Here’s a ‘trip report’ Tom wrote about his part of the trip:
Organic Farms, Biodiesel, and Local Production
My girlfriend and I did a 4000 mile roadtrip over 14 days in September,
and still trying to actually see things and visit with people. Mark
bought a new van in Boston - a 1998 Savana, same year and model as mine
- and needed to bring it back to the West coast, so I flew out there to
accompany her back. We had talked about heading on a scenic trip through
Canada, but then we changed it around to visit a bunch of farms and
biodiesel plants spread across the nation. Biodiesel activism is her
thing, and she has spend literally thousands of hours talking with
people online about everything even tangentially associated with
biodiesel. As a result, everywhere we went, people enthusiastically
gave us tours of their farms and plants, as well as invited us to their
dinner tables.
First stop: New Hampshire, and Tuckaway/Sheltering Rock Farm. It’s
about a 220 acre organic farm, with a desire to become a CSA (community
support agriculture, people that deliver those “veggie boxes") in the
next couple of years, but for now, they just grow enough for several
farmers markets, and have a very large field for horses. Fresh corn and
blueberries - yum!
Dorn Cox, the son of the owner, is in his mid-30’s and is growing about
4 acres of sunflowers as a pilot project with UNH to see just how much
oil can be crushed out of the seeds, after which the oil can be made
into biodiesel and used to power all the farm equipment. Dorn spent
some time down in Argentina, where many farmers have been growing oil
crops (like soybeans) in order to power their farm equipment, with the
remainder being fed to cattle. Down there, they’ve figured out that if
you set aside about 10% of your land to grow oil crops, you should have
about enough to get by, regardless of the number of acres you have.
Oddly enough, this is about the same percentage as used to be set aside
to grow feed crops for oxen and horses. The more things change, …
Farmers and biodiesel make lots of sense. By separating themselves from
the vagaries of the oil markets, they can quote prices on next year’s
harvest without worrying that they’ll lose it all to rising fuel costs.
Even if they have to pay tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of
dollars to build a plant, the farmers seem to think it’s worth it even
if they don’t save any money over diesel – just knowing exactly what
their costs will be next year for fuel gives them a significant
competitive advantage over other farmers, as they don’t have to quote
high prices just in case fuel is expensive next year.
Also, almost all farm equipment is already diesel, and so can run
biodiesel without modification (though, occasionally, there are
incompatible seals or fuel hoses, which need to be eventually replaced,
but biodiesel works in _all_ diesel engines without modification).
Finally, farmers know how to weld, plumb, and do all the other tasks
needed to set up a small-scale plant, unlike most hippies that just
heard about this “biodiesel stuff, can I make it myself and save money?”
(quick answer: no, it rarely makes economic sense on a micro scale, like
for your VW bus).
Why don’t they just buy futures, and hedge against rising prices with
the markets? After all, that’s what they’re for, right? Well, turns
out you can get crude oil futures into 2011, but futures for crude oil
refined into gasoline is only offered months in advance, not years.
Check it out: gasoline futures are only offered to January 2007
http ://sites3.barchart.com/pl/vsn/quote.htx?sym=HUV6&mode=i
… and diesel, which is tied to home heating oil, can only be hedged to
March 2008:
http ://sites3.barchart.com/pl/vsn/quote.htx?sym=HOV6&mode=i
Also, even if you buy crude oil futures every year to 2011, tying up
significant capital on the margin, what if fuel is $120/barrel at that
time? Can you pass the farm onto your offspring with a fighting chance
of staying afloat? Farmers are very long term thinkers, maybe not
10,000 years, but certainly thinking a few decades in advance, and tying
the viability of your farm to a volatile commodity like oil is a bad
proposition in the long run. More than being just a known value,
running your own plant also puts an upper limit on fuel expenses
(something I should have mentioned in the first place).
And finally… a 2M gallon biodiesel plant can fit onto about 1/2 acre,
about the size of The Shipyard, complete with space for loading and
unloading tankers and a gas pump. It’s a pretty simple chemical plant,
maybe a dozen 2000-20000 gallon tanks, so there’s not much complexity or
much to worry about breaking except pumps (which farmers are all too
familiar with already). In the big scheme of things, we’re not talking
about that much effort to make & run a plant in the big scheme of things.
