WEEKEND MEMOS

'Weekend memos' give our editorial writers a chance to express their own opinions, comment on topics they have been writing about, or take a lighter approach. The opinions in 'Memos' do not always follow the Enquirer's editorial positions.

Off a side street on the Oberlin College campus, in view of the practice rooms at the Conservatory of Music, sits a restoration of the woodshed in which young Charles Martin Hall developed a process to cheaply extract aluminum in 1886 - which helped usher in the modern industrial era.

So maybe it's fitting that a couple of present-day Oberlin students are doing their bit to popularize a sort of alchemy that could mark a turning point in 21st-century transportation - using vegetable oil as motor fuel.

David Brown and Rachel David are tooling around the nation this summer in a VW Jetta they modified for about $250 to run on processed vegetable oil. They're art students, not science or engineering majors - which illustrates how simple, non-technical and workable this alternative fuel technology can be.

Brown and David got the idea from Joshua Tickell, an author-tinkerer-filmmaker who's been promoting biodiesel fuel for years with his "Veggie Van" (www.veggievan.org) and showing folks how to make the fuel in a couple of hours. Tickell notes that Rudolph Diesel, who invented the engine that bears his name, envisioned that various substances would fuel it. During the 1900 World Exhibition Diesel ran his engine on peanut oil.

In Cincinnati, Metro experimented with diesel fuel laced with soybean oil in 1993. More recently, its buses have used fuel made partly from used french-fry oil collected from area fast-food outlets. It works just as well as straight diesel fuel, is less flammable, is renewable, and is far more friendly to the environment. And it would be a boon to the farmers who produce it.

It is still more expensive than regular fuel, but the gap is closing. It is another sign that we are nearing the time when alternatives to the standby gasoline-powered internal combustion engine will be practical - biofuels, electric, hybrid, hydrogen fuel cells.

Don't be surprised if someday soon you pull your Mazda Mazola or Crisco Cruiser into a filling station and hear, "You want fries with that?"

Ray Cooklis