illustration by Sara Fanelli
Fuel for thought
From soybean fields to Frialators, can we fill the tank on biodiesel?
Ken Oldrid leans over the counter of Ahli Baba’s Kabob Shop on Main Street in Burlington and asks, “got any grease today?” He’s not ordering the falafel. He’s looking for used cooking oil to power his diesel car.
For a few hundred dollars in parts, this UVM graduate student has added an extra fuel tank and parallel fuel system to his 1987 VW Passat. Once the engine is warm, he flips a switch on the dashboard. Vegetable oil starts to pump into the combustion chamber and, ahh, instead of the sooty smell of petroleum diesel coming out the tailpipe, “it smells like food cooking,” he says.
Nationwide, there are only a few thousand vehicles that have been converted to burn straight vegetable oil. They’re one part Yankee frugality, one part kooky car trick. But they’re more than that. These “grease cars” are the do-it-yourself fringe of a bigger trend: the rapid development of biodiesel, an EPA-approved alternative fuel made from vegetable oil and animal fats—whether from crops like soybeans or from restaurant Frialators.
As the days of cheap petroleum head toward sundown, UVM students, alumni, researchers, and staff are making numerous contributions to an international movement to promote biodiesel as the next generation of liquid energy.
FRENCH-FRIED FUEL
Take self-described “green chemist” Omar Reffell ’06. As a freshman, he joined Green Technologies, LLC, a start-up biodiesel manufacturing plant in Winooski and has been employed there the past four years. While Ken Oldrid picks up a few jugs of burned canola oil in the basement of Ahli Baba’s, Reffell is doing the same thing on a larger scale in the back of the Billings Student Center on campus. He peers into a fifty-gallon drum of congealed grease the color of milky coffee, then hauls it to his truck with a handcart.
“French fry oil goes in there,” Reffell says back at Green Technologies’ Willy Wonka-like warehouse, pointing to a plastic vat the size of a hot-tub. Then, tracing his finger over a spaghetti-pile of orange tubing and brass pipes, he points to another vat. “And finished biodiesel comes out here.”
Biodiesel is the easy-pouring cousin to straight vegetable oil. Under Reffell’s watch, oil as thick as maple syrup flows into what he calls the “main reaction tank.” Next, from a separate container, a blend of methanol and potassium hydroxide—an alcohol and a catalyst—mixes with the oil. This begins a simple chemical reaction that strips away sticky glycerin from each oil molecule. The resulting biodiesel pours like flat beer and can be added directly into any diesel engine, often in a 20 percent blend with conventional petroleum diesel called B20, or mixed with #2 home heating oil.
This ease-of-use is one of the reasons that U.S. biodiesel production exploded from a half-million gallons in 1999 to 25 million in 2004, according to the National Biodiesel Board. Rising petroleum prices and federal tax incentives for new processing facilities helped to triple production in 2005 to some 75 million gallons.
Green Technologies contributed about 8,000 gallons to that flow last year, using nothing but cast-off cooking oil from Nectar’s, Manhattan Pizza, and several other Church Street restaurants—plus all the grease from UVM’s seven dining halls. “That’s six tons of waste,” says Erica Spiegel, UVM’s recycling coordinator. “Now we get a competitive price for it and it goes to a locally owned business.”
Some of Green Technologies’ customers are motivated only by price. Though biodiesel is often more expensive, at $2.25 a gallon their product competes well when regular diesel prices at the pump soar to $2.89. “If the bottom line is what matters to you that’s fine with us,” says Reffell, “ but I’m in this business because it’s better for the environment.”
Government studies back him up: biodiesel is petroleum diesel’s cleaner cousin. School bus fleets are switching over to biodiesel because in its pure form—B100—it produces 47 percent less particulate pollution, a cause of respiratory health problems; the National Park Service, scuba-diving outfitters and others who take vehicles into sensitive natural areas like running biodiesel since it’s nontoxic and biodegradable. A U.S. Department of Energy study concluded that biodiesel reduces net carbon dioxide emissions by 78 percent compared to petroleum, slowing greenhouse gas formation. It appears to have fewer cancer-forming byproducts, smog-forming hydrocarbons—and none of the acid-rain forming sulfur found in petroleum diesel. “Biodiesel is not perfect,” Reffell says, “but it’s a practical way, right now, to put less pollution in the air.”
NO MAGIC BULLET
In 2001, Joshua Cabell ’01, an Environmental Studies student, proposed in his senior thesis that the University try biodiesel in its on-campus buses. Michael Altman, UVM's transportation manager, enthusiastically supported the idea, and started buying drums of B100 from a small local producer, Dog River Fuels, and pouring it into the buses by hand. The experiment was a success—the vehicles ran well and students liked the cleaner exhaust at bus stops—but it was time-consuming and expensive, and by 2004 the local supply dried up.
