INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Their exhibit doesn’t require any tractor-trailers to haul the materials – in fact, the posterboards can fit in the back of any car – and it’s not even about corn.

But a display about the biodiesel project of FFA students of Pontiac Township High School in Pontiac, Ill., may have been the perfect complement to the Indiana State Museum’s announcement last week of a major traveling corn exhibit. It was the future corn campaign’s opposite in many ways – small where the “Corn: Powering the World” exhibit will be huge (see related article), locally-powered where the bigger exhibit plans to detail corn’s worldwide impact, staffed by people not yet out of high school where the corn exhibit is sponsored by companies employing thousands of degreed researchers and engineers.

“We wanted to get a lab opportunity for people to interact with,” said Ashley Graves, a PTHS senior.

She and fellow 17-year-old seniors Brian Enderli and Marty Plocher were among the large group of Pontiac students who arrived a day ahead of almost anyone else, on Oct. 23, to the FFA’s 80th annual national convention in Indianapolis.

PTHS FFA advisor and ag teacher Parker Bane said Chris Krok, manager of sponsorships and special events for the museum foundation, heard of the biodiesel project and contacted the school just prior to the convention to ask if the FFA chapter would like to be guest exhibitors at the corn announcement.

A few years ago, Bane and PTHS ecology teacher Paul Ritter started brainstorming ideas which led to the biodiesel reactor going into use on campus this past spring. Bane said they worried it might be dangerous – converting kitchen leftovers into combustible motor fuel isn’t everyday activity for most people.

With help from the University of Illinois and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) Waste Management and Research Center, teachers and students studying agriculture, ecology and automotives are pooling their talents to regularly convert locally-collected used cooking oil into biodiesel to power vehicles, including a tractor donated by the local John Deere dealership and some buses.

Bane said they started with a few farmers as guinea pigs, but that didn’t last long. “Some of the first places we put it in, they didn’t want to run on B100 (no petroleum),” he explained, because the equipment warranties wouldn’t cover it.

UoI donated the reactor, but the school would like to have its own. “I think you could have your own thing at the school, where you’re doing nothing but a renewable energy project,” Bane said.

Once they collect 40 gallons of oil from local eateries – excluding too-frequently used fast food oil – the students mix in methanol and sodium hydroxide to trigger the chemistry to alter it to 40 gallons of biodiesel, as well as byproducts. Graves explained they make soap from the glycerin and use leftover fatty acids in livestock feed, just like a commercial plant.

For some vehicles, they dilute their B100 with diesel fuel; for the donated tractor, “we take it straight from our tank to John Deere’s tank,” she said.

“It’s an interdisciplinary project to get other classes involved with it,” Enderli said. Plocher and Graves added it’s a way to learn to take alternative fuel seriously and lessen dependence on foreign oil.

The project has garnered this FFA chapter and the school all kinds of press. Students have demonstrated it to younger students and exhibited at places such as this year’s Farm Progress Show in Illinois. Bane said it’s not the first school fuel project in Illinois, but it has helped DNR earn federal grant money to get other schools started with similar projects.

And then there’s rewards like the national exhibit tie-in last week. “We’re having a little bit of fun with it, too,” Bane said with a smile.