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How French fries = fuel: Amy Kingsley explores biodiesel usage, production and effectiveness in the Triad
Amy Kingsley
Staff writer
Eric Henry raises a glass of refined biodiesel.
Tom Sineath demonstrates how co-ops refuel at TS Designs in Burlington.
Out in Burlington, off a side road studded with warehouses and ranch-style homes spread out on spacious lots, something is brewing under heaps of rich compost.

Piles of coffee grounds, vegetable scraps and other organic materials rise in peaks from the crest of a low hill to a wooden wall where Eric Henry stands. Henry checks a digital thermometer; it reads 134 degrees Fahrenheit. In this swampy decomposition, waste vegetable oil from local restaurants is moving through a series of five 55-gallon drums buried under the mulch in a weeklong process that will separate water from the frying grease. This is one of the first steps biodiesel producers take to turn used fryer oil into fuel.

At the same time Henry refines his product, multinational corporations are drilling for oil produced over millions of years in the high-compression blast furnace beneath the earth’s crust. Most of that drilling occurs in the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela and China, but the largest percentage of the harvest is consumed in the United States.

The same fate awaits both the fossil fuel drawn from beneath the earth’s surface and the homemade biodiesel Henry and a handful of other Piedmont residents produce in small batches. It will be pumped into local gas tanks and blasted with compressed air or spark-ignited to release energy that fires pistons and turns rubber against road. Automotive exhaust pipes will introduce byproducts like carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, sulfates, nitrogen oxide and others into the air we breathe.

But there are differences. The exhaust from biodiesel contains half the carbon monoxide, a third of the hydrocarbons and none of the sulfates of petroleum diesel. It can also be produced from domestic materials like soybeans, rapeseed or the old oil from your grandma’s Fry Daddy. Factor that with the simple geometry that from point to point, biodiesel works as well as its petroleum counterpart, and you have a formula for an alternative fuel that is quietly displacing traditional diesel in North Carolina.

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Outside a small garage a block off Walker Avenue, Jeff Barbour stands with his hands jammed into his pockets and his chin pulled down to the top of his turtleneck. Brian Talbert works an antiquated red crank joining one end of plastic tubing to a blue oil drum. The other end of the tube barely reaches the gas tank on Barbour’s month-old Ram 2500 — the receptacle for Talbert’s homemade biodiesel.

“I have an oil furnace that is just licking its chops for some biodiesel,” Barbour says. The comment is a nod to both the dropping November temperatures and the delectable tempura aroma emanating from the garage.

The inside of the structure looks like a traditional workshop until you peek around a rack of metal shelves at the fat-bellied, brushed metal biodiesel reactor. A few scattered items hint at the advanced operation: beakers, oil drums and bags of the catalytic chemical potassium hydroxide.

A closer look reveals a heavy dose of rag-tag ingenuity that fuels this tiny refinery. Talbert, the boy genius behind the incipient Organic Energies biodiesel co-op, gets his waste vegetable oil from several restaurants in Winston-Salem and Greensboro. Although he pours the oil from the grease traps through a filter before he hauls it away from the restaurants, he filters it once more back at the workshop. Today the filter is a torn pant leg from an old pair of jeans.

Right now, Talbert has a near monopoly on restaurant grease in Greensboro, but interest in biodiesel has increased in the last year. He worries about how the new biodiesel enthusiasts will affect the market.

“There’s a class at GTCC,” Talbert says, “and let’s say two out of twenty who take the class are going to take it to this level. You’re gonna have these guys who do it for a little while, then they drop the restaurants they have agreements with. I call it polluting the vendors.”

Talbert pays one of his vendors $15 for used oil, but the others gladly relinquish the byproduct they once paid rendering companies to haul off. Asian restaurants provide the best oil for his purposes, Talbert says.

Right now only a handful of locals belong to the fledgling co-op. The members alternate oil pick-up, but most of the refining falls to Talbert, the president of the enterprise. With the current set-up, Talbert could produce 300-400 gallons a week, but he is plotting a much larger undertaking come spring.

That is when he plans to move the whole shebang out to a 2500-acre tract of land just outside the county line. It will also be a baby step away from relying on restaurant vendors since the scheme includes plans for a 40-acre test crop of rapeseed.

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Henry, the president of organic apparel company TS Designs, meets me in the conference room of the solar-powered company headquarters. His sandals squeak when he walks across the linoleum floor.

“Fortunately we live in an area that fries a lot of food,” Henry says. The Burlington Biodiesel Co-op gets waste vegetable oil from local restaurants Zack’s Hot Dogs, Hursey’s BBQ and others.

“We target local restaurants so it’s easy for us to pick up and communicate with the owners,” he says.

In addition to convenience, the regional focus also conforms to Henry’s weltanschauung. His goal, and that of the co-op, is to take local waste product and produce a fuel for local use, thus amplifying the positive affects to the community.

