An unusual and potentially historic three-vehicle caravan made a brief pit stop at the McDonald's restaurant on Fourth Avenue at about 9:00 last Friday evening.

They look like Baja-race-ready SUs, but these Volkswagen Touaregs have one vital difference. They run on biodiesel, a clean, renewable fuel that can be burned in a regular diesel engine with $50 worth of upgraded hoses.

The Touaregs and their crews will travel 25,000 kilometres through 14 countries and two continents in 15 days. It's a journey comparable to any extreme rally race but the prize is much broader and harder to measure. These Touaregs are racing for awareness.

Biodiesel, according to Jˆrg Sand, one of two main organizers of the Pro Biodiesel Panamericana Tour, is a fuel source of the future that can be utilized today.

To prove it, he and partner Matthias Jeschke have organized and financed a gruelling trip along the complete length of the Pan-Americana a collection of highways that runs from the northern tip of Alaska to Ushuaia, Argentina, the southernmost city in the world.

'We want to send a signal to the world that you can use biodiesel now, you don't have to wait,' said Matthias Jeschke, owner of Extreme Events and the second main organizer of the trip.

Biodiesel is a biofuel, a fuel created from living organic matter rather than petroleum. Biodiesel, like ethanol, can be derived in abundance from living plant material without waiting millions of years for nature to turn it into petroleum.

Biodiesel, explained Sand, can be created by adding ethanol to vegetable oil. The mixing separates glycerine from the vegetable oil, a valuable by-product that can be used in soap. Its benign sources make biodiesel non-toxic and harmless to plant or animal life if spilt on the ground.

This fuel also creates far fewer emissions than regular diesel and adds no CO2 to the atmosphere. According to the Pro Biodiesel team, this fuel burns with 40 per cent less hydrocarbons and no benzenes or sulphur.

It is also considered CO2-neutral because it releases the same amount of CO2 when burned as the plants would have released during normal decomposition.

It's a very exciting project,' said Sheila Dodd, referring to the tour.

Dodd, the tourism co-ordinator with the City of Whitehorse, was the only government official who came out to welcome the tour.

'We're always looking at ways to stop climate change, especially in the North where we feel the effects of climate change first,' she said.

For the first stretch of the trip from Alaska to Whitehorse, the Touaregs used a mixture of 20 per cent regular salad oil with 80 per cent diesel. The team had to use a heavier ratio of regular diesel to keep the vegetable oil from congealing under the Arctic cold.

The team will run B50, meaning 50 per cent biodiesel, from Whitehorse to Prince George, B.C.

From there, they will run on B100 until they get to southern zones. Part of the reason for running the different mixtures is to show the versatility of this fuel source.

'We want to show everyone biodiesel works everywhere, in cold countries, hot countries, in regular cars, with hard conditions just as good as petroleum fuels,' said Sand.

His partner, Jeschke, also said they want to show that it can be used in any combination with regular diesel and produced by a wide variety of different manufacturers.

For Jeschke, the performance of the vehicles and their fuel is not his main concern. His top worry is 'to reach the time for events.'

To meet the different media and refuelling stops along the way, the Pro Biodiesel team has to keep a gruelling schedule and drive 24 hours and day with three drivers in each vehicle trading off at regular intervals.

There's no stopping to take pictures or stretch cramped legs.

That schedule becomes even more difficult when something unexpected happens. The first stretch of the trip from Alaska to Whitehorse claimed three tires that were repaired by Fountain Tire while the team was refuelling in the McDonald's parking lot (luckily, Goodyear has stepped up to be one of the main sponsors). The flats put the team an hour behind schedule for their arrival in Whitehorse.

Jeschke's second main worry is interpersonal difficulties among the nine drivers. Spending two weeks crammed into a medium-sized SUV can test anyone's patience.

Add to that the pressure of keeping an intense schedule and travelling through some of the most politically unstable countries in the world, and the potential for conflict rises.

'The personal challenge is to be clear with everyone in the car,' explains Jeschke about the need to keep communication lines free from conflict and misunderstandings.

Jeschke and Sand have invested considerable amounts of their own money to make the trip a reality.

'It's our personal money, our personal investment,' said Jeschke. 'All our drivers also invest personally.'

'Volkswagen was going to sponsor us but pulled out,' said Sand. 'We (already) came so far we couldn't stop this, so we went ahead to do it. So now we hope to break even.'

Besides Goodyear, Schenter Logistics, a German university and a number of other companies and organizations have stepped forward to help the trip along.

The Fourth Avenue McDonald's gave the team a free meal, a couple boxes of water and a box of granola bars. But the majority of the cost is still being covered by Jeschke and Sand.

Surprisingly, the team has not found much support from environmental organizations like Greenpeace.

'I don't think they have really thought about this project,' said Sand, referring to Greenpeace's lack of support. 'I think it is possible to do a big portion of transportation using biofuels.'

Sand explains that one of Greenpeace's main concerns is that biofuels could encourage the continued use of monocultures, the current agricultural practice of growing huge swaths of one crop to maximize the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, products that have a detrimental effect on the environment.

Biodiesel, however, can be produced from a wide variety of different plants which can be raised in mixed crops to avoid this problem. Biodiesel can even be produced from plants that grow in the ocean and desert.

'There is a plant called Jathropa that grows in India, that grows in the desert that can be used for biodiesel,' notes Sand.

While financial help has been weak, the team has enjoyed solid support from media covering the events and governments of the countries the team will travel through.

The German government has also used its network of embassies to ease border crossings in the 14 countries the tour will travel through.

Even without commercial success, the team's main goal remains: to show the world there is an environmentally sustainable alternative fuel that is not dependent on an increasingly hostile Middle East.

'The petroleum companies talk about biofuel but in the time they can sell petroleum, they sell petroleum,' said Sand.

Sweden, he added, is one of the best countries in the world as far as biofuels are concerned.

'They try to do a lot for biofuels, it's the law,' he said, referring to legislation that will make see biofuels completely replace petroleum fuels in Sweden by 2020.

The team continued their southward tour with stops in Prince George and Vancouver before entering the United States.

'I find it interesting they eat McDonald's as well as their vehicles,' noted Joseph Graham, a local biodiesel enthusiast, as the team went in to consume their Big Macs and French fries.

His comment refers to the increasingly common practice of biodiesel drivers using old fry oil from fast food chains to power their vehicles.

Graham and a few friends are interested in running their own diesel vehicles on biodiesel.

The group is looking at different mixes of biodiesel that could range from 20-per-cent vegetable oil to a full biodiesel formula.

Like many others using biodiesel, Graham and his friends are looking to fast food restaurants as a source of vegetable oil to use in their vehicles. Restaurants are often willing to give away old deep fryer oil.