Strange Brew: French fries and farmers

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

By Henry Sweets

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-Mike DeVine raced through the Mexican portion of the Pan-American highway in a 1959 Mercedes Benz 190 D with a handmade rollbar and his blood-type stenciled on his door. In the navigator’s chair, DeVine read directions from a large manual as his buddy, Kip Moncrief, worked the pedals and gears. The countryside whizzed by.

The highway lacked signage. Hazards like sinkholes and unmarked road construction peppered the course. Those things could be easily avoided, if they weren’t all going as fast as they could.

Halfway through the first leg, DeVine and Moncrief were excited to be making good time. Then, they turned a corner onto a bridge, and dropped four inches onto a mesh of exposed rebar.

“Right after the bridge, there was like one car crash here, one car crash there … and a guy standing on the edge of a cliff waving a flag because his car had fallen off of the cliff,” DeVine said. “We were like, holy shit, we’re definitely coming back.”
The clutch casing fractured, adding to the hassle of tending to their support truck, an 1995 Ford F-150, which had sprung a significant oil leak earlier that day.

But Moncrief timed and grinded the gears all the way to Oaxaca, for what would have been the first hero’s welcome of six awaiting them, a scene complete with cheering locals crowding a town square to see the 107 fuming relics of a romanticized past.

But there wasn’t any time to revel, because DeVine and Moncrief needed a solid weld job for their clutch. They also needed to re-up on fuel, which in Mexico, is typically poured down the drain. DeVine and Moncrief needed waste veggie oil.

Living the Dream
The trip was a hybridization of a couple of different dreams. One was to race in the legendary Carrera Panamericana, which ran from 1950 to 1955, until it was discontinued because of the number of accidents – many of which were fatal. Another was to crusade for alternative fuels and green energy.
“The ’59 Mercedes just gets people’s attention, and then when you tell them you run it on vegetable oil it opens the doors for conversations regarding waste vegetable oil and biodiesel,” DeVine said.

DeVine and Moncrief weren’t the first people to travel long distances on veggie oil, trying to educate people about diesel engines’ potential. In fact, crusaders are a staple of the clean energy world. What is maybe the greatest obstacle to bio-diesel’s success is an American mentality that sees it as inferior. Biodiesel is rumored to raise food prices, ruin engines, is expensive to maintain or is noisy and ugly. When you show people that you can filter something from a fryer, and fuel a car with it, it gets them thinking about alternatives in a new light.

A Pure Statement
DeVine and Moncrief named their car Rudy, in honor of Rudolf Diesel, who invented the diesel engine and wanted it to run on peanut oil, as a way to put power back into the hands of farmers.

He won the Paris Exhibition’s Grand Prix in 1900 but before his engine brought him financial success, he disappeared off a ship in the English Channel. He had been facing debt and depression, and the last entry in his journal was an eerily drawn cross, so his death was ruled a suicide. But some think it’s not a coincidence that soon after Diesel’s death, a byproduct of gasoline distillation, ironically named “diesel” fuel, worked quite well in diesel’s engine. Conspiracy theories point fingers at the fishy coincidence, but with little evidence.

As part of the movement to bring the diesel engine back to its roots – burning veggie oil – people like DeVine and Moncrief go out and show folks how simply it works.

They began their crusade with an old Mercedes, broken down in a friend’s tobacco barn. They added an auxiliary heated tank for recycled vegetable oil from Mexican restaurants and got permission from Pemex (the nationalized Mexican oil company that started the race in the ’50s to promote gasoline) to race a veggie-oil car in the Carrera Panamericana. They used recycled veggie oil because it’s accessible all over the world, and it makes a pure statement: you can show people that a waste product can run a car (after you filter the chunks of food out) instead of something pumped from the ground that belches black smoke into the atmosphere.
Along the way, DeVine said their car was met with interest, and they hope to send at least one veggie-oil kit to a man they met in Chiapas.

For a car to burn veggie oil, it must have a two-tank system. One tank carries petrol-diesel (or bio-diesel), and the other carries the veggie-oil, which is usually recycled, filtered oil from a restaurant fryer. The car starts on diesel fuel, and once the veggie oil is heated (there are a variety of ways to do that), the tanks can be switched and the engine burns pure veggie oil. This isn’t really practical for jaunts around town, but is good for long distance trips, like a race through Mexico or a commute over Teton Pass.

Biodiesel proper refers to a refined veggie oil that is very similar to petrodiesel, but has a biotic origin. Biodiesel is called B100 in its purest form, but diluted blends of down to 5 percent (B5) are also referred to as biodiesel. Because biodiesel still congeals at low temperatures, people use anywhere from a B50 to a B5 in the wintertime in a place like Jackson. At the Phillips 66, B20 is available in the summer, and B5 in the winter.