“I guess we started at the end,” he says after he walks to a fuel pump at the loading dock of an open warehouse filled with boxes and T-shirts. He takes the opportunity to dip a clear measuring cup into the oil and hold it up to a dusty sunbeam. The sunlight illuminates the lager-colored liquid, and the gesture resembles a toast.

“You could drink this stuff,” Henry says, “but I wouldn’t recommend it. It would clean you out pretty good.”

He points to a stain on the concrete ramp where someone spilled the fuel. Biodiesel spills create no special haz-mat concerns because it is biodegradable and poses no threat to water quality.

It is one of two products created during the refining process; the other is glycerin. In higher-grade form, glycerin can be used to make soap, but the low-quality ooze Henry gets goes on top of those compost heaps that are heating the intact waste oil.

That brings him back to the beginning process, that separation of water from oil occurring under the compost. Henry strives to run this operation as much off the electrical grid as he can. The goal of this whole operation, after all, has always been to reduce his energy footprint.

Once the water is removed from the waste vegetable oil, the substance goes through a process called transesterification. The waste oil is pumped into the main 90-gallon reactor and combined with a mixture of methanol and potassium hydroxide. It is mixed for an hour and sits for another 24, afterwhich the glycerin is removed from the biodiesel that is now ready for the fuel pump.

Next Henry settles into the driver’s seat of his 2000 Volkswagen TDI Golf and turns the ignition. The car starts without a hitch.

“It doesn’t have that noxious diesel smell,” he says. Indeed, the exhaust does not smell much like anything except for a hint of corndog, a residue from its former deep-fryer incarnation.

Back in the office, Henry pulls out a world map overlaid with a bar graph of fossil fuel discovery and use that projects supply to vanish by 2075.

“People think once the refineries get back online and we stabilize Iraq that oil will go back to one dollar a gallon,” Henry says. “Well, that’s not going to happen. For every two barrels of oil we use, we discover one.”

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The NC Department of Transportation is the largest consumer of biodiesel in the state. The department began using B20, a blend of 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent regular diesel, in Winston-Salem in 1997 and now uses 1.9 million gallons annually.

Greensboro switched the majority of city vehicles to B20 in November 2002 and is the largest municipal user in the state, consuming more than 1.1 million gallons in a year. City officials’ commitment to biodiesel promotion and easy transition to the blended fuel earned high marks from a public/private coalition called Clean Cities. The national organization sponsored by the US Department of Energy awarded Greensboro the 2004 award for Excellence in Advancing Biodiesel. Today the city buses, garbage trucks, dump trucks and emergency vehicles all run on biodiesel, and the city provides B20 to Guilford County.

“It’s been pretty much a trouble-free transition,” says Gary Smith. No mechanical problems have surfaced in city vehicles as a result of the switch.

The city of Greensboro gets its B20 from Potter Oil, a distribution company based in Aurora, NC on the coast. Potter Oil in turn is supplied with soybean-based biodiesel from the Midwest, mostly Iowa.

A map provided on the National Biodiesel Board website of distributors looks like Seurat’s rendition of a tree: the trunk climbs up the Mississippi and branches out across America’s breadbasket. Key suppliers stretch from the Dakotas through Kansas and Michigan to the north. The map overlaps even more perfectly, if unsurprisingly, with a USDA record of domestic soybean production.

Soybean farming in North Carolina is concentrated in the east, where there are plans to build the largest biodiesel plant in the Southeast funded in part with $10 million from the Golden LEAF Foundation. The foundation was organized to distribute some of the funds gained from the 1999 tobacco settlement. The foundation also gave $1.1 million to the NC Grain Growers Cooperative to develop biodiesel production.

“North Carolina imports all of their fuel needs through Louisiana and Texas,” says Abolghasem Shahbazi, the head of the bioenvironmental engineering department at NC A&T University. “Whether they are produced domestically or not we don’t know, but we spend a lot of money on that. All that money goes out of state. If we let the farmers produce grain for fuel, then all the money stays in the state. From an economic impact point it is very desirable.”

Shahbazi, who did his undergraduate work in Iran and got his doctorate from Penn State, is now working on research into biofuels that might help reduce US dependence on foreign oil. His department instructs 30 undergraduate majors.

A&T bought Henry’s first 40-gallon biodiesel reactor when the Burlington co-op upgraded to its 90-gallon model. It is used to educate students about biodiesel, which has become the focus of this year’s senior project. The assignment, which was chosen by seniors, entails designing a model for a rural biodiesel co-op for farmers.

Such co-ops exist extensively in the Midwest, where they provide farmers a local market for their product as well as cheap and cleaner-burning fuel. It is a model A&T is in the process of adopting for some of the equipment on its 600-acre University Farm.

