Legumes that Zoom!
Those aren't freedom fries you smell - that's my car! Biodiesel makes its commercial debut for the a
"She who is old, but nowise feeble, Pours her power into the people."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Nature
f you didn't know exactly what you were looking for, you might drive right past the Los Angeles area's first biodiesel fuel station. There's no giant, spinning green ball with a big glowing "B" or anything - the environmentalist analogue to the famous Unocal 76 ball. Instead, wheeling into a Culver City parking lot, as per instructions offered on a website (www.biodiesel-coop.org), you come across a nondescript horse trailer. It sure doesn't look like the key to overcoming our national addiction to fossil fuels or any kind of eco-panacea.
But it's what's inside that counts: one 1,000-gallon tank full of American-farmed soy oil, or a B99 mix that is 99 percent soy oil, 1 percent petrol (they get a tax break to include that little dab of petrol), to fill the gas tank of any paying member's diesel car. Getting into the game can be a costly endeavor ($500 membership fee, plus about $3.40 per gallon), but is well worth the investment for a myriad of reasons.
"It's unfortunate right now in California that the ability to go to a station and buy biodiesel is not there," says Kent Bullard, a long-time biodiesel advocate and employee of the National Park Service. He's co-founder of the Biodiesel Co-op along with Colette Brooks of BIG Imagination Group, an advertising agency in Culver City. "My advocacy is to see biodiesel available commercially to pumps," Bullard tells me, "because until you get it at the pump so that people are pulling in their pickups or their Mercedes or VWs, it's not going to happen on a broad scale within the community."
He drives his vehicles on a B100 mix - 100 percent biodiesel, zero petroleum. "I have to remain pure at heart," he says. "I have to walk the talk. By the same token, driving on straight vegetable oil is a 'onesy-twosey' kind of thing, where you're more interested in taking care of yourself instead of taking care of your community. I want to see biodiesel produced locally. Every dollar that we spend in California on petroleum essentially is a trade deficit for the local area. As long as we're having biodiesel imported, it doesn't have the caveat of being a local fuel."
The co-op's vision for the mobile fueling station is to raise awareness in a specific area - in this case, the Culver City-Marina del Rey area - to inspire the construction of a permanent station, then move on to the next town in need. "What we want to demonstrate is that there is a market here, and our hope is that a gas station comes and puts us out of business," says Colette Brooks. If used in conjunction with solar and wind power, biodiesel could radically improve the wretched air quality of Los Angeles and help strengthen the local economy. This city was ranked the third worst polluter of fine particle pollutants in the country in 2004. Everyone largely depends upon their individual vehicles as a major mode of transportation, and high gas prices - which pushed as high as $2.95 again locally last week - have made biodiesel an affordable option.
When Rudolph Diesel first presented his engine in 1893, he demonstrated its efficiency by running it on peanut oil. But with gasoline so cheap and readily available, and bio-fuels so expensive to manufacture, Diesel's dream was eclipsed for the majority of the twentieth century. Now, with gasoline prices on a steep incline and no abatement in sight, a vast number of people (globally) are returning to Diesel's technology as a way to detox from a pervasive addiction to oil. As it stands, 45 states officially utilize biodiesel in various ways (25 million gallons were sold in the U.S. in 2004), as well as some of our neighboring countries to the north and south, and a slew of European nations. Biodiesel adheres to strict EPA standards, and when burned, results in a substantial reduction of unburned hydrocarbons. Carbon monoxide emissions are approximately 50 percent less than that from straight petroleum fuel.
Plus, biodiesel is made from beans! (Or any number of other vegetables.) But it's not as simple as going to your nearest Chinese food restaurant, taking their oil runoff from the deep-fryer and dumping it into the tank of your car. The oil needs a little filtering and processing. Bringing the cost of biodiesel down to an affordable price seems to carry a burden similar to what has confronted solar power, taking the better part of three decades to gain momentum. With each advancement of alternative fuels, however, like the recent passing of the state's Solar Power Initiative, biodiesel gets just that much closer to its day in the mainstream marketplace.
State Senator Roy Ashburn (R-Bakersfield) has been one legislative advocate of biodiesel. On September 29, 2005, Ashburn's biodiesel bill was signed by Governor Schwarzenegger, passing through both houses of the legislature with unanimous support. The bill gives incentives to public agencies and utilities to use vehicles that operate on biodiesel and biodiesel blends. "By using biodiesel, we can reduce dependency on foreign oil by up to 20 percent," Ashburn said. On the federal level, the 2000 Energy Policy Act and a subsequent presidential executive order require that all federal fleets, including the military, use high percentages of "alternative" fueled vehicles, including biodiesel. That's not freedom fries you smell, it's the U.S Army!
Colette Brooks says that the one way to bring the cost down is for the government to subsidize biodiesel. "With biodiesel, the demand increases, the infrastructure sets in, and then the price comes down," she says. "If the co-op is able to get it down to $3.41 a gallon with a thousand-gallon tank, with a regular fueling station that could pump 50,000 gallons a month of this stuff, you could get it for much less."
And then there's the celebrity factor, which raised the profile of biodiesel considerably. The National Biodiesel Conference in San Diego recently recognized country-music legend Willie Nelson for his efforts in promoting the awareness of biodiesel. He's helped to build a fueling station in Texas stocked with BioWillie fuel, his own B20 (20 percent biodiesel, 80 percent petrol) blend currently sold in four states. Singer Bonnie Raitt hosted a biodiesel educational event last month and is touring the country in a vehicle running on a B20 blend. Actress Daryl Hannah drives her car on the fuel, and is a member of the biodiesel co-op who regularly speaks at conferences and rallies.
"People see this as the right thing to do for a variety of reasons," Bullard says. "My boss is very Republican. He gives me grief about going out and doing this biodiesel thing. And I look him right in the eye and say, 'I'm doing this 100 percent American fuel thing.' Then he can't say anything. You can tell that class of people that this is supporting American farmers and supporting American economy, not sending petrol dollars out to support hostile regimes."
Published: 03/16/2006
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