It’s the middle of the night at Lyle and Tami’s Home For Wayward Biodiesel Junkies here in North Carolina after the first night of the Grassroots Biodiesel Conference. I’m wide awake and will be useless tomorrow at the conference. The house is full of people from the Blue Ridge Biofuels co-op (the Asheville boys) filling all the spare beds. I commandeered the living room couch and the woodstove and shooed the other visitors into the official guest rooms so I could take over the living room, knowing I"d be up half the night with insomnia after sleeping half the day today on the drive down here from DC. Just tried to chill out by doing some light reading of a 1996 study on biodiesel contaminants, and tried to wrap my mind around quality issues I’ve heard about/experienced this year. Trying to figure out what I"m going to say in the ‘quality in the biodiesel industry’ talk that I got drafted to give at the last minute. Oh yeah, that’s scheduled for first thing in the morning, too. ugh. morning.
I’ve been trying to figure out if I"m going to the Florida NBB convention or heading home after this NC event. I’ve been excruciatingly sick with autoimmune illness issues since about mid-december, and I"m a freakin’ wreck at the moment. If I dont’ go to Florida I’ll probably really regret it for the rest of the year, and if I go, I’ll be screwed up for a couple of weeks, which I can’t afford to do since I"ve got some major work planned in another part of the state when I get back. Tonight I was already surfing the airline ticket websites trying to figure out if I could afford to go home early instead of on Wednesday. That’s pathetic- here I am on the East Coast, should be taking advantage of the amazing blessings that come with being able to step on a plane and fly out to the other side of the continent and ‘Poof! you’re 3000 miles away!’. I’m surrounded by people whom I like and whom I don’t get to see much, and really want to spend time chatting with (back home I’m not a major conversationalist and I’m really sick of talking about biodiesel in person, believe it or not, so me WANTING to talk to all these peopel out here about it is a pretty big deal). For me, this conference is almost like a mini-Appleseed Tour-reunion. But all my body wants to do is go home early and sleep. waaahhhhh!!!!!!!
It’s been an interesting last few weeks.
I almost didnt’ come out here at all because I’ve been too sick to work, for the most part, for a month and a half. I’ve had a serious argument with my immune system for a few years- I had Lyme Disease, the tickborne thing, about 5 years ago, and about three or four years ago I developed what seems like chronic Lyme or fibromyalgia or one of the other autoimmune complications that Lyme sometimes sets off. I went through a huge battery of blood tests a few years ago, to no avail- I never got it officially diagnosed beyond A. learning that I did in fact have some sort of overactive immune system signs, and B. reading enough about Lyme and chronic autoimmune disorders to learn that there’s not a whole lot that western medicine, at least in the US, has to offer (and that there are hundreds of quack schools of thought about how to deal with it, which I dont’ feel qualified enough to evaluate. Every form of non-conventional medicine in this country seems to want to claim that it’s discovered the cure for poorly-understood autoimmune illness issues)
I was actually doing pretty well from last spring to about mid-december. Tour was difficult and I had a few weeks where intermittently I’d get serious bouts of fatigue and need to pull over and sleep in the middle of some of the long drives, but I more or less pulled it off despite all that. It could have been better, it could have been worse. Tour was one of the most important (or at least the most visible) things I’d done in my life, so I was pretty happy to do it even in my slightly- gimpy state.
I almost wrote a blog entry in mid-december about how I really seemed to be doing better, and then, as if to spite me, another bout of ye old fatigue and brainfog came around almost as soon as I had that thought about how great I was doing. So in the past month I"ve been pretty much unable to work construction, and mostly unable to do focused brain work either. This is just about the worst time for this to happen- right before this trip, and all the money-making that it’d require to get out to these conferences, and I can’t work all of a sudden and needed to sleep 12 hours a day. I’ve had a piece of writing to edit for two months and it’s driving me nuts that I can’t get it together to do a good job of saying what I need to in the assigned number of words. It’s pretty scary not having either resource available- brain or brawn.
So mid-january, I looked at my finances and decided that I wasn’t going to the conferences and it felt like a great relief to stop struggling to make it happen. I posted an announcement on the lists about trying to sell my train ticket between the two events. Instead of someone buying the thing off my hands, a couple of my penpals from the lists started up an impromptou fundraising campaign to get me out here. I’m really grateful for this and it made it possible for me to get here, but I’m still in a bind about Florida and the NBB convention and whether I can even deal with a few days of that one. Hopefully I’ll be semi-awake enough to have coherent conversations tomorrow! but I don’t think I can even deal with the trip to Florida now.
