A $10,000 grant from the green power fee, imposed by students upon themselves in 2003, provided start-up funds for the effort to use waste oil from UT Dining Services to power a fleet of 11 campus vehicles. The program was an effort of the UT Student Chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers. The program initially stalled because of lack of time to devote to the effort by the engineering students involved, but in summer and fall 2006, Scott Curran, a senior in mechanical engineering, and Sean Peterson built the processor and began producing biodiesel. The precise procedure for producing biodiesel was based on Curran’s experiments.