WOOSTER, Ohio — Those at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster are running four of their vehicles on natural gas. But it’s not the typical natural gas people generally know.

The vehicles are operating thanks to gas produced locally from renewable and plentiful organic waste such as chicken fat, rotten tomatoes and the byproducts of making potato chips.

“It is about fuel, and everyone has a fuel issue nowadays, but it’s also about a waste issue,” says Jim Currie, a leader of the project and the director of OARDC’s ATECH program, which works to commercialize the center’s research.

“When it comes to waste, there’s the problem of getting rid of the waste and the cost associated with getting rid of that waste. The problem that most businesses which produce organic waste have is what to do with that waste. We think we have a small solution to this problem.”

According to Currie, the fuel costs about two-thirds as much as gasoline and, when burned, emits about one-third less greenhouse gas. “I find it fascinating and very cool that we can produce a portion of our energy from what is otherwise today a waste stream,” he said. “You don’t have to pump it out of the ground. It’s not taken out of the food supply. This (use to make fuel) is all after the fact.”

Thanks to $46,000 in funding from the group Clean Fuels Ohio, OARDC is having three Ford Fusion sedans and a Ford F-150 pickup truck turned into bi-fuel vehicles. They’re called “bi-fuel” because they can run on either gasoline or compressed natural gas, called CNG.

“Quasar has a biodigester that converts this compost into mulch,” Currie said. “It works like a cow, chewing the solids and liquids, breaking the solids into methane and carbon dioxide and capturing the methane gas. You end up with the same quality of natural gas. You can put it back into a pipeline, put it back into an engine or compress it and run a car with it as we do.”

The CNG will come mostly from an anaerobic digester a company called Quasar Energy Group designed, built and operates on OARDC’s campus in Wooster, about 60 miles south of Cleveland. Some may come, too, from a similar Quasar facility in Columbus.

Both systems take in food-processing waste and similar materials such as cornstalks and cow manure, break them down under tightly controlled conditions, then harvest the methane biogas that results. Some of that gas runs a generator. Quasar’s Wooster digester currently produces about 30 percent of the electricity for the main part of OARDC’s campus.

A portion of the gas is refined into higher-value CNG, a renewable fuel that Quasar markets and dispenses from stations at its Wooster and Columbus facilities. The pumps resemble regular gasoline pumps.

“It’s not just that it’s an alternative fuel,” Currie adds. “It’s that it’s bio-derived, that it takes a waste stream and turns it into a useful product.”

According to him, what’s left from the process (a liquid) can be used as an alternative farm fertilizer, a good source of plant nutrients and organic matter. Or it can be de-watered and dried, leaving a rich material similar to compost that Quasar can sell as livestock bedding or a soil amendment.

“As a university research center, we fell like we should be looking at the alternatives, that we should be doing this experiment,” said Dave Benfield, an OARDC associate director and one of the project’s planners. “We’re doing it to see how well this alternative fuel works in what we call a normal vehicle, or road vehicle. Findings will be reported to Clean Fuels Ohio as a requirement of the grant we received and any information we gather will be shared publicly.”

Quasar currently sells its CNG for $2.25 per gallon. At these prices, each of the three bi-fuel cars would save about 6.5 cents in fuel costs per mile, resulting in a savings of $975 per year, per car. Currie and others say this results in fuel that is 40 percent cheaper than gasoline.

The converted bi-fuel vehicles keep their standard gasoline tank and fuel line, get a separate tank and line added for CNG and can run on either fuel.

Those at OARDC boast all this is renewable, sustainable and requires no drilling. But they also point to other benefits as well. For starters, vehicles using CNG show significantly less engine wear, need less maintenance, need fewer oil changes and should last longer. Greenhouse gas emissions will be cut by 30-40 percent.

Quasar’s gas-making process diverts waste from landfills and incinerators, cuts the risk of pollution from that waste and reduces farmers’ and business’ waste disposal costs.

“The price of fossil fuel is not going to get cheaper,” Benfield said. “We want to look at what possible alternatives might be out there for fuels for our vehicles, because we don’t want to be held hostage by gasoline prices in the future and not be able to operate because of the high cost of fuel. We think it’s worth the experiment.”