Bio Products Opportunity

I seem to have struck a chord with my last reference to our imaginary Janky but True awards. The committee is currently meeting to determine whether or not they can accept Kumar’s nomination for his entire biodiesel plant.

Rachel and I recently came up with a formidable entry. We had a walk through with our fire Marshal on Friday morning. At 9:30 on Thursday night we discovered that the labeling had come off our tank farm.

Fire people like things to be labeled-so they know what substance they are dealing with when they arrive to fight a fire.

Our feedstock tank used to say “Vegetable Oil,” but that was covered up when we insulated it. And its placard was lying on the other side of the tank farm, knocked off, or removed some way, some how.

Our glycerin tank was also beautifully labeled, but it was a used fiberglass tank with sheet metal siding that was torn and flopping around in the wind. It not only failed to show well on tour, but huge sheets of dangling metal posed a safety concern. So we had Clancy re-side it. It is now safe, and looks great, but our label vanished.

Our previous labeling was meticulously done by Tes, with a transparency and an overhead projector.

Knowing we would not impress anyone without being labeled, Tami and I sat down at the kitchen table with a box cutter and made some stencils.

Next morning Rachel and I hit it early. We duct taped stencils to the tanks, backed them up with a Christmas advertising insert we found in Receiving and went to work. Rachel’s activist past came into play. She is handy with a spray can. And we used her brake fluid to clean up the drips.

The lettering might not be straight, or look as good as everything else that is labeled, but we felt it was a competitive entry into Janky but True.

We took the opportunity to change the name of our feedstock tank. What once read “Vegetable Oil,” now reads “Feedstock Oil.” That should help deflect some of the flack we have been taking from the vegangelicals around here, who think we are lame for using poultry fat as a feedstock.

Our walk through left us with a list of things to complete prior to our actual inspection, which is scheduled for later this month.

We are short handed at Industrial these days. Chris Jude moved to Seattle, because of love or some such, and in doing so blew a gigantic hole in the Control Room–and in the social life of the project.

Leif and David are in Dominican Republic putting the finishing touches on a palm oil biodiesel plant we built down there. It’s pretty much Evan on distribution, Link on production, with Rachel and Jill on everything else. Admin continues to hum away-but they are not onsite-so we don’t feel their absence.

Original post by Lyle

We have an expression around the project, which we use whenever someone rigs up a solution that is somewhat sketchy.  We tend to ask, “Are you going to enter that into the ‘Janky but True Awards?”

“Janky” is a term which Leif brought to the table years ago.  It is the opposite of “professional,” or “well done.”

Things done in plastic, with JB Weld at the seams, lean toward the janky side.  Things involving JB Weld in general for that matter.

The time Rachel and I delivered a load of fuel and had the brakes fail on the tank truck.  That was janky.

I believe the term “Janky but True” was coined right before the grand opening of Industrial in the fall of 2006.  Evan threw a masterful P.R. event, fetching politicians and news crews, and a vast crowd to the project.

In the eleventh hour, he needed a stage.  He found some old display cases on casters, flipped them on their sides, and elevated them on a large number of empty 5 gallon cans which had been donated by a neighboring chemical company.

Anyone looking at it closely, wondered if it would hold the weight of our Mayor, who is a sturdy fellow.  But Evan rounded up some exotic tablecloths from French Connections, and it looked beautiful, and it held, and all was well.

His stage was, however, nominated for a “Janky but True Award.”

Evan went on to win the award with his anti-gelling strategy.  To see him push the tank truck into the bay beside our Pump and Tank shop, slide a propane powered torpedo heater under it, and line the edges of the truck with broken down cardboard boxes for insulation, is to know you are in the presence of a highly competitive award entry.

And until now, I felt that Evan was unbeatable.

But tonight, I watched in awe, as two Koreans rigged up a “flexitank” inside a shipping container to transport a load of biodiesel far away into parts unknown.

We waived goodbye to our hundred mile sales radius awhile back, when we realized that poultry derived biodiesel was no fun in winter.
And tonight was our first “ISO” shipment.  I had heard about coding into ISO ports, and about the training involved, and tonight I stood stunned to see a pair of logistics specialists prepare a 5000 gallon bag of biodiesel for shipment to California, and off to warmer climes.

It was unbelievable.  Step one was to remove the nails which were protruding from the bottom of the container.  For this they used an adjustable wrench (for awhile, before I fetched a claw hammer).  They then lined the container with cardboard, duct taped some spacers to the wall, dropped in some metal pipes, followed by a chunk of paneling which they tie wrapped into position.

Slap a sticker on the outside which reads:  Bulk Liquid Inside, and suddenly a box can be filled with a bag of liquid.

At our terminal we can top load with our toploading arm.  We can bottom load with our wethose system.  Using the tank truck we can fill 55 gallon drums, or shot glasses when need be.

We have filled a lot of trucks and vessels a lot of ways, during our first 600K gallons of fuel, but never this.
Link, Evan, and Chris, stared in astonishment at the task which lay before us.