But not the desire to run the buses on biodiesel. So, in 2005, when Champlain Oil Company offered to make B20 available at their nearby wholesale fueling station on Dorset Street, Altman signed up the whole fleet. “We’re always looking for opportunities to reduce pollution and set a good example,” he says. “but we needed a reliable supplier and we want to be able to just go to the pump and fill up easily.”
However, the days when any of us can rely on going to the pump for an easy fill-up are coming to a close, thinks Greg Pahl ’67, author of the new book Biodiesel: Growing A New Energy Economy (Chelsea Green, 2005) and president of the board of the Vermont Biofuels Association. “As we head into the era after ‘peak oil,’ biodiesel may take a more important role than many people realize,” he says, “but it will not be used for cruising around the countryside. When the petroleum gets scarce, we’ll be using biodiesel for agriculture and emergency vehicles.”
In this year’s State of the Union speech, President George W. Bush said, “America is addicted to oil.” Indeed, and a lot of it. In 2004, U.S. petroleum consumption was 870 million gallons—every day. From this we have a daily diet of about 168 million gallons of diesel fuel. Even if all the used cooking oil in the United States was turned into biodiesel, it would only cover a few days of our annual diesel use. Put all the fallow cropland in the U.S. toward growing soybeans and canola for biodiesel—an unlikely scenario—and, Pahl calculates, it would cover just 10 percent of the U.S. diesel market.
“There is no magic bullet,” Pahl says, “and biodiesel is not the end of our liquid fuel problems. But, if we really start to take conservation seriously, as one part of a broad array of renewable energy strategies, it can help.” Though a half-dozen retail gas stations sell B20 in Vermont and a growing number of truck fleets in the state are adding some biodiesel, Pahl sees home and building heat as the best market for biodiesel in the Northeast.
“Strengthening the local energy economy is good idea,” he says. “We’re going to run out of oil and the federal government doesn’t have a Plan B.” He’s optimistic that, with help from the state legislature, a regional biodiesel industry can take root. “Large Midwestern farm interests have been the main drivers so far,” he said, “and these big players have the technical wherewithal to make a difference nationally.” But, closer to home, the Vermont Biodiesel Project—a collaboration between the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund, the Vermont Biofuels Association, and the state’s Department of Public Service—aims to increase in-state biodiesel production capacity to 450,000 gallons in the next few years, and the VBA’s director anticipates that Vermont could produce 5 percent of its current diesel needs by 2020 using crops grown here.
SEED POWER
John Williamson, a farmer in Shaftsbury, is planting some of the first seeds. With help from Vern Grubinger and other staff at UVM’s Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Williamson is pioneering a small-scale system for brewing biodiesel from canola and mustard grown on his farm.
First, with a special license from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, he built an alcohol still for making his own ethanol—using sweet sorghum grass he grows. Then he used this ethanol to help make biodiesel in small batches in his barn, using restaurant waste oil. “All our tractors and vehicles run on straight B100,” he says.
Now, with $4,000 in a cost-sharing grant from UVM’s Davison Fund, Williamson and his partner purchased a $9,000 commercial seed press from Sweden. “It squeezes the bejeezus right out of the seeds,” he says. With 7,000 pounds of canola he grew on about five acres, he’s producing his own oil for biodiesel.
“It gives you quite a sense of security to be growing your own fuels,” Williamson says. “You don’t care when you go down to the gas station how much a gallon costs. And your money stays here. It’s not going to Saudi Arabia or Venezuela.”
Dave Kestenbaum G’02 from the Vermont Tourism Data Center at UVM thinks vacationers might like to see Williamson’s operation at work—while riding on biodiesel-powered buses. He’s launched a “green coach” certification program to encourage tour operators to run their bus fleets on B20. Lamoille Valley Transportation, UVM’s carrier for sports teams and other trips, has signed on and will receive a “Biodiesel User” logo to put on their vehicles and letterhead, plus marketing assistance from the tourism center. “A cleaner, greener trip is a selling point for some people choosing a bus company,” he says. “We’d like to take this nationally.”
Kestenbaum also thinks that his green coach project could help growers like Williamson find profitable markets for their homegrown biodiesel. This may not be easy. Kenneth Mulder, a doctoral student at UVM’s Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, developed a computer program to study biodiesel production in Vermont. His models turned up several challenges, including the problem of “aggregating demand”: how does a farmer sell a lot of fuel quickly without having to move it?
While Mulder’s study left him skeptical about biodiesel’s economic benefits for Vermont farmers, Kestenbaum sees potential in large-volume consumers, like tour bus companies, that go directly to the farm. He envisions “sustainability tours” in which buses stop where oil crops are being grown and fill up the tank. “Suddenly, the fuel on the bus becomes a story,” he says. “Just like Vermont maple syrup, why not Vermont biodiesel?”