Local brewers
Here in Jackson, a handful of people, including a cop, a beer brewer, a bassist and a county commissioner, use veggie oil from restaurant fryers to fuel their cars. Some use the two-tank system, but that requires a conversion on your car. It can be done by someone with a mechanical inclination, but could cost $1,500 to $4,000 to have a mechanic install the extra heated tank that feeds pure veggie oil into your engine.

If you want your car or truck to run on recycled veggie oil without any conversions, you’ve got to brew your own bio-hooch with what’s known as an “apple seed processor,” a bootleg contraption that removes glycerin, soap and water from the veggie oil.

Three years ago, Rudy Borrego, a brewer at the Brewpub, learned how to make his own fuel out of a couple of old hot-water heaters from the Habitat re-store.
For Borrego, the process is easy to understand, but for others it might be a little more complicated. First Borrego separates the glycerin from the oil by adding methanol, and then he does a “dry wash” with magnesol to get the water and bio-soap out of the fuel. He was just given a third heater, with which he hopes to recover methanol and leave a glycerin product he can make from soap.
The most important concern in the process, Borrego said, is meth oxide, a dangerous byproduct which can cause blindness, so the process must be done in a closed-off ventilated room. And like always, the tendency for oil to congeal requires a heated space in the wintertime.

Those who brew their own bio-diesel make it for around $1.25 to $1.35 per gallon, and the apple seed processor can be built for a few hundred dollars.

County Commissioner Ben Ellis has also built one of these contraptions. He said that if you are the kind of person who changes his own oil, or if you are handy enough to frame and build a small out-building in your backyard, then you can probably figure out how to brew your own biodiesel or install a second, heated tank in your car. Plenty of online forums, and a trove of local knowledge, should get a handy person on their way to making their own biodiesel.

For the Environment
Most do it for the environment, but they say the benefits are numerous and the drawbacks, few.

Though their cars still emit CO2, it is from a waste product that would likely wind up in the atmosphere someday anyway – whereas petrodiesel is pulled from the ground (where it could have stayed) and released into the atmosphere.
And though much of the vegetable oil would be recycled and used in some sort of products like makeup or dog food, it could also wind up in the dump where it would become methane.

Biodiesel also releases far fewer toxins than petrol diesel, and leaves less gunk in your engine. In fact, it is such a good solvent that it releases grime from petrol diesel and clogs fuel filters, which need to be monitored and changed if you are running different types of diesel in your engine.

But practical tinkerers like Borrego and Ellis both said their brand of biodiesel is not for the masses of people, who don’t want to mess with dirty oil and inconvenience. To keep it simple, they can buy B20 from the Phillips 66, or B100 from High Roads Biodiesel in Driggs.

Sandy Shuptrine helped establish the Yellowstone-Teton Clean Energy Coalition, its purpose is to wean people from petroleum. She was instrumental in getting the B20 pump at Phillips 66, and says that type of fueling will make a bigger impact than recycling veggie oil.

“We own a truck that’s run on waste veggie oil, but 99.9 percent of the people aren’t going to mess with that,” she said. “While it’s admirable and great that these people are [burning waste veggie oil], unless its done by a lot of people, its not doing a lot to address the problem.”

There’s also not enough oil to go around.
“There aren’t enough French fries in the world,” Ellis said. “And rightly so. We’d all be dying of heart disease for everyone to be in their own world brewing biodiesel [from veggie oil.]”

For the “masses”
Five years ago, Porter Broughton started selling B100 at his gas station, High Roads Biodiesel, in Driggs. The fuel came from Blue Sun Biodiesel in Boulder, Colo., which was a high quality source, but also very expensive, Broughton said.

Commercial biodiesel, like Blue Sun’s, is usually made from oil, extracted from soybeans or canola oil, but can be hard to find, and is sometimes prohibitively expensive – even when oil is above $100 per barrel.

The venture broke even, Broughton said, which was fine because he wasn’t expecting a huge profit, but if the price could have been lower, the station would have been more successful.

“When the price was close [to petrodiesel] people would show up, but when it got to be 50 cents, 60 cents, and even $1 above petrodiesel, very few people were still filling up,” he said.

In November of 2007 Broughton, paralyzed in a car accident, sold his business to someone who had to temporarily shut it down, until a more affordable product could be located.

“The resource really got beaten up by the corporate situation,” Broughton said. “When we first started with Blue Sun, they were saying ‘your next tank will be cheaper and soon … you’ll beat the pants off petro-diesel,’ but then their sources became so expensive that they sort of lost their word, and we were the victims of the other side of things, and I think that’s where [biodiesel] sits nationally.”
Products like soy and canola saw a price spike, resulting from commodities trading and other market forces, and the fuel just became too expensive.