We chased a 3” cam fitting down to a 2” cam on the bag, strung our hose up with a pair of chains,  climbed over the paneling and hit the button.

Bags of fuel must be appropriate technology in the developing world—or wherever this load was headed.

It only took four guys, a bandsaw, an angle grinder, some duct tape, and a couple of hours to move the same amount of product we normally have a lone terminal operator dispense in twenty minutes.

I can barely fathom it.

And the sad part is that we have a whole bunch more loads to ship.  The good news is that our plant is back to capacity in the dead of winter.  The bad news is there are many more bags in our future—all of them heading straight for the global economy—where apparently, liquids are held in place with plastic tie wraps.

I’m guessing these folks will burn a thousand gallons of petroleum to get the bag to California, and another thousand gallons to get it to its end destination.
Good thing biodiesel is so good for the planet.

Evan is going to have to work hard to top this—our new finalist in the “Janky but True” competition.

Original post by Lyle

Bob and Camille moved to town from Texas. They had been watching our project from afar, and now they are at the heart of it.

It is a treat tonight to welcome Camille as a special guest writer.  This is her Energy Blog debut:

Community is in short supply in our industrialized world. This loss of connection to our neighbors has grown in direct proportion to our abuse of cheap oil. Regardless of whether you believe we have reached peak oil and are facing dwindling supplies, neither condition is sustainable. The first is detrimental to our mental health and the second to the health of the planet.

The answer to both these problems is being played out at Oilseed Community in Moncure, North Carolina. The community represents an experiment in communal living in conjunction with the cultivation of an oilseed crop, in this case canola.

My husband Bob and I moved into one of the houses at Oilseed last November, not quite realizing what we were getting into. Two months later, we are astounded at our good fortune.

First of all, we were immediately accepted as members in full standing by the eight other people currently living at Oilseed. Benefits include shared resources, a brain trust and good will from other organizations to which our fellow Oilseeders are affiliated.

We have yet to see a television on in any of the houses except when we are watching movies or documentaries on our own set. Not surprisingly great conversation flourishes here. It is common for us to drop by each other’s houses share ideas, produce, tools, beers and dreams.

Every Sunday evening we share a meal. Everybody cooks. It isn’t unusual for four or five guests to show up with 1.5 the amount of food they would ordinarily eat. Amazingly, I have yet to see a Sunday Potluck turn into fifteen macaroni and cheese casseroles although the local produce does have some sway. There were at least five versions of sweet potatoes one Sunday and on another cabbage was prominently featured.

Out of town guests always bring a fresh perspective. Last month, a man who had just returned from a few months in Tibet treated us to a slide show from his travels. His impromptu presentation sparked an insightful discussion of the differences between our cultures, notably our lack of community and over-dependence on oil.

In addition to great people, the security of community, and wonderful food, we all live on a very pretty piece of property. Oilseed is located on acres of meadows and woods, which translates to abundant wildlife. We’ve seen fifteen different species of birds since arriving. It is not unusual to look out the window and see a deer or some fellow Oilseeders out for a stroll. One great excuse for a walk is a trip up the lane to the mail box.

Another great aspect of Oilseed Community is the location. We are located between the Piedmont Biofuels Coop and downtown Pittsboro. Many of us work at the Ecoindustrial Park four miles away by car or a forty-five minute walk west through the woods.

By now you must be wondering how Oilseed Community come into being. Last April, Piedmont Biofuels signed a lease with a developer for use of this 83-acre property. This arrangement provides rental homes for interns, employees and others, revenue for the Coop and fodder for a long term vision. The vision being that of a sustainable alternative to Golf Course Communities. Huh? you say. Check out Building an Oilseed Community where Lyle did a great job of explaining the concept.

Basically, developers use golf courses to dispose of household wastewater. Given that we have already reached peak oil, an Oilseed Community is a brilliant alternative to a Golf Course Community in that wastewater is used to irrigate a fuel crop rather than water a golf course. And, in fact, a test plot of canola has been planted at Oilseed as an example of how this can be done.

We are looking forward to enjoying several more years of our good fortune. We expect people to come and go with new ideas and wonderful energy while the seasons change and the oilseed crop moves through its growing cycles. We promise to keep you posted as this experiment unfolds.

Original post by Lyle

Awhile back I noticed Farmer Doug had a ladder that went way up into a tree. I felt it was and invitation to children to hurt themselves, so I took it down.

Tomorrow I head to an EPA conference in Chapel Hill. I’m doing a powerpoint, which I generally loathe, entitled Barriers to Change: It’s Not the Technology.

Along the way I find myself rooting through a thousand photographs, to pick slides to accompany my words.

And I found this one. It’s off topic, but it is remarkable. I’m guessing Doug took it from the top of his ladder when there was some function going on at the Plant.