Someone else responded to the fundraising by offering me some consulting work in DC in getting a large-scale offroad fuel user into their own on-site production. In-house production for fleets and possibly farmers is something I"m really interested in developing, and I think I"ve got a solid grasp on the technology to make it happen up to a certain scale. I’ve been dying to implement a farm sized system for a while now. I went out to DC a couple of days ago, and immediately realized that this user was biting off more than they could chew- at the scale they wanted to work, they couldnt’ economically do their own oil collections, and of course had been looking at buying yellow grease from the renderer, which immediately eats up something like $1.20 a gallon even before methanol, labor, and energy costs.
There are some ways in which homebrewing doesn’t ’scale up’ (but peopel tend to hear the numbers as they apply to homebrewing, not commercial production). Yellow grease, at least the cheap version, actually brings some of those issues about quickly (ie high water content, high ffa compared to what homebrewers are used to handling, which instigates a round of filtering/dewatering and acid-base pretreatment steps that we often avoid with the nice oil we handle regularly).
It also turned out that they were interested in in-house production because they wanted to save money over diesel costs. The numbers looked do-able to them on paper because of their massive monthly fuel usage- a few cents’ savings can really add up- but the economics are still really marginal if you’re competing against $1.80 a gallon offroad diesel. If something were to go wrong with the feedstock and the process, the economics didn’ look so favorable anymore.
This is kind of where I think the common argument about how small producers should target the offroad diesel market instead of dealing with EPA registration for legal on-road fuel sales sort of falls apart. Big earthmoving companies like this one, or other construction, farming, and mining operations, are directly depending on turning diesel energy into money, and there’s no room for a profit margin for commercial biodiesel there. In-house production holds some promise for the smaller ones, or for farms that produce some oil-bearing crop. It’s a puzzle I"d like to work on for a while, especially the farm-use side of it, since the heavy diesel use on farms probably ties in somewhere with health issues like the ones I"m having.
I hadn’t realized that saving money was the only motivation for this place to use biodiesel- I was talking to them through another person, and I misread the info I did get. I incorrectly thought I was coming out here to deal with a big organic farm that had environmental motivations in doing this (they have ‘organics’ as part of their name), which wasn’t the case at all, and, although I think that saving money is a very valid motivation for homebrewing, it’s tougher to make it fit into a business plan when the company’s constantly comparing the economics to those of offroad diesel and has no other reasoning behind the decision. I know we occasionally run into fleets/bulk users who want to produce their own in-house fuel because they’re still working off the homebrew ‘50 cents a gallon’ myth. arggh. In their case, that wasn’t quite true- at least I wasn’t the one to break the news to them about how its not really 50 cents a gallon. They’d already studied that issue- and at least they’re still interested in pursuing it, with a pretty good-sized chunk of money ready to throw at the whole proposition. I talked their homebrew enthusiast into starting really slow with a small homebrew setup onsite and to answer all the outstanding questions about what he was capable of doing with that feedstock, before trying to work that into the tight economics of the business on a large scale. He’ll be trying to talk the renderer out of a few barrels of yellow grease to start with for tests (the renderer didn’t respond well to their request for ‘ two tankerloads’ either- that was somehow too small too). The homebrewer is going to be on salary to get started with these smallscale experiments, which also seems like a good move on the company’s part.
We ran down to North Carolina today, we were in a rental car (my ride’s real ‘ride’ was all gelled up in the DC cold snap) and I wasn’t on the rental agreement/insurance, so I couldn’t drive. As a result I slept for the entire trip (now I"m paying for it with being awake at the wrong hours)… As we rolled onto 15/501 on the way down to Pittsboro, I was enjoying the smell of the winter breeze and had a little moment of nostalgia for North Carolina- I’d lived here for years, in a variety of dilapidated farmhouses. I felt a round of homesickness for NC and felt this brief rush of what I can only describe as ‘homecoming’.. There was bluegrass on the radio station and some lights twinkled in the distance out of an old farmhouse… and a moment later we passed the modern NC reality, an ugly housing development with some ridiculous theme as it’s ‘ye olde’ gimmick, and the spell broke as I thought about how much that great farmland isn’t economical to actually farm anymore, and is getting snapped up by developers if it happens to be anywhere near a road like this one. I still gotta say despite all that I feel a heart-aching love for this place that I’ve never experienced about California.