NASSAU TO SALT LAKE CITY
Or Bahamas biodiesel? As a science project with his high school students at the Island School in the Caribbean, Jack Kenworthy ’00, tried making biodiesel on their remote island, Eleuthera, using the one source of vegetable oil available: cruise ships. It worked. Now, when the Grand Princess makes a port call at the island they leave behind dozens of seven-gallon pails of used cooking grease from the galley.
Using oil that would otherwise head to the ship’s incinerator, Kenworthy and colleagues are saving close to $60,000 a year in fuel costs to power the school’s fleet of boats, heavy trucks, generators, and two sawmills. Now, as director of systems for the Cape Eleuthera Institute, Kenworthy is working with investors to turn it up several notches. “We plan to have the first commercial-scale biodiesel plant in the Caribbean up and running in Nassau by summer 2006,” he says. “It will come on-line at 200,000 gallons. The plant is going to be totally waste oil driven from resorts and cruise ships.”
Kenworthy is not the only recent UVM graduate cruising on biodiesel. Andre Shoumatoff ’01, the managing director of the Utah Biodiesel Cooperative, got into the alternative fuel out of guilt. “I had just graduated. I moved to Utah to ski, and I fell in love with this Toyota Land Cruiser,” he says, “But I hated that it was big and gas-guzzling and horrible for the environment.” Making his own biodiesel kept his rig on the road and eased his conscience.
Shoumatoff’s car hobby bloomed into biodiesel activism. His organization has been instrumental in encouraging large Utah organizations—including the Park City municipal government, Canyons ski area, and the Salt Lake City airport—to start using biodiesel in their trucks, grooming equipment, and plows. “I’m one eco-motorhead,” he says, “but if you get a fleet manager to switch over, all of a sudden you’ve got a thousand.”
A USEFUL EXPERIMENT
Rudolf Diesel would have liked biodiesel. At the Paris Exposition of 1900, the idealistic German engineer demonstrated that his patented “compression ignition engine” would run on peanut oil. He hoped to create a high-efficiency, nimble engine that would “empower small businesses to compete with large industrial companies,” Greg Pahl writes. And Diesel imagined that his invention would be powered by vegetable oil, creating a new market for agriculture.
Instead, the era of Big Oil began and the development of the diesel engine was shaped by the low cost of petroleum. A century later, Robert Jenkins, UVM professor of engineering and an expert on fuel science, sees similar surprises in store for those who have a simple image of biodiesel as an environmental victory. “The energy business is so complicated that the net effect is usually something you didn’t expect,” he says. “We’re paying for this long era of cheap energy,” and biodiesel can be “part of the solution, but keep in mind, if it gets big, you’re mixing the energy market with the food market. Would we reduce petroleum imports and increase food imports?”
On the strength of recent federal funding secured by U.S. Sen. Jim Jeffords, Jenkins and his University colleagues will explore such complex issues through UVM’s new National University Transportation Center. “There is a lot of magical thinking going on in this country, whether it’s biodiesel or the hydrogen economy or coal gasification, that—snap—we can solve our energy problems,” he says. Instead, Jenkins sees a long, bumpy road toward a post-oil world. “We must look at energy systems from the local to the global,” he says, “and have a real national dialogue about smart policies.”
Roelof Boumans, associate professor in UVM’s Gund Institute, agrees there are no simple solutions. He sees promise in a “biodigester” project he has been collaborating on that would, while processing manure into methane, also use dead animals and slaughter waste to make biodiesel on farms in St. Albans. But he doesn’t think there is enough serious talk about our overall energy prospects. “Many people are holding onto a dream world,” he says. “The only way we go into the future is to use less energy, make the system smaller, forget about cars.”
Jenkins sees something a bit different. “I don’t see the energy system falling down,” he says, “I’m no fan of nuclear, but when the American people are told, ‘you can have electricity for six hours a day,’ they’re going to say, ‘can I have a nuclear power plant in my backyard and store the waste in my basement?’ We like our lights and cars—very much.”
Both scientists agree on the need to conserve—and innovate. And this may point to the best role for today’s biodiesel: as a bridge to better liquid fuel technologies. “In the next 10 to 20 years you’re going to see technologies that are going to make conventional biodiesel look inefficient,” Kenneth Mulder says. At the top of the list may be biodiesel produced from oil-rich algae farms, fed carbon-rich pollution from industrial smokestacks; it’s being tested at one U.S. power plant now.
“Biodiesel is not a panacea,” says UVM Environmental Council Coordinator Gioia Thompson ’87, “it’s a useful experiment, and people are learning along the way, asking questions. That’s what a university is supposed to be about.”
(for UVM staff)