It blows me away.  Sometimes we are so ensconced in the bubble that we fail to see what we are working on…

Original post by Lyle

I’ve just returned from Canada, holidaying with the family. Toting the six of us from place to place is challenging enough, but Canada always provides interesting perspectives for me.

Zafer, Kaitlin, and Laura kicked off our visit with some tobogganning.

I kicked off the visit with an acute asthma attack, which was triggered by exposure to dogs and cats. Normally I avoid inside animals completely, but during the Christmas season I make exceptions, and exceptions get me re-acquainted with inhalers, and anti-histamines and the like. As I munch a handful of newly prescribed steroids, it makes me reflect on background stress.

My brother Glen is under excruciating stress right now. He is in the last leg of permitting his new wind farm that means the interest-meter is ticking but his six new turbines are not producing. He’s much grayer since our last visit.

My brother Jim lives under constant duress. He manages a multi-billion dollar computer empire. He writes about his own time management strategies in his blog.

This being New Year’s Day, it’s a time for promises. One of mine is to turn a profit at Piedmont Biofuels Industrial. Losses are stressful, and presumably we cannot go on re-financing forever.

I’m still in the middle of editing Small is Possible, my new book about local economy that will be in bookstores this spring. Pre-publication marketing has already hit, calls have come in for readings and tour dates, and it has not even been wrapped up and put to bed yet. That makes me toss and turn.

And I think there are other factors at work.

In the States we refer to the current blight on our economy as the “sub-prime meltdown.” Or the “credit crunch.” Canadian banks never delved into the high-risk real estate lending products that have clobbered U.S. and European financial markets. While in Canada my father referred to the faraway crisis as ABCP (Asset Backed Commercial Paper). That sounds diminutive, and less stressful than a meltdown.

A barrel of oil never broke the 100.00 mark in 2007, which means I owe Tom McCarty another half gallon of beer. Drat. He was at the kitchen table the other evening, and was confident it would clear 150.00 in 2008.

I might have to shed this gambling habit. As my brother Glen points out, if there is a recession looming, oil consumption will fall like a stone. And a looming recession causes background stress.

Another background stressor for those in biofuels lately has been the whole “Food vs. Fuel” debate. As sustainability advocates, we have done a rotten job of communicating how it might be possible to make fuel from waste streams in a responsible way.

Instead we are tarred with the ethanol brush, and by “Big Biodiesel,” which is why we have been so badly bruised in the press. First the U.N., then Greenpeace, and again at the climate change talks in Bali.

Too small, too busy, and too under-resourced to fight back properly, we go about our business making what Ecologist Magazine refers to as “Blood Diesel.”

As a background stressor I believe the current public debate, in which the sustainable biodiesel crowd is poorly represented, has an impact on everything from Coop membership to intern applications, to curiosity about the product. Biodiesel is losing its sex appeal.

I suppose for 2008 I should shrug off the background stressors and live a little. Perhaps a recession will be a good way to squeeze some waste out of the economy.

Or maybe Tami and I should simply go buy a new house…

Original post by Lyle

I can’t seem to get Fairview, Alberta, out of my imagination. This is my first day back from Powering the Peace, and surely this will pass as I get back on board our own runaway train.

Fairview, Alberta has around 3200 souls. About the size of Pittsboro. It is in the shadow of the “oil patch,” which is very different from us. We are in the shadow of bulldozers, which are arriving to flatten these parts to build golf course communities.

But there is a fierce thread of self-sufficiency which runs through both communities. And whenever there is a desire for independence from the usual top-down, oppressive, community depleting infrastructure which is our current energy regime, there is an interest in making biodiesel.

Not necessarily to get rich. Not always as a means to “get ahead.” It is actually driven by a desire to get “free.”

Canada is a net exporter of energy. The old “We can’t be dependent on foreign sources who hate us” argument does not play in Fairview. Neither does the “No War Required” slogan which tends to power many in the grassroots biodiesel movement down here.

Canada tends toward peace keeping rather than war.

Which is not to say Canada gets a pass for its behaviour. The overwhelming majority of Canadians demand cheap energy, strive for McMansions and SUVs, and tend to sing from the songbook of America’s disgracefully wasteful economy.

My heart dropped when I saw a Tim Horton’s sign in the background during a viewing of “End of Suburbia.” Tim Horton’s is a Canadian fast food cultural icon, the presence of which makes the film’s location a dead give away.

But those are not the people who head for a renewable energy conference like “Powering the Peace.” The people who show up are similar in inclination to the folks in the grassroots biodiesel movement down here.

This fledgling conference is in its second year.

This year Rachel jumped in and did a lecture and workshop on “Backyard Analytics.”

The conference is the brain child of Gerard Aldridge and Kamie Currie.

He is the Canadian equivalent of what we would term an “Agriculture Extension Specialist,” and she is what we would call an “Economic Development Officer.”

The conference has been so successful it has been yanked out of the local hands of “agriculture,” and handed over to the Alberta Department of Energy. While that might appear to be the kiss of death-since Alberta’s approach to energy tends to define the status quo-the concept will live on.