Anyway, back to the farm. Dorn got this cool 1940’s combine that you
tow behind a tractor, and it cuts the heads off the sunflowers, crushes
them, separates the parts through several filters, spins them to get rid
off the chaff, and then someone bags a steady stream of sunflower seeds
that come out of a little nozzle. It was like a Rube Goldberg piece of
equipment on wheels that saved millions of hours when it was first
introduced (which was shortly before this pieces was made, as it was
about 60 years old, but still works). Farm equipment is cool.
Mark and I also read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” on the trip, and damn if
it hasn’t changed the way we both think about food. Dorn has been
talking to Joel Salatin’s, the
“Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” that is
highlighted in the book, and they’re going to be modeling their CSA
after Salatin’s farm. Cool stuff, and a highly recommended book that is
so well written I think/hope will change our society (well, it already
has with Whole Foods buying more local produce already, but I think
it’ll change a lot more than that). One quote from Salatin about
selling produce/meat straight to consumers: “don’t you find it odd that
people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house
contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”
We spent about 4 days in New Hampshire, hanging out on the farm, before
heading down to Pittsboro, North Carolina. There’s a whole alternative
community down there that is amazingly self-sufficient. I’m not sure
how many people there are in this community, but probably a few hundred
hard-core members, and thousands of more loosely affiliated people.
First off, a signifant number - perhaps half? - of these people have
diesel vehicles and get their fuel from Piedmont Biofuels. Piedmont
Biofuels has been distributing biodiesel to the area for years, but is
about two weeks from the opening of a 1 million gallon/year biodiesel
plant so they’ll be distributed their own biodiesel rather than
bulk-purchased biodiesel. At this size, that’s about two 8000 gallon
tanks of feedstock oil (mostly soybean oil, crushed from soybeans used
for cattle feed) arriving each week. On the output side, they have a
network of 500 gallon fuel tanks spread throughout a 100 mile radius so
that people don’t have to drive far to refuel. Given that fuel is one
of the major costs (including home heating oil, which can be replaced
with biodiesel), just keeping everyone’s fuel costs “in the family” is
really cool.
Lyle Estill, a co-owner of the company (and the guy we were staying
with), is a former homebrewer that has scaled up his operation by
getting almost $1M in funding to make this fully-permitted plant,
complete with 20,000 gallon tanks, explosion proof pumps and wiring.,
750 kw genny, etc. It really raises the bar in my mind as to what’s
possible for us “common folks” can do, separate from the petroleum
industry and their easy access to capital. He also wrote a book about
the startings of the homebrew biodiesel movement, “Biodiesel Power",
which I haven’t read but I hear is in it’s fourth printing, and girl
Mark is prominently featured (to her embarassment - she’s shy about how
many people recognize her and what she’s written, which happened many
times during the trip).
Also, Lyle’s wife, Tami, started a co-op that looks like a small gourmet
grocery store, but carries exclusively organic food, and something like
20% of the food is locally produced. Not just a little produce, beer,
and soap, but whole sections of foods that were manufactured locally.
They got about 1000 people to loan them money to start to co-op, and
they’re been running for about 6 months and are just at the break-even
point. Not the cheapest, but all the profits from the store stays
local, and even more of the community’s expenditures stay local.
Fuel and food distribution is the start, then there’s the deli/coffee
shop, the farmers, the solar contractors, the mechanics, the carpenters,
the body workers… it really is almost a self-sufficient community,
with people actively trying to make it more self-sufficient. Forget the
global economy, bringing it local is the future. I couldn’t help but
think of this as the left’s answer to the mega-churches of the midwest,
now all we need is day care and schools.
What about the economies of scale? Keeping as many products & services
local is sure to be less efficient, and if done on a global scale, might
it actually be bad for the global environment due to the
inefficiencies? For many products, I wholeheartedly agree -
semiconductor manufacturing the best example of economies of mega-scale,
but this also puts the world at global risk whenever a plant goes down
(fire, natural distaster, political reasons, etc). Even so, I keep
hoping it will be possible to make, say, 10,000 transistor microchips in
your shop someday, powered no doubt by the Mr. Fusion home reactor.
