Well, that is not unlikely with the trucks from Pittman Machine Service in Leslie, when they are out making deliveries and servicing various machinery. Owner Gil Pittman — also an instructor in Machine Tool Technology at South Georgia Technical College (SGTC) — has developed a distilling method of refining vegetable oil into diesel fuel. He runs his business and personal vehicles off that biodiesel fuel.

“It smells pleasant,” Pittman said as he sat behind the desk in his office at SGTC. “It smells like your frying a turkey.”

“This oil is environmentally safe,” Pittman said. “It won’t hurt the ozone layer, and it doesn’t give off toxic fumes.”

And the savings to his pocketbook are phenomenal: He said he would spend $150 a week in gas at the pump, whereas, he only spends $60 a week on fuel with his vegetable oil biofuel.

“It is saving our company money,” Pittman said. “We have fuel we can make right here in America.”

So, where does Pittman get the leftover food oil to make the fuel? He currently attributes his supply to the generosity of Anthony Dragoin at Roman Oven and the King’s Inn Restaurant.

“We will take the oil, but we don’t take animal fats,” Pittman said.

He added the concept of biodiesel is not a new one, and it’s been around for approximately 20 years.

“The first diesel engine was designed to run on peanut oil,” Pittman said.

“I was watching this show on TV called, ‘Trucks,’” Pittman said. “I saw them running a pick-up truck on straight vegetable oil.”

Pittman said he took the information offered on the show about making fuel out of vegetable oil. The product running the truck was under the name “Fuelmeisters.”

“There were certain things I didn’t like about the product,” Pittman said. For instance, the people making the product on TV would apply water to it in washing it out.

“Anyone in the South who farms knows that water and diesel don’t mix,” Pittman said. He said that machinists, by their nature, are always trying to find ways to make a better product, or “build a better rat trap,” as Pittman says.

He found a man in Pitts who owns Rocking House Biofuels, and in order to get his enterprise started, he enlisted the man’s help.

“I took his product and being the way I am, I took and improved what he had,” Pittman said.

“You can do straight vegetable oil,” Pittman said. “It’s called SVO.” He added that country legend Willie Nelson runs his tour bus off SVO.

Thus, Pittman illustrates that “oil is not scrapped,” but the solid matters — trapped food particles — do have to be distilled out.

Pittman added that while there are savings at the pump, the matter of the distillation does require time and several people, because lifting the buckets of heavy food grease to load into the refiner can get heavy.


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