I have a love/hate relationship with my car.

While my VW TDI is the best vehicle I have ever owned, I despise the fact that it requires fossil fuel that pollutes the environment and increases our need to maintain unsavory relationships with foreign governments. I look forward to the day that I drive an electric car (solar charged, of course), but for now, my transportation choices are limited.That's why last Sunday, against what most folks would say was sane reasoning, I stood in front of my beloved 2001 Golf and cut the fuel lines in half.

And I did it with a smile on my face.

Running your car for (and on) peanuts The first time I heard about running a diesel car on vegetable oil was in a copy of Home Power, a magazine devoted to "off-grid" living. I was instantly intrigued by the prospect of jumping off the petroleum bandwagon and helping the environment at the same time. I purchased a book on the subject, read it twice for good measure, and was hooked.

In the early 1900s Dr. Rudolph Diesel (1858-1913) designed a new engine that operated on the principle of compression-ignition (diesel engines) rather than spark-ignition (gasoline engines). It was stronger, more efficient and most importantly, designed to run on peanut oil. That's right, peanut oil.

Unfortunately for all of us, Dr. Diesel met with an untimely death a few years later and the peanut oil concept was quickly forgotten. Sensing a vast, emerging market, the oil companies swept in and created a fuel they called "diesel." The rest, as they say, is history.

While diesel engines have changed considerably over the years, it is still possible (even preferable) to run them on vegetable oil. There are two ways to do this:

Biodiesel — Biodiesel is basically vegetable oil (palm, corn, soy, canola, walnut, jatophra and olive to name a few) that has undergone a process called "transesterfication," which removes the triglycerides and thins it out. Biodiesel and diesel can be used interchangeably and can be mixed in any amount. An added benefit of using biodiesel is its solvency, potentially resulting in cleaner and longer-lasting engines.

Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) — WVO is exactly what it sounds like: vegetable oil that has been used by a restaurant for deep frying and is ready to be discarded. The oil can be picked up (with permission of course), filtered to remove sediment and water, and used as fuel. A cleaner version of this is Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO), which is pure vegetable oil that has been purchased (clean and unused) and does not need any filtering (a bit less messy of course, but tougher on the ol' change purse as it's not free). With the exception of the need to filter WVO, the two are essentially the same.