Something smells fishy on the top floor of Damen Hall.

Actually, it’s fried fishy.

Industrious students at Loyola University are trying to turn fried oil – fast food runoff – into a green income stream.

After siphoning off gallons of Frialator grease from the school’s four cafeterias, a team of student chemists and biologists separate the fuel-clogging fatty acids and are left with an all-vegetable fuel source.

It works in any diesel engine – no converter required.

Students would like to see the fuel used not only in university vehicles and buses, but also to advance a university conversation about biodiesel, global warming and the greater environment.

Damen Hall is an appropriate location for the lab – right out the window is the Life Sciences building, proud owner of Loyola’s first green roof, a layer of sod that absorbs and purifies rainwater and reduces sewer flooding.

"We’re putting this on a global scale,” said Zachary Waickman, 21, a communications student who is working on the project. He makes up part of the project’s non-lab side – educators, sociologists and business students who teamed up to spread the word on the project, create a business plan and link up the project, called Solutions To Environmental Problems, with other university departments.         

The goal, Waickman said, is to make Loyola “the next great green university.”

Shane Lishawa, 28, is a full-time faculty member leading 21 students in getting the project off the ground. The project is an experiential learning course at Loyola and is worth three credits. Students set up the lab themselves and will soon lead the program sans staff and decide on ways to sell and market the biodiesel fuel.

Veggie-oil cars are nothing new – a peanut-oil fueled car was on display by inventor Rudolph Diesel at World's Fair in Paris at 1900.

When the global economy switched to fossil fuels, however, the vegetable oil systems were abandoned.

The biodiesel lab is, as you might expect, a little greasy.

Cardboard lines the floor around large vats that collect, cook and store the oil. To turn french-fry grease into fuel for a diesel car, the oil needs to be purified so it doesn’t clog fuel injectors and other engine parts.

First, they strain out particles using a micro-filter net that is finer than a car’s fuel filter. Then, they measure the purity of the oil, which can vary widely – fondue oil, which is used just once, is purer and better than that of a university fryer used all day.

They use a combination of methanol and lye along with some heat to start a chemical reaction that basically trims the glycerine right off the oil molecules.

Then, they “wash” the solution, using water filtered to attract waste products, and then “dry” it by adding air bubbles and letting certain substances evaporate. The finished solution creates biodiesel on a 1 to 1 ratio, and the lye and methanol create byproducts of soap and the unabsorbed methanol.

The group hopes to improve on a setup at Western Michigan University that inspired the Loyola lab. At Western Michigan, a large amount of waste resulted from the conversion.

Loyola students hope to learn how to further refine these byproducts, and possibly use the soap in university bathrooms and refine the methanol for a second use.

It takes four days from start to finish to transform 15 gallons of oil into an equal amount of biodiesel. The lab is surprisingly low-tech – the tubes, filters, pipes and heaters are easily bought and the whole operation cost less than $2,000; the students jokingly call it “garage biodiesel”.

The project is in its infancy – the only thing that runs on the biodiesel is Lishawa’s 1986 Mercedes. He says he is close to persuading another teacher to jump on board.

The students hope to acquire more equipment and double their production time, and move closer to absorbing all 80 gallons of grease that the university produces a week.

They hope to enlarge the operation, fine-tune the refining and recycling aspects and roll it out to the campus in November. It costs the students about 80 cents in raw materials to make a gallon of biofuel.

Part of the roll-out included creating groups in Myspace, Facebook, and an ongoing video series on Youtube.

Students acknowledge that while biodiesel is an exciting step, it cannot hope to solve America’s fuel dependency problem. For starters, they say, it would require an incredible amount of land, not to mention addressing that “food vs. fuel” debate that mass-scale ethanol production has already raised.

“It’s important that we have that discussion,” Lishawa said.

“Biodiesel might not be the total answer, but it certainly helps some of the problems,” he said, including reducing greenhouse gases by up to 80 percent. It also is made of recyclable materials, and therefore is a renewable, if only supplemental, fuel source.

The job of grease chemist is not always pleasant; once one of them had to siphon grease out of a vat with a hose and his mouth. Still, the students feel that the ability to make fuel is very attractive and empowering to students.

Waickman said that some Loyola students are helping nearby Highland Park High School build a miniature fuel lab of their own.

“We’re taking a whole lot of steps, and that’s just 20 students,” he said. “Imagine what a whole university could do.”