Because people are crushing their own seeds. And brewing their own fuel. And converting their tractors to run on straight vegetable oil. Last year there was a scientist named Rex who was “going to get a trailer” a la our Clean Technology Demonstration unit. He did that-added a crushing unit (standard thinking in this part of the world), and proceeded to do as many demonstrations across Canada in one year as we have done in four times the amount of time.

We want to bring Rex down to North Carolina, some way, some how, in order to get access to even a tiny percentage of his huge brain.

Gerard and Kamie have let the cow out of the barn, and the community will grow. They might lose their fiscal backing, but they will cobble it together, just as Fairview cobbled together a community hall where we were served a remarkable “fall dinner.” That was their term. With turkey and mashed potatoes and cranberries and a handful of other side dishes, it is what we would call a Christmas feast.

People are playing with camelina, and with both heated and green canola. Before we write-off a small town in northern Alberta, we should note that people there will farm 2500 acres as a hobby.

Rachel and I came home inspired. It was not only our protracted time together (24 hours worth of traveling is a lot, eh?), but it was also seeing these folks who endure unbelievably harsh weather conditions, and thrive through the generations.

I had a chance to have some extended conversations with one of the fellows from a nearby Hutterite community.  They appear to have a thorough understanding of energy, and a tendency to take self reliance to new heights.
Once again we are changed by a visit to Peace Country. And once again we find ourselves miraculously recharged and ready to persevere on our own project.

Original post by Lyle

Tonight Rachel and I are staying in Grande Prairie, awaiting an early flight home after a couple of days in Peace River Country.

This is a bizarre and wonderful place.  Farmers, homebrewers, academics, and canola growers trudged through the cold (20 below C) to take in a conference on renewable energy.

Rachel held court with a session on backyard analytics.  And I was asked to do a talk on biodiesel side streams.

Here is what I said:

This is my second trip to Powering the Peace, and as the conference date approached I took a long look in the mirror to see if I could figure out the appeal of this gig.

Of course it feels natural to fly from Raleigh to Toronto, Toronto to Calgary, Calgary to Grand Prairie, and then to catch a ride to Fairview so that I could talk about sustainability.

And it makes equally perfect sense for me to leave the seventy-degree weather of Pittsboro, North Carolina to come to the twenty below temperatures of Fairview.

Looking in the mirror didn’t help.

I think the reason I came back here was because of the crushing equipment that was on display last year.  I saw innovation, and fearlessness, and I talked to a bunch of farmers who were happy to improvise as they went along.

In the past year I have come to realize that in North Carolina we have lost our vernacular knowledge of crushing.  It’s largely a mystery to us.  Today in North Carolina we can get oilseed crushed at either the Cargill plant in Raleigh, or the Cargill plant in Fayetteville.

After which we are pretty much out of tricks.

Yet this part of the world is a farm scale crushing paradise.

North Carolina, on the other hand, is a haven for home brewers.  And farm scale biodiesel makers.  And small scale commercial biodiesel producers.  Today we have 7 biodiesel plants operating in our state—all of them 5 million gallons per year or less.  We have a half dozen active biodiesel Coops, over a hundred biodiesel home brewing operations, and a community college system that has a biofuels curriculum that is offered statewide.

We know a lot about making biodiesel.  But virtually every operation I just mentioned is powered by waste fats oils and greases.  Today there is no bridge from our biodiesel production to the farm.

I believe we are learning to grow canola, although we haven’t quite figured out how we are going to get the oil out of it when we take the crop off.

Before you leave this conference fearing North Carolina’s entry into the global canola markets—beware—we might have as much as 250 acres under cultivation statewide. We are pretty much soy country—and as far as soy producing states go, we are a big dog on the eastern seaboard.

By the way, I was born and raised in Canada.  And whenever I was in the audience, listening to some bozo from the United States, nothing would make me angrier than when all the currency references were in U.S. dollars.  Full disclosure:  I don’t do hectares, metric tones, liters or any other measurements that make sense.  I am firmly locked into the weights and measures that I trade in all day every day.  The other day we shipped a truckload of sweet peppers off of the sustainable farm we operate on our project, and yes, we really did pick them in pecks…

Although, now that I think about it, any Canadian dollars that come my way up here are sure going to go a lot further than the ones I got last year.  Perhaps I should learn to adapt.

Adaptation is something we have accomplished at Piedmont Biofuels.  We started out as a class at our local community college, and went from backyard brewing of biodiesel to a coop.  With just over five hundred members, some say we are the largest biodiesel coop in America today.

Our Coop operation is what I call a “farm scale” plant.  It kicks out a few hundred gallons of fuel a week, from waste vegetable oil it collects from local sources.  Most of it has been used for frying something or other.

