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For the first five minutes of every drive, the car runs on diesel fuel while the grease heats up.

‘‘The basic concept is, once vegetable oil is heated and thinned, then it has the same properties as diesel fuel,” said Sellers, 32, who lives in Boonsboro, in Washington County.

In other words, once a restaurant has fried enough french fries and chicken patties in a batch of vegetable oil, Sellers takes it, filters the oil and fuels his car with it.

It’s not for everyone, according to one of the few Frederick County residents who drives a car that runs on cooking oil.

‘‘It’s more for your hobbyist⁄enthusiast [than for the average driver],” said Tom Hickey, owner of The Orchard, a vegetarian restaurant in downtown Frederick. ‘‘I think of it more as a curiosity than a cure-all [for problems caused by non-renewable fuel sources].”

Hickey, 47, of New Market has been driving his grease-powered 1984 Volvo 240 for two years, he said Friday.

An art studio specialist at Frederick Community College, Sellers got about a dozen of his friends and colleagues together and met at Mark 1 VWS — a Volkswagen shop and dealership in Walkersville — to enhance his diesel-powered truck.

‘‘The bulk of the actual conversion was done in that one day,” Sellers said.

The small truck has a handmade wooden box under the console and behind the stick shift, where Sellers can flip between diesel and grease while driving.

The vegetable oil must be heated to a viscosity similar to that of diesel before it can be used as fuel, which takes less than five minutes in the summer, Sellers said.

The truck bed includes an aluminum tank for the grease. The truck gets 40 miles to the gallon on both diesel and grease, Sellers said.

A few people got the chance to meet Sellers and watch his two mini-documentaries about his greasecars on June 14 at the Emmitsburg Branch Library, and were impressed with the concept.

Larry Wintermyer, 54, of Emmitsburg said that, as a devoted fan of diesel vehicles, he is looking for a project that would allow him to save money.

‘‘Economically, it makes sense,” Wintermeyer said, adding that he planned to try to turn his car into a greasecar.

Jim Calhoun, 45, drove from Detour (in Carroll County) to see Sellers and his greasecar exhibition on June 14.

He brought along his son Travis, 9. Travis said his father should consider using a greasecar, using whatever fuel savings the move would produce to buy an all-terrain vehicle for him.

Jim Calhoun said the exhibition prompted him to consider looking for a conversion-ready diesel when he goes shopping for a replacement for his Oldsmobile. Although he said that more people driving greasecars would be a positive step in reducing the country’s reliance on foreign oil, Calhoun said that spending less on fuel for commuting purposes could attract him, too.

‘‘For a pure commuting vehicle, I wouldn’t mind putting a little bit of elbow grease in saving some money,” he said, adding that his wife commutes 50 miles twice a day to work. ‘‘At $3 a gallon, you notice that.”

If a greasecar like Sellers’s gets 40 miles to the gallon, emits fewer particles and poisons than gasoline or diesel-powered cars and runs on free waste material, why isn’t the whole country embracing grease as a fuel?

The answer is simple, Sellers said, but significant. There is no corporate backing, and few people have the time and energy to fetch and filter grease from restaurants in the evening so they can get to work the next morning.

Car companies are making few affordable new diesel models, Sellers said. He added that putting a system in place to standardize used grease from all restaurants may be infeasible.

‘‘I’m sure there’s some dark components to it,” he said. ‘‘[Grease is] something that the average person could filter and have stored. They’ve sort of eliminated a corporate entity.”

Learn More

Go online to greasecar.com or deepfriedrides.com.