A Japanese research team is planning to run a campaign on environmental awareness by entering a racecar that runs on cooking oil, used to fry tempura, in the Dakar rally. Hidefumi Onaka, a lecturer at the Osaka Sangyo University, said Toyota's Land Cruiser 100 would be the first racecar to run on bio-diesel in the prestigious sporting event.

Onaka told the Canadian Press, "We want to show what tempura oil can achieve, as a way to raise environmental awareness...We're not doing it just for fun, so we decided to enter an internationally acclaimed event and appeal to the world."

Former Formula-One racer Ukyo Katayama will drive the car.

The race will need 10,000 liters of tempura oil, which will be donated by students, the university cafeteria, and local restaurants. Onaka said that bio-fuel maker Revo International Co. in Kyoto would reprocess the edible oil.

Although it is used in some buses, garbage trucks, and other vehicles, bio-diesel is still not very common in Japan.

Katayama wrote on his Internet blog recently, "The idea is to drive on biomass fuel, which is easier on the environment, over the dessert that is severely affected by global warming...I want to be the first to complete the Dakar rally on non-fossil fuel."

Mr. Onaka added that bio-diesel fuel generates about 20 percent less power than regular diesel. But the advantage is that it creates less black smoke and almost no sulfur dioxides that are known to cause acid rain.

Although it has a fowl odor, cost cutting is possible through mass production and this could mean that tempura oil could be the oil for the future in Japan.

Onaka concluded, "The smell isn't as appetizing as tempura...After intensive fuel testing in my lab, I had heartburn and didn't even want to look at tempura for a few days."