I work at our “Industrial wing” were we can make and ship around 4,000 gallons per day.  Google tells me that is around 15K liters.  We think of it as a 1.3 million gallon facility.  You are welcome to call it a 5 million liter facility—which in my mind sounds much more impressive.

Today we are running on chicken fat and waste vegetable oil, but we have run soy, back in the day.  I have a bid in on a load of peanut oil right now, and I have my fingers crossed.  We are a multi-feedstock facility.  You give us some fat, we’ll make you some fuel.

Outside of biodiesel production we do a mountain of education and outreach, we run a design-build business that builds farm scale processors, and we have a couple of acres of sustainable produce under cultivation.  We are about to launch a farm-incubator project, we have a small canola trial underway, and this winter we are building a mobile crushing plant to go with our mobile biodiesel reactor.

On any given day we might have 25 people across all projects, and combined we represent about a two and a half million dollar per year enterprise.

Its pretty good growth for a group of passionate volunteers who started out in a metal drum with a canoe paddle.

We’ve done a good job of demystifying small-scale biodiesel in our state, and one of the jobs that lie ahead for us is to do the same thing with oilseed crushing.  That’s one of the reasons we are here.

Another reason we are here is the one on the agenda.  I’m not supposed to be talking about us.  I’m supposed to be addressing biodiesel side streams.

So here it goes.

When you are making biodiesel you create fuel, and what amounts to a worthless glycerin cocktail.  It’s part water, part methanol, part free fatty acids, and part glycerin.  Trying to find a market for the cocktail is exceedingly difficult, as you will find what one party desires is not desired by the next.

For example:  We all know you can burn crude biodiesel glycerin as a boiler fuel.  It has 40% of the BTUs of most fuels, so it is generally not used at 100% strength, but it does make a nice additive to fuel oil.  Want to sell your product to the boiler market?  Get your water out.  Leave your methanol in.  The more BTUs the better.

Want to sell your glycerin into the animal feed market?  Get the methanol out.  In the United States the FDA and USDA has granted crude biodiesel glycerin GRAS status.  That’s their way of saying “Generally Regarded as Safe” to include into animal rations.
To hit the feed specification, you need to be less than 150 parts per million.  Which we have found hard to hit.

Want to sell to water remediation companies?  They pay dearly for pharma and food grade glycerin that they dump into holes in the ground to clean up aquifers.  But they need the methanol out, and they need the metals out.  If you have traces of selenium, or nickel from your stainless steel piping, you need to get that out before entering the water remediation market.  They need a product that is safe to drink.

Want to sell to the digester folks?  They are the wastewater treatment plants.  When you find a municipal treatment plant that has more treatment capacity than it has gallons coming at it, you have a customer who needs your glycerin to feed their bugs.  Some want methanol in.  Some want methanol out.  After all, methanol is sold in the scientific markets as microbial starter.

The point is don’t build a biodiesel operation without a way to sort out the glycerin cocktail.  Methanol is currently at the highest price it has been for the past five years.  When you run the numbers today, you can’t afford to build a biodiesel operation without including methanol recovery.

And when you do that, by the way, rig it up so that you pass both your fuel phase and your glycerin phase through methanol recovery.  You are not going to get much methanol out of the fuel, but you are going to reduce water washing on down the line.  Most of the excess methanol comes out in the cocktail—and you want that back so that you can reuse it.

That will not only help the carbon footprint of your plant—it will also help your wallet.

We have engineered a bio-refinery that we intend to use to sort out the cocktail.  It includes methanol recovery, and a glass lined reactor in which we will be able to strip out the free fatty acids.  We will ship those back to the rendering company that provides us with feedstock, where they will find their way into animal feeds.

Most biodiesel plants in America today are water washing.  After you have separated your fuel from your glycerin, you go about washing the fuel.  And you wash out soaps, and crud, and glycerin that you missed, and you wash, and wash, until your hit the on road specification.

How many times you wash is largely dependent on the fuel maker.  If you are a multi-feedstock plant, it is largely a function of getting the recipe right and knowing what you are doing.  The more experience you have making biodiesel, the less washing required.

Wash water then becomes an important side stream.  If you plan to discharge to a municipal treatment plant, you will probably need to build pre-treatment into your thinking.  Our pre-treatment includes a neutralization step, a pass through an oil water separator (which often catches biodiesel for us to put back into the system), followed by a sparging with diatomaceous earth.

Sparging, by the way, is simply adding air to water (or fuel) to make bubbles.

At Piedmont Biofuels we ran into trouble on the water front.  Our small town wastewater treatment plant is at capacity.  It can’t handle us.  We slowly poisoned all of the town’s bugs, discharging a mere 3600 gallons day into a plant with a 500K gallon per day capacity.

So our town made us pump and haul all of our water—and our profits—off to compost.

Combine that with the fact that we are in the worst drought in recorded history, and we faced water problems coming and going.

