Posted on 30-9-2003
The
Alternative Alternative Fuel
By Pagan Kennedy, New York Times, 28 September 2003
Three years ago, Justin Soares stood in the
kitchen of the group house he lived in, consulting a recipe
as he measured out methanol (aka wood alcohol), Red Devil brand
lye and some fry grease he'd begged off a local restaurant.
He poured the ingredients into a blender and punched "puree."
Later, he took the blender out to his driveway and tipped its
contents into the tank of his 1981 Volkswagen pickup. Soares,
then a student at Oregon State University, had just made his
own fuel.
Eventually, he moved his operation to the
backyard -- partly out of consideration for his seven housemates,
who assumed he had been making soap. As his batches got bigger,
he began sharing the fuel, called biodiesel, with friends. "I
got them hooked," Soares says. In September 2001, he and
his friends started a fuel-making co-op called Grease Works,
one of perhaps a dozen such groups that have formed around the
country in the last few years. To join, you have to own a vehicle
with a diesel engine -- most likely a VW or a Mercedes -- because
biodiesel does not work in gasoline engines.
By the following year, the group decided
to buy commercially produced biodiesel in bulk. "In the
beginning, it might seem romantic to make your own fuel, but
pretty soon you realize it's greasy and grimy work," Soares
says. Ready-made biodiesel costs about a dollar more per gallon
than gasoline, but advocates argue that this is a small price
to pay. A significant switchover to biodiesel, they say, would
reduce lung-cancer and asthma rates, clean up greenhouse gasses
and prevent countless toxic-waste spills. Moreover, if fuel
was grown in Iowa rather than imported, America might pursue
a different kind of foreign policy. Lately that has proved the
most compelling argument for biodiesel. People who drove around
with "No Blood for Oil" bumper stickers felt like
hypocrites whenever they gassed up at the local Shell station.
For them, "veggie fuel" represented an end to cognitive
dissonance.
Taking a principled drive, though, comes
with significant drawbacks. For starters, though the exhaust
smells like popcorn, it's not entirely clean. "If you use
biodiesel instead of petroleum, you lower almost all the criteria
pollutants coming out of your tailpipe," says Shari Friedman,
an environmental consultant based in Washington. "But you
are increasing nitrogen oxides marginally." In addition,
biodiesel is a fair-weather fuel. On warm days, B100 -- 100
percent biodiesel -- works fine. But in the cold, most drivers
opt for B20, which is mixed with conventional diesel to prevent
congealing.
Another problem is that less than 1 percent
of Americans drive cars with diesel engines. Though they get
much better mileage -- the VW Lupo, for instance, gets about
78 miles per gallon -- most diesel cars don't accelerate as
rapidly as those with conventional engines. And because diesel
fuel was never as widely available in the United States as regular
gasoline, drivers tended to view it as an inconvenience.
But perhaps the biggest issue facing biodiesel
is that, as far as alternative fuels go, a great big bet has
been placed on another contender. Earlier this year, President
Bush pledged $1.2 billion for research into hydrogen fuel cells.
There are some who see this technology as the answer to the
environmental and political difficulties of oil, but such a
sweeping change will take years and cost a staggering amount.
Other alternative-energy schemes, like compressed natural gas,
have withered because they require so much new investment. Just
building filling stations for such a technology could cost as
much as $100 billion dollars.
Biodiesel, on the other hand, works with
existing gas-station equipment. "You feel very independent,"
says Friedman, who just bought an ancient Mercedes that she
plans to run on the fuel. "It's something you can do completely
on your own, without waiting for the government or the car companies
to catch up. If I put a solar panel on my roof, it would probably
generate enough for a couple of light bulbs. But biodiesel will
take care of almost all my transportation needs."
More than 150 gas stations in America now
offer a biodiesel pump, which is a tiny fraction, but it's poised
to grow. More than 15 million gallons of biodiesel were sold
last year; advocates hope to see it eventually account for 10
percent of diesel consumption, mostly going into trucks and
buses. In Germany, where diesel engines power close to 40 percent
of passenger cars, more than 1,000 gas stations offer biodiesel
at the pump -- at a competitive price, thanks to huge tax breaks
and subsidies for alternative fuels.
But that's Germany. Such generous subsidies
are unlikely in the near term in the United States, and that
will limit biodiesel's appeal. Americans tend to view higher
gas prices as an assault on basic human rights. When Prof. Orlando
Patterson of Harvard asked 1,500 Americans to define "freedom,"
most of them talked about the freedom to travel, and many of
them mentioned cars. Far fewer mentioned the right to vote.
For now, the best hope for biodiesel lies
with government agencies, who have to comply with the Energy
Policy Act of 1992, which mandates the use of alternative fuel
in certain fleets of official cars and trucks. The U.S. military
has become one of the largest consumers of biodiesel, and cities
like Berkeley, Calif., Takoma Park, Md., and Keene, N.H., use
it for their fleets.
Last year, Stephen Russell, the fleet manager
for Keene, began pumping biodiesel into the city's snow plows,
fire trucks and ambulances. "At first, people said, 'You're
not going to put that in emergency vehicles are you?' And I
said, 'I don't have a second storage tank, so I don't have a
choice.' " This year, facing budget cuts, the city council
kept the biodiesel program even though it costs an extra $8,000
a year. Its environmental benefits were the decisive factor.
Still, in most cities, cost trumps clean
air. "In the fleet world, there's a bottom-line mentality,"
Russell says. "If biodiesel were comparably priced to diesel,
it would happen tomorrow, all across the country."
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