Over the course of a year, one group of students has taken it upon themselves to make a difference with renewable resources.

The ISU BioBus club has spent the last year developing a diesel fuel made from used vegetable oil from the various ISU Dining centers.

“We take the used oil from the fryers at places like the UDCC,” said club president David Correll, graduate student in business administration. “And I can’t really describe the exact process, but basically it gets cleaned, mixed with other chemicals and comes out a usable diesel fuel.”

The usable diesel fuel isn’t just a science project. It will be used by CyRide in all of its buses as soon as the club has everything ready.

To have everything ready all comes down to logistics.

“It’s all a bind now,” Correll said. “Organizing the picking up of the grease, delivering the fuel to CyRide, all that stuff.”

So for right now, Correll said the club is at work cleaning up the lab it acquired, getting it ready to produce as much of their biodiesel as they can.

The club itself started out with a small group of students who had an idea to take the wasted oil from where they ate and put it to a good use.

Throughout the whole process, the club hasn’t seen much resistance, especially from CyRide.

“They’ve been excellent,” Correll said. “They were even trying to get us a bus of our own.”

However, owning their own bus would’ve been a bigger hassle than simply supplying fuel to CyRide’s massive fuel tank on its premises. Hiring a driver, getting insurance and keeping up maintenance on the bus was more than the club wanted to deal with, Correll said.

Correll said Nancy Levandowski, director of ISU Dining, was instrumental in getting the grease for the club.

Since a company already came and disposed of it, she helped to bridge the gap and allowed for a certain amount of the vegetable oil to get to the club.

So over the next few weeks, as the semester comes to a close, the club enters the final stages of getting the fuel ready for use on a regular basis by CyRide.

“This summer, CyRide will test our fuel in their buses,” Correll said. “Then, once any kinks have been worked out, it will go into regular use this fall.”

The club is finally getting its hands dirty, too.

“When we first started, there wasn’t much for people to do,” Correll said. “But, now, we’re really getting to do real work.”

Correll and the club want anyone who’s interested to look them up.

“We don’t have a Web site yet, but anyone can contact me at [email protected],” he said.