Which is why we switched to ionized beads.  We plumbed in a lead-lag ion exchange system that grabs soaps, and moisture, and stuff that we want out of our fuel.  And it does it without water.  Ion exchange is our new best friend.  It knocked our water consumption down by 80%.  We now do a quick pre-wash as fuel is coming out of the reactor—to help knock glycerin out—and one wash cycle to knock the methanol out, and off we go to our ion exchange columns.

Every time I see the water truck pull in, I see 500.00 pull out of the gate.  It’s refreshing seeing it around the place 80% less.  And it is nice to see our water bill drop on the incoming side.

Ionized beads are rechargeable which means you can find a vendor who will take them back, wash them up, and get them back into action for you.  Reusable resins not only earn you a sustainability point—they also save you money.

You can buy talc that serves a similar purpose to ionized beads, but I do not know of any that can be recharged—so if you move to polishing your fuel with talc, you will have a biodiesel soaked powder side stream to deal with—most of which is sent to the landfill at this point.

We have one other annoying side stream to contend with, and that is what the chemical industry refers to as the “one way tote.”  The damn things are ubiquitous. These are plastic 250 gallons vessels ensconced in aluminum cages with a built on pallet that makes them easy to toss around with a forklift.

We use them for sodium methylate and potassium methylate.  By having our catalyst pre-mixed at the chemical distributor we avoid making water in the methoxide stage of biodiesel manufacturing.  Less chemical water equals a higher biodiesel yield, and a cleaner glycerin cocktail.

But the one-way totes drive me nuts.  We sell them off for rain water harvesting, but to do so we need to neutralize, and scrub, and lose money on every container.  We haven’t figured it out yet, but we may find ourselves buying a fleet of “round trip” totes, or installing a bulk methylate tank in order to shed this oppressive side stream.

And that is biodiesel side streams, as I know them.

Original post by Lyle

After five long years of adventure prone struggle, it has finally come to pass. At last the Coop is selling legal, onroad fuel it has produced itself.

I suspect the journey into homebrew is largely similar across the land. It looks something like this:

1. Discover biodiesel, fall in love with the idea.
2. Embark on the goal of meeting our own fuel needs yourself.
3. Dream about leaving your day job and earning a living by making and selling fuel to your neighbors.
4. Forget item 3. Not happening.

The primary reason number 4 shows up on the list is because it requires membership in he National Biodiesel Board, EPA registration of the fuel, and a lab that can verify that the fuel coming off the line meets the specifications of ASTM D6751.

Our story has followed a similar trajectory, although when we hit item 4 we built Industrial so that we could earn a living making and selling fuel. Along the way we complied with all of the regulatory gobble-de-gook that allows us to sell onroad fuel.

Which means we built a lab at Industrial which is worth more than the entire Coop operation.

And with that, we settled into our respective strides. Industrial ships a few thousand gallons a day of “commercial” fuel, and the Coop ships a few hundred gallons a week of “homemade” fuel to members who have co-operated in the fuel making process.

Along the way the Coop started selling commercial fuel from Industrial, and have maintained the “Tami Tank” in its yard for years. Which means that we have long had two fuels hanging around the Coop. Homemade for hard working members, and Store Bought for those who do not like getting dirty.

The Tami Tank was named after my wife, Tami, who likes to fuel up in stilettos and fishnet stockings, but does not like getting messy. There is a great picture of her filling up in the current issue of Home Power magazine.

Long after we were swept down the river of commercial fuel production, the Coop continued to labor away to make onspec fuel they could sell for onroad use. They developed a robust waste vegetable oil collection mechanism. They built the Grease Warming Zone where they can dewater around 2000 gallons of feedstock. They improved their reactor. They perfected wash-dry. They plumbed. And replumbed.

And in a Herculean act that many considered hubris, they trenched an underground pipe from their homebrew plant out to the cobb structure which holds the Tami Tank.

And yesterday it happened. Yesterday the lab at Industrial verified that they had hit the specification, and they moved a glorious hundred gallons of “homemade” fuel into the Tami Tank for onroad sale.

Essentially, they will never need to buy fuel from Industrial again.

One little Coop, five years of work, finally able to legally sell onspec, onroad fuel out of the yard.

Today the Tami Tank does not blow through a whole lot of fuel. It hovers around 500 gallons per month. That’s not quite enough volume to warrant a “living for one.” But the idea is there. I’m not sure what the volume would have to be. 2000 gallons per month? Perhaps. If all we have to do to achieve economic viability is quadruple Tami Tank sales-that’s easy.

I dropped in on the Tuesday Night Fuelmakers last night. They were giddy. One said to me, “It looks like we will be making the fuel for Industrial now.” Another said, “Are you the guy who wrote that piece about pricing? I saw petroleum diesel at 3.59 in Raleigh yesterday.” Another showed me his plans for the biodiesel plant he is building on his farm.

I’m so jazzed about this development that I have decided to break my fundamental rule of photography, which is, always have a human in the photo, and do not publish geeky tank shots. This morning I dropped the boys at school and doubled back to the Coop to get some photos.

