop. The original diesel engine debuted at the 1900 Paris World's Fair, she notes, and ran on peanut oil. "What we're talking about is really returning to the original invention of Rudolf Diesel."

For more info, visit www.lovecraftbiofuels.com.

BRETT CLARKSON

author Mac Barnett :: photographer Duncan Stewart

While pundits and politicians debate the feasibility of ethanol, switchgrass, and other alt-energy sources, Los Angeles-based Lovecraft Biofuels is busy making cars run on vegetable oil. The autohouse will convert any diesel engine in an afternoon, for about $700. They also have a handsome fleet of converted Reagan-era Mercedes Benzes for sale, going for about $6,000 each. Forget any preconceptions of flubber-like complexity: Lovecraft's engine conversions are driven by founder Brian Friedman's imperative to "simplify, simplify, simplify." And business is brisk: the company performs about four conversions a day.

As for fuel, a nationwide network of biofuel stations already exists: grocery stores. New vegetable oil is available in bulk (around $2.60 a gallon at Costco; cheaper if you buy expired stuff). Those willing to forge friendships with deep-frying restaurateurs can fuel up for free, collecting used cooking oil and filtering it at home.

Friedman's ambitions include developing a conversion kit for every kind of diesel engine, and he talks about a future fueled by vegetables—with vegetable-powered farm equipment harvesting crops, vegetable powered machines turning those crops into oil, and vegetable-powered big rigs taking that oil to consumers. An utopian vision, yes, but with gas prices creeping ever skyward, it is also beginning to seem elegantly sensible.

Valli Herman's story from the calender section on Saturday, August 5, 2006.

Here is a PDF .