Sears Tower Or Bust: My Algae-Powered Car Adventure

It was when the oil light came on that I started to run through the appropriate next steps in my head...and realized that there aren't any appropriate next steps when warning lights start going off in a 1982 VW Vanagon camper. Particularly one converted to run on a mixture of vegetable oil and algae biodiesel grown and refined by a group of Chicago high school students. As the Sears Tower, our goal, loomed in the distance, a question loomed in my mind: Was our shared belief in the future of petroleum alternatives and, more importantly, in the fuel processing abilities of public school students and their teachers, strong enough to convince us to push further into the knot of congestion forming around the city? More »