This is the Coop wet lab, with a fancy kitchen sink that came from Summer Shop.

On the left is our current “Escape Pod” reactor.  Next to it is the wash-dry setup, complete with homemade grease trap for waste water, and filtration.

This is the newly completed “Finished Fuel Out.”  One tank for homebrew for those who make their own, and one for the Tami Tank with fuel for sale.

Original post by Lyle

It appears that petroleum diesel is about to cross the 3.50 a gallon mark.  Unbelievable.

It wasn’t very long ago that we were buying fuel from Iowa, and selling it to Coop members for 3.50 a gallon.  At the time petroleum diesel was 1.59 at the pump.

We were about twice the money, and we have always been inconvenient, and you had to be a Coop member to buy fuel.

On that model we built the B100 Community Trail which has long provided fuel to a narrow and intense fringe group of consumers.  Different owners of trail assets have come and gone and today the major stakeholders operating the trail include us, Carolina Biodiesel, and the folks at Cape Fear Biofuels.

The Coop operates its own location in Moncure, and Industrial operates the locations in Pittsboro, Carrboro, Raleigh, and Burlington-if we can ever get the damn thing open.

Along the way the Coop has grown to over five hundred members, some of whom make their own fuel at the Coop, and the majority of which pull fuel from the Trail.  I’m guessing we meet the fuel needs of around three hundred Triangle families-and we are in the midst of a new Fuel Consumption Survey which will give us new information.

Some people just buy memberships because it is “cool,” and don’t run around on biodiesel at all.  And sometimes, on our sliding scale consulting business, we ask people to buy a membership to get their questions answered.  A lot of them live far away from North Carolina.

All of which is merely background fodder to the real question at hand, and that is, what will happen to us, and to  our 3.50 fuel when petroleum is 3.60 on the street.

As John succinctly put it on a recent BIG list post, “Don’t the laws of supply and demand apply to Pittsboro?”

It’s complicated.  But I think he is right when he says we need to tackle this question, so here it goes:

Traditionally our Coop members have been driven by different levers, none of which has been price.  We are populated by clean air connoisseurs, peaceniks who like the fact that there is “No War Required” to get biodiesel, fans of Made in America, societal collapse aficionados, and a host of others who all have their reasons to run around on B100, or high percentage blends.

We do have fans of cheap fuel-those are the folks who brew their own.  But when the price on the street exceeds the price on the Trail, I believe we will be awash with “cheap fuel lovers” who will sign up based exclusively out of an abiding love for their wallets.

Stand by for membership explosion.  I believe that is what will happen to the Coop, and I think that is a good thing, since healthy membership equals healthy Coop.  I should note that the Coop is a “C” corporation, that is jointly owned by the membership.  If we have 510 members, that equals 510 shareholders, each with one vote.

I should also point out that the Coop is very close to producing its own on-spec fuel which they will be able to sell for onroad use.  I believe they are on the cusp of becoming the smallest commercial producer in the land.  When that happens, their fuel will no longer come from Industrial, and presumably the sale price of the fuel will be set by the Board of Directors and Matt and Greg-the folks who make the fuel and who manage the various revenue streams at the Coop.

All of which is merely a long introduction to the question of what will Industrial do about price at the locations it operates.  Carolina Biodiesel, the Coop, and Cape Fear  have long been buying bulk fuel at wholesale pricing and have subsequently been free to charge whatever they wish.

But back to “Supply and Demand.”

Today our three Trail locations represent less than 10% of our business.  Last month the number was 7%.

A small percentage of Industrial’s business ships out in the form of blends, and the rest ships out in bulk to oil companies, who then blend and deliver to bus lines, and airports, and municipal fleets, and gas stations.  We sometimes ship to other biodiesel plants which are running short of product.

For simplification sake, let’s divide our fuel business into two parts:  The Trail, where fuel has sold or 3.50 a gallon for years, and the Terminal, which tends to mirror the price of wholesale petroleum.

Fuel that ships to the Trail typically goes out on our tank truck, and gets dropped at various locations.  The locations tend to be capital intensive, high maintenance and transaction heavy.  It tends to be a bunch of 14 gallon fills, sometimes having to birddog down inaccurate credit card info, or membership info, etc.

And while there is no doubt that fuel sold for 3.50 a gallon has a higher gross margin than fuel sold through the terminal, I doubt it has ever been a profitable undertaking.

That said, we would have no objection to seeing the Trail move from 10% of our business to 100% of our business.  I’m not sure how many members that would take-but I am guessing around 2000 or so.

The fact is that we could happily pump ten times the product through the Trail, and stay at 3.50 a gallon, and merely drive our gross margin up.

We believe in the Trail.  We’ve invested heavily in the Trail.  One of the main reasons it fails to make money is that it does not represent significant volume.  A tank and dispenser costs the same for a location that pumps 2,000 gallons a month, or 20,000 gallons a month.