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While Shahbazi teaches mostly about biofuels made from soybeans and other crops, his student Adrian Boggs co-teaches locals how to brew their own version of the stuff through a continuing education course at GTCC. The first section of Introduction to Biofuels, which Boggs teaches with Andy MacMahon, was introduced this fall as a continuing education course and it filled almost instantaneously.

Some of those students who signed up for the course — which premiered after Hurricane Katrina drove gas prices above three dollars a gallon — left disappointed that biodiesel is not a free source of fuel. It is a different chemical substance than straight vegetable oil that must be refined through trial and error with costly equipment.

“People need to learn the technique to make biodiesel,” Boggs says, “like a chef needs to learn how to make a soufflé.”

Some people do run their cars on straight vegetable oil, but the engine must be modified to heat the oil to combust. Biodiesel can run in any diesel engine with no modifications because it combusts after exposure to compressed, oxygenated air.

“Biodiesel is just an organic form of diesel fuel,” Boggs said.

The co-op model is popular for small biodiesel producers because of the high initial cost of reactors, chemicals and other equipment that can be split between members. A complete biodiesel reactor kit can run more than $3,000, and the unassembled parts cost about $2,000, according to Henry. Only the waste vegetable oil is free. Usually.

Properly refined, biodiesel is better for engines than its petroleum counterpart. The organic material acts as a lubricant, reducing wear and tear on engines, which decreases maintenance costs and extends life. But in older vehicles, biodiesel’s corrosive qualities may dislodge buildup that can clog fuel lines.

Another drawback to biodiesel is the fuel’s tendency to gel in cold weather. Henry, who has driven his Golf 40,000 miles on alternative fuels, blends biodiesel with petroleum during cold snaps.

One problem that can’t be easily solved is the slight increase in nitrogen oxide emissions by biodiesel-fueled vehicles. Studies have recorded increases ranging from insignificant to nine percent in biodiesel versus petroleum diesel. Nitrogen oxide has been linked to increased rates of asthma and ground-level ozone (what we call smog).

Some local biodiesel producers also struggle with taxation. Because of their organization, the Burlington Biodiesel Co-op does not sell fuel and thus has not paid taxes that fund road improvement and other projects.

“The intention to do this was not to not pay taxes,” Henry said. “We will in the next 30 to 60 days start paying our road tax.”

Price and market stability are holding back the emergence of biodiesel as a major source of fuel, says Anne Tazewell, the alternative fuels program manager at the North Carolina Solar Center in Raleigh. Federal subsidies bring the cost of biodiesel down to a point where the fuel can compete with petroleum for industrial and government users.

The state boasts a smattering of public pumps, but none of them are in the Triad. The closest retail stations peddle their wares at least two counties east, in Durham and Carrboro. But growing interest in biodiesel and other alternative fuels offers hope for burgeoning retail accessibility.

“Biodiesel has a really wide appeal, from farmers, truck drivers, local government, state government and people who care about the environment,” says Tazewell. “There’s already so much interest, but with technology as it is today, we could only replace about 20 percent of the petroleum.”

The experts and alternative fuel enthusiasts agree on one point: biodiesel is not a magic bullet against the specters of energy insecurity and air pollution. Multiple alternative fuels must be combined with lifestyle changes that promote conservation.

“When we talk about renewable energy we are talking about an integrated system,” Shahbazi says. “No one alternative energy can substitute for the fuel we use now.”

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Rudolf Diesel invented the internal combustion engine in the last decade of the 19th century to provide an efficient alternative to the cumbersome steam engine that would allow independent craftsmen and artisans to compete with big industry. The engine was designed to run on a variety of fuels.

“The diesel engine can be fed with vegetable oils and would help considerably in the development of agriculture of the countries which use it,” Diesel wrote in 1911. He added that vegetable-based fuel might one day become as important an energy source as petroleum and powered a 1900 World’s Fair diesel engine model with peanut oil.

Diesel might not have foreseen Congressional inquiries into petroleum industry profits, declining air quality and dwindling supply. But we are seeing them now. In Greensboro Barbour, a sculptor, and Talbert, a craftsman, are part of a group that is realizing Diesel’s vision almost a century after his death.

Part of that vision is tucked away in a bright blue trashcan, next to a dumpster in a parking lot filled with cars. At Fishbones, the adjacent restaurant, friends and couples clink their glasses, laugh and order food. Tomorrow or another day, the oil that fried their fish and chips will be poured into that trash can and hauled to a garage workshop a couple of blocks away. Once there, the process will begin to turn it from a substance associated with deliciously naughty foods into a guilt-free fuel.

To comment on this story, e-mail Amy Kingsley at amy@yesweekly.com

For more information contact Eric Henry  336.229.6426 x201  cell:  336.675.6266 eric@burlingtonbiodiesel.org

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