And to get biodiesel at a lower price than petro-diesel, a web of regional climate and production issues, shipping routes, government subsidies and regulations would need to fall in place.

Lost Ground
In Chiapas, Mexico, DeVine and his crew found an overnight “miracle” welding job for the Benz, but then the repair on the F-150 turned out bunk, and they spent the next few nights at a Fiesta Inn in Oaxaca, waiting for a new turbo unit for their truck while the car sat race-ready in the trailer. Mexican mechanics thought it would be impossible to get the turbo, and DeVine and Moncrief faced the unthinkable logistical nightmare of leaving two cars in southern Mexico. But they finally found their turbo part, unused and wrapped in plastic, in a Chiapas junkyard, and had it installed in time to hit the road with one day to finish.

For 24 hours straight they drove the last five legs of the race, with their support truck still behind them.

Growing diesel fuel
Bob Marron, an entrepreneur from Sheridan, knows all about the problems of producing biodiesel. He wants to build a 30-million-gallon-a-year plant in Wyoming, which he thinks can beat the price of petro diesel.

He has the plans drawn up, and the financing available to build it. He just won a visionary of the year award from the Governor’s office, but before he produces a drop of biodiesel in Wyoming, he has to get 200,000 acres of an oilseed crop growing within 100 miles of a rail-freight station that can deliver the product to the plant.

That means he has to convince wary farmers to give up 40 acres to try out crops like Camelina (also called rapeseed,) which he says are more efficient fuel sources than soybeans or canola (the two most common commercial sources for biodiesel). Some of these crops aren’t traded on the commodities market, so prices could be kept low.

Marron says farmers can spread camelina seed, not water it, harvest over a thousand gallons of oil per acre and improve their soil to grow more wheat the next year. That means a couple of hundred dollars per acre, and a field that will produce more wheat the next year and if USDA approval comes on line next year, they could sell the meal as cattle feed.

Ellis said the most promising biodiesel crops will be algae and palm oil type plants, which his company, Sagebrush Energy, investigated. The company’s primary focus is wind energy, and they were looking at ways to grow biodiesel crops on the land in between their turbines, but for now that endeavor has run out of steam.
The University of Wyoming has begun an oilseed crop research program, and Montana State University is a few years ahead of that one. Both universities hope that biofuels will be a way to help farmers who are struggling from drought in the high plains of the West.

Some Agricultural groups, like the Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC), have been crusading for community-based biodiesel cooperatives that would be able to distribute fuel locally without the red tape.

But all these initiatives need a combination of legislative support, and the open ears of American farmers, investors and consumers.

Rough road
Diesel engines represent about 3 percent of the U.S. market share, compared to about 50 percent in Europe.
Automobile manufacturers are afraid of biodiesel, and most new warranties only allow B20 (20 percent biodiesel mixed with petrol diesel) in the engines of new cars.

So despite J.D. Power and Associates prediction that diesel will have about a 10-percent market share in 2015, it is too early to tell if those Americans will be fueling with biodiesel.

In order for the technology to catch, it will have to be really easy for people to make the decision to use it.

And without the demand, it takes a lot to get a pump installed. That’s why much of the bio-diesel use is “underground” or as the result of a community effort. Small productions, like Borrego’s, can’t sell their fuel without costly inspection fees and taxes, so people who want to buy it must purchase it from folks, like Porter Broughton, who have to ship in the fuel from hundreds of miles away. That keeps it expensive which keeps people from using it.

Looking ahead
DeVine and Moncrief rolled in to Nuevo Laredo, near the Texas border, a few hours after the last car finished the race.

Of 107 cars, about 60 finished. The course was littered with cars that had pushed their luck and run off the road. The tumbleweed and vintage-wreckage lansdcape was pretty surreal – the kind of thing that really catches people’s eyes when DeVine shows pictures from the race. That’s the kind of eye-grabbing flavor that give DeVine and Moncrief an attentive audience for their alternative-fuel spiel.
DeVine has left Jackson for the time being, and will be working at an alternative fuels company in Virginia, recycling vegetable oil on a large scale to convert it into biodiesel.

He will also spend the next year visiting elementary schools and community events, with the car, spreading the word about alternative energies.

He and Moncrief are looking for more sponsors, hoping to return to the race next year with a bigger engine and the understanding that though their fuel may be reliable, they will still have to be prepared for road conditions. PJH

Check out the supplemental video of Danny Haworth's Veggie Car on our news page:
http://www.planetjh.com/news/A_104476.aspx

Photo by Andrew Wyatt.
Mike DeVine

PERMALINK:
Strange Brew: French fries and farmers | Planet JH News Article: Cover Stories

Leave a Comment