But there are economic reasons for bringing manufacturing more local,
foremost being fuel costs. Shipping goods and products is costly, and
manufacturing locally from locally (or regionally) grown products avoids
most of these costs. There are 149 refineries in the US, and this means
that each gas tanker has to drive a long way for each delivery, and each
supertanker has to go a long way to deliver the crude (~2% of crude oil
is burned in transit to refinery).
In homebrew biodiesel, making 30 gallons at a time (very common) is
nonsense economically, and really a hobby like making soap or
hand-churning butter. A 2M gallon per year plant, however, can support
the transportation & heating fuel needs of about 3000 people at current
rates (13M barrels/day for US, 300M people in the US, is 664
gallons/year/person, including all commercial and industrial fuel usage).
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/petroleum_supply_annual/psa_volume1/current/pdf/table_03.pdf
http ://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0105.html
I think this is probably more like 10,000 people supported by a 2M
gallon per year plant, as consumption will drop as oil prices stay at
$70/barrel or even increase, and things like insulating your house and
buying a new efficient vehicle are cheaper than fueling your 15mpg land
yacht. The new TDI diesel vehicles get 40+ mpg with no performance
drop. This is why 50% of european vehicles are diesel and rising fast
(high sulfur content in US fuel has inhibited penetration here, but
low-sulfur diesel will be at all pumps in the US at the end of the year,
paving the way (ha ha) for more diesel vehicles). And full-size
diesel-electric hybrids are getting about 80 mpg… but I digress…
At that scale and efficiency, biodiesel starts to make sense… a small
community can support itself, and the capital costs aren’t ridiculous
(about $1/gallon yearly production capacity is the industry rule of
thumb, or $100/person). Perhaps 10M gallon/year makes even more sense,
but clearly a 2M gallon/year plant is already financially viable, no
donations required.
But that’s biodiesel as a 100% solution, something it is not - it just
doesn’t scale, as there’s not enough land available for oil crops,
though developing marginal land for rotating oil crops is being explored
(and almost all excess waste oil is already being utilized, mostly for
non-biofuel uses). There’s only 1.5 acres of arable land per person in
the US, which if even 20% is set aside, is only enough for 50
gallons/person/year, or maybe 10% of current needs (that’s based on 160
gallons/acre, which may be high or low depending on the acre, and
there’s no good data for scaled oil production). I like to think of
biodiesel as a 5% solution, not good for everything, but a good start.
But there’s also another dynamic at work, that of centralized control
vs. decentralized. Centralized control is a libertarian bane, giving
control to people that you may not want to trust or rely upon, and is an
issue for both the left and the right. Put another way, what price are
you paying for that efficiency of scale? Keeping operations small -
say, 200 people max - also keeps humans from being part of a faceless
mass working for a multinational company. I’ll pay 10% more ($3.50
instead of $3.20/gallon currently) for biodiesel instead of petrodiesel
to keep everything local, and it won’t affect my standard of living. In
fact, it’ll be at least partially offset from all the positive effects
(carbon neutral for better air, good wages for plant employees (kind of
like fair trade coffee), fewer speed-addicted truck drivers and highway
repaving projects, perhaps fewer wars and resulting deficits under a
republican president, etc).
I think it’s becoming more than a feel-good, consciousness-raising
experiment, but rather a real part of the worldwide energy equation, no
longer “alternative", but actually real. Seeing a 20,000 gallon tank
full of fuel - almost a lifetime of fuel for me - being made every month
by a 4 person company was sure eye opening. That’s a damn fine economic
scale already.
