"What is biodiesel?"

That was the question to one of the answers on last night’s broadcast of Jeopardy, demonstrating the fuel has reached a new level in mainstream consciousness. No doubt due, in part, to promotions by celebrities like Willie Nelson, who has his own brand of biodiesel, or Prince Charles, who is working on his own fleet of vehicles running on B100. But did you know that biodiesel actually started out as a grassroots effort?

Biodiesel did not come out of intense study by well endowed universities. Biodiesel was not the result of an international chemical company’s research. Biodiesel did not come from royalty or country western singers. Biodiesel came out of regular people’s garages. Regular people bought tanks and tubing, got waste oil from local restaurants, made their own fuel, and ran their cars on it.

In this day and age, rarely is there a chemical industry that starts at home. You might get a rock band or a dot com, but thanks to the support of biodiesel cooperatives and clubs, home “brewers” of biodiesel have a place to learn and share and develop their “craft”.

Just as before the pub, beer was brewed at home, biodiesel "brewing" has become a home activity, especially for folks concerned about the environment. Now you can buy biodiesel kits, take biodiesel-making classes, or attend biodiesel brewing parties complete with wine and cheese. Some folks even spike their fuel with essential oils like lavender and rosemary, so that it burns with a pleasant after-nose.

Running diesel engines on something other than petroleum is not a novel idea. At the end of the 19th century the inventor of the diesel engine, Rudolph Diesel, used biodiesel to show off his creation to the world. The chemistry for making biodiesel has been known for even longer. But when petroleum was popularized in the twenties, #2 fuel oil or "diesel" pushed the vegetable oil-based fuel out. Biodiesel began its slow resurgence along with wood stoves and thermal envelope homes during the energy crisis in the 1970's, mostly as a homemade fuel.

Thirty years later, we are in the middle of another turning point for biodiesel. Home-brewed beer begot Budweiser and Corona. Similarly, the commercialization of biodiesel production is promising a steadier, better quality supply for a larger market. According to the National Biodiesel Board, 75 million gallons of biodiesel were produced in 2005 and the 85 US biodiesel companies have a current combined capacity of 580 million gallons per year, which will grow to 1.4 billion gallons per year by 2008. A small but noticeable dent in our annual diesel consumption of 40 billion gallons per year for on-road vehicles.

Commercialization is also changing the face of biodiesel culture. It's no longer just for biodiesel enthusiasts who care about the environment. It's gotten the attention of entrepreneurs and investors looking for profits. It's gotten the attention of some regulators and policy makers skeptical of the fuel's promise for a better environment. This might sound harsh to those who have come to love the fuel, but it is part of biodiesel's transition from infancy to proving itself in a capitalist environment. To have a significant impact on reducing our carbon footprint or on transforming our relationship with oil, it must go through the economic and regulatory rigor that will demonstrate its viability. You may argue, this commercialization is happening with the help of government subsidies, but petroleum had its share as well. And yes, you can also argue it is happening with the help of royalty and country western singers, and you'd be right.

References:
Common Ground Magazine December 2006: Wisdom on Wheels by Emily Dulcan
Biodiesel America .org
Bdpedia
EIA Website

The Earth's Solar Energy Bank Account

We are energy trust fund babies. We can chose to exhaust what we have or we can choose save it and pay our own way.

Most of our energy comes from burning fossil fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal. When we burn them, we are converting the chemical energy stored in the fuels into heat energy. We use this heat energy to heat our homes or convert it to electrical energy in our power plants or to mechanical energy in our cars. But the chemical energy in these fuels originally came from solar energy. Hundreds of millions of years ago, plants on the earth absorbed light energy from the sun and stored it as chemical energy. Then they died, got buried for millions of years under pressure and heat, and now we dig them up and use the energy they stored.

This description is quite simplified, but it still illustrates that our main source of energy took millions of years to make. We have been tapping into this huge store of energy we inherited, an energy bank account or trust fund, if you will. Deposits were made long ago and have been accruing interest. Now we are burning the savings, literally.

Over a hundred years ago, we withdrew a part of this energy account to invest in the Industrial Revolution. Thanks, in part, to this investment we developed new manufacturing and transportation methods, transforming our lifestyles completely. Since then we've fueled countless innovations and have made a considerable dent in our energy account in the process. This is especially true for crude oil. Many experts argue that we are near or have even passed our peak oil production rates. Though we are still discovering new oil deposits, they will be harder and more expensive to get to, and we'll burn more oil in doing so.

Since the Industrial Revolution, we have become complacent about our energy account and we are no longer really investing, just simply spending. We tend not to think of this energy account as a blessing or a “breathing spell”(1), but as a right or worse, a given.

To sustain our lifestyles and set aside a “safety net” for the future, we must work toward controlling our spending through energy efficiency and finding other income streams. These income streams could come from the energy we currently get from the sun instead of the energy the sun provided millennia ago. The sun provides light energy we can to convert to electrical energy with our photovoltaics and wind and water turbines or to chemical energy with our biomass crops. Perhaps at some point we could generate more energy than we consume and recharge our energy account.

We might have needed the silver spoon a hundred years ago, but we've outgrown it by now.


1. Reference to quote by “the First and Greatest Chemurgist” George Washington Carver: “I believe the Great Creator has put oil and ores on this earth to give us a breathing spell... As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which is God’s true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow.”

News: Progress toward running cars on plants

Before leaving office, Gov. Pataki (NY) helps make it a good week for cellulosic ethanol.

Mascoma Corporation of Cambridge, MA received a $14.8M award from NYSERDA to build a 500,000-gallon-per-year cellulosic ethanol pilot plant in Rochester, NY. The company is teaming up with Genencor and will be getting support from International Paper Co., Cornell University, Clarkson University, and the NRDC. The plant will be able to test processing of multiple feed stocks such as wood, switch grass, paper sludge, and corn stover.

In addition, the state provided SUNY ESF and Catalyst Renewables Corporation of Dallas, TX with a $10M grant to build a 130,000-gallon-per-year cellulosic ethanol facility in Lyonsdale, NY near Syracuse. The feedstock for this facility will be wood.

The efforts of these companies, universities, and of NY state is bringing US commercial cellulosic ethanol closer to reality. Currently, the only other plant of this kind is Iogen's Canadian facility in Ottawa, Ontario. They use agricultural feedstocks such as wheat, oat, and barley and can make up to 3 million liters or almost 800,000 gallons of ethanol per year.