Untreated or straight vegetable oilshave had a poor performance history in high speed engines. I've been out of it for a while, but a few years ago did quite a bit of research and the dealer I worked for did some field testing and work with University of California at Riverside, who at the time was pretty much one of the USA leaders in researching bio-diesel fuels.
In short, untreated base stocks, SVO is one of those, has issues with deposit rates, doesn't like the high surface temperatures in modern high speed diesel engine fuel systems (it oxidizes and rapidly degrades), and has storage problems, mostly with water and biological growth. It also had erratic emissions performance, and in some cases I know, problems maintaining rated power.
www.biodiesel.org has some good general information regarding biodiesel and applications for stationary and on road engines. They also point out some of the issues with non-treated fuels.
The other challenge you may find is that engine manufacturers have to certify their engines for emissions, and fuels not meeting ASTM or other similar guidelines make it hard to predict performance and emissions.
In my experience the best operation on SVO type fuels has been older design engines, like the older D399 series, we ran one for over a year on straight palm kernal oil in the Pacific, but problems with fuel storage and treatment caused an engine failure and the site upgraded the unit to a 3500 series engine.
For your last question, I think the answer is yes, before I left the dealer we quoted an Mak engine to run on palm kernal oil, and the performance engineer from Kiel seemed to think it was quite doable. I haven't seen one go in, but that type of engine, medium speed with a lower pressure fuel injection system might be your best answer.
You might want to contact some of your military partners at National Training Center, Fort Irwin. It's my understanding they run a significant amount of B20 fuels, and have been doing some work on other blends and possibly straight base stock oils like soybean. I know at one time the worked quite a bit with Southwest Research and UC Riverside on bio-diesel research.
Maybe some of the European dealers or users will add some info, as I think there are a number of projects in Europe, mostly with rapeseed oil and I heard that there was a project in Northern Africa on palm oil, I believe by Alstrom.
Hope that helps,
Mike L.
United States / Canada
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