Onwards with the road trip… then there was Blue Ridge Biofuels, 10
guys with little business experience who built a 250,000 gallon/year
plant from mostly salvaged parts and almost zero capital in Asheville,
NC. They also have a strong local following, with people pulling up to
their biodiesel pump: an old tanker truck with rotted tires and weeds
growing around it, “parked” out front with a fuel dispenser pump
attached. They get most of their waste vegetable oil from local
restaurants, but when we showed up, they were really happy that they had
gotten a contract to get all of the fryer oil from artery-clogging food
at the NC State Fair, almost 4000 gallons for one week. They were also
proud of a used 8000 gallon steel tank lying in front of their facility,
retail price >$20,000, purchased for $500 but with the standard salvage
problem that they had to figure out how to get it home. They started
out as a fuel co-op, moved into distribution and waste oil collection,
and then have made a progressively larger biodiesel processing system
piece-by-piece. Amazingly, they are 100% legal and permitted, too.
Then there was another 500,000 gallon plant at an unnamed location
between NC and NV. Two guys run the whole operation, and tankers of
chicken fat come in, tankers of biodiesel go out. Yawn… it’s boring
if you just buy your feedstock and sell the result in bulk - it’s the
integration in the community of these inputs and outputs that’s
interesting to me - but wondering how many chicken remains it takes to
make a tanker (8000 gallons) of chicken fat was kind of gross to think
about. They did have a gas chromatagraph, which was cool as they could
do all their own ASTM fuel testing, but more tanks and pumps are only so
interesting to even a geek like me.
Final stop was Minden, NV, where Bentley Biofuels is making about 30,000
gallons of biodiesel a month, most of which (250,000 gallons/year) is
used on their huge ~5000 acre farm. About 5 years ago, Mr. Bently, a
conservative businessman who seemingly owns half of Minden, said crude
oil was going to be $100/barrel (it was at $17 then, $70 now), and he
wanted to use biofuels for everything on the farm. So, being the
hard-headed octagenarian he is, he hired a team to figure out how to do
it for a couple of years, and then in 6 months, the plant went from
groundbreaking to full operation. Wow. The whole plant is
profesionally made, and has a whole different feel from the scaled-up
homebrewer’s operations (he put in about $2M for a 1M gallon plant, $1M
more than Piedmont and ~$1.95M more than Blue Ridge, and it shows).
Cool stuff, and right in our backyard, though there’s talk of several
plants in Marin that could make & provide biodiesel to the bay area
(Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley currently buys railroad tankers of fuel from
the big ag farmers in the midwest).
Bently is completely supplied by used fryer grease collected from local
restaurants, and they’re looking into growing their own oil crops, too.
No one really considers used oil from fried foods “sustainable", as you
really can’t live off fried food - eww - and there’s only enough waste
fryer oil to supply about 2% of U.S. cars, though there’s not very good
data on used vegatable oils. They tried planting a few acres of
soybeans for oil last year, which didn’t work very well. Making
biodiesel is easy and well understood: pressing various seeds and
products into oil is still a challenge. Unless that vegatable oil you
buy in the store is marked “cold pressed", it was almost certainly
recovered using hexane extraction, where a vat of seeds is mashed and
washed with hexane (a component of gasoline) to dissolve all the oils,
then the oil skimmed & heated to remove the hexane. Double eww, and not
a process that’s good for a small scale plant. Anyway, they are going
to try mustard seed next season, as well as try using waste wood chips
to grow algae and harvest oil from the algea (which I don’t understand
at all, but I guess is possible, and they just hired someone to start
working on it).
Whew, that was a long trip. There’s lots of work going on around
biofuels, and it’s this interesting combination of left and right: the
hippies with their planet-saving eco-sustainability, and right-wing
rednecks that don’t want to give their money to sheikhs in the mid-east,
they’ll make their own damn fuel, or buy American-made fuel, thank you
very much. Seeing both groups doing the same “right” thing for the
world is really neat to see, for whatever the reasons. If humans can
get to the point where we aren’t using up supplies stockpiled by the
planet over millions of years, and not significantly impacting the
global or local environments, well, maybe we’ll be a little less doomed
as a species.
Tom
PS: as always, wikipedia has the detailed scoop on biodiesel
http ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel if you want more info
and here’s more about hexane extraction
www.alaffia.com/ingredients/oil_extraction.php
