Some time ago, my daughter--an ardent, well-informed environmentalist who doesn't just talk--got excited about biodiesel and looked into it as a business.  She was told that straight vegetable oil doesn't work well in diesels because it contains glycerine, which has to be removed.  The reigning process, currently, uses lye (a harsh caustic chemical) and exposes the operator to some danger if she is not a well-trained chemist.  So Cathy decided not to do it.  I have since learned that a new, noncaustic and more nearly permanent catalyst (metallocellulose?) has been discovered but is not yet available.

So, what about the glycerine problem?  My hunch is that SVO will work if the engine is properly tuned, but that the claimed efficiencies and lack of pollutants are not based on it but on the purified stuff.  Does anyone know?

Only a tiny minority of people would actually even consider doing the work or spending the money that Umbra claims using vegetable oil entails.  It would be far more environmentally and ecologically beneficial to get people to stop or greatly reduce their driving, and there's about as much chance of doing that as there is of getting people to spend the time, effort, and money it appears to take to run an engine on veggie oil.

BTW, I remember perusing a book about a guy who motored his way across the world's oceans about 15 years ago on straight veggie oil, and I don't remember him saying anything about the extreme makeover that Umbra described.  What gives?

Biodiesel just sounds so good.  Just take that chicken grease and burn it in your car.  Lick your lips and just drive around on the waste cooking oil.  

We wish.  Unfortunately you have to have an efficient collection system in place to provide a reasonable economy of scale.  Then there is the problem of refining the grease and redistributing it back out to gasoline service stations.  Will big oil put in another pump? Another underground tank?  And as Jdhlax stated, only a small group of people would give it a try. You probably use more petro collecting the stuff than you save in using it.  It is a great idea though and to the extent practicable, it should be utilized.

Anyway, I prefer plug-in hybrid electrics.
   

I was thinking of mixing a vegetable oil perfume with the SVO if I got a Frybrid can you tell if this would reduce the smell or cause damage to the engine.  I have found I can get everything from Coffee vegetabel oil to strawberry vegetable oil.

I remember watching the TV show "Dirty Jobs" and saw that some schools that cook their food on site have grease tanks. Grosse. But the point I want to make is that if they could process the oil on site to be used for vegiol it could be used to fuel the school buses that are going to be there anyway. This eliminates the oil moguls from having to "add a pump" etc...
The fact that there is so much oil being used for our kid's meals that it has to be kept in the huge underground tanks is another issue!
This idea could be transposed to other large industries, like hospitals/ambulances or factories/eighteen wheelers, and any other that you can think of.