All of which is to say that it is not quite as simple as Supply and Demand.  I actually think it would be spectacular to see every drop we churn out go directly into the fuel tanks of Coop members.  And I think there is a very real possibility that we could do that, without increasing price.

Which is merely a long winded way to say, “We’ll see.”  The last time we had a price intersection with petroleum was after Katrina hit.  We had a terminal full of fuel, gas stations were shuddered, and petroleum diesel hit 3.59 in Pittsboro.  We held the line at 3.50, and had a very big sales month.

Unlike Katrina, I don’t believe this price of petroleum is headed back down…

Original post by Lyle

We have long resisted the natural human desire to expand, but there comes a time when we succumb to our own manifest destiny.

We’ve decided to develop the ground on the other side of the fence.

One of the things our project is blessed with is a mile’s worth of chain link fence, complete with barbed wire. It’s pretty clear that the last occupants wanted to keep people out.

Nature takes its course on an abandoned fence, like everything else, which means we have long been surrounded by twenty years of honeysuckle, and poison ivy, and sumac, and other fence loving plants.

We’ve shipped a fair bit of fence to the scrap yard-it seems we dig out concrete ensconced fence posts every semester-to make way for the tank farm, or for a greenhouse, or for farm access, or something.

And now we are moving on the western front. This time, however, the goal is to keep the fence intact so that there can be crops on one side, and soccer on the other side, and both activities can peacefully co-exist.

Which means we need to strip honeysuckle. By hand. The hard way.

Last weekend Tami and the boys and I cleared a gate and two sections-just enough to raise the curiosity of Dr. Fabulous, our itinerant crop scientist. She can’t resist looking at new dirt.

Sustainable farming in Chatham County entails having the soil, the water, the market, and the fence. In this case, we can develop all four.

Which is not without controversy.

The bio-diversity folks on project hate it. They view this one acre of woods as ideal wildlife and pollinator habitat, and they do not want to see it cleared for agriculture.

I view it as an under deployed asset that should be put to work. I would like to see it in asparagus. Or blueberries. Anything under cultivation.

And I don’t think it is ideal habitat. Because it is fenced. It might be great for birds, snakes, and bugs, but I don’t anticipate evicting a lot of foxes, deer, possums or other charismatic species.

The bio-diversity folks love to see the honeysuckle disappear. To them it is a non-native invasive that out-competes the trumpet vines they have coaxed up the fence. The fact that is full of bird nests is secondary.

We have settled on a compromise: I will leave the specimen cedars, a tulip poplar and a honey locust-both of which are good for Sandi’s bees, and I will leave an island of sumac, which can no longer be procured from local nurseries. I can get rid of the privet, and honeysuckle, pines and gums, so that we can proceed with our westward expansion.

Piedmont Biofarm does not need the space. It is slammed with roughly two acres under cultivation, shipping truckloads of produce to the Durham Farmer’s Market, and to fancy restaurants, and to Chatham Marketplace, and to our own CSA.

But I figure if we bring up soil, water, and fence-in this market where there are a surplus of hungry local food enthusiasts-someone will snap up this new province.

Original post by Lyle

It’s funny.  We are so immersed in our project that it is easy to forget why it is we are here.

The other day I had a heart to heart with one of our long-standing members who put it in perspective for me.  I didn’t get his exact quote, but it went something like this,

“People are daunted.  They are walking around in the shadow of climate change and global conflict and they don’t know what to do.

“They want to take action on a personal level, but they are paralyzed.

“And Piedmont comes along and says, ‘Here is something you can do.  You can drive around on 100% biodiesel.  It costs you fifty bucks a year plus more for your fuel and suddenly you are doing something.’”

I was taken aback.  I remember the early days, years ago, when I got free of the petroleum grid.  I thought back to the exhilaration.  His comments reminded me of why I came.

“Fifty bucks?” he went on, “That’s what I spent on dinner last night.”

“Look,” he said, “I fill carboys when I am going to the beach.  It’s messy, it’s inconvenient, but it means I don’t have to buy petroleum while I am there.”

I thought about my own travels, where I wedge the family into the Jetta wagon and stick to beaches that we can drive to, spend a week on, and get home from on a single tank.

“I tell anyone who will listen about Piedmont Biofuels,” he said.  “That way, every time they get in their car they can be reminded that they are doing something about the big problems. Personally.  Something that makes a difference.”

I was blown away.  A couple of days later I was still thinking about it, and I brought it up with Chris Jude in the kitchen.  He and Link kick out around four thousand gallons of fuel a day, and he rides his bike to work.

We don’t get that all over “we are doing something about it feeling” anymore because we are submerged in the details of how to keep the plant spinning like a top.

It reminded me of the verbiage I once penned for our new jigsaw puzzle, which is affixed inside each tin, and is titled “Welcome to the Movement.”

Recently our Coop board has been meeting about how to take things up a notch, and one of the things on the list is our tchotche management.   It reminded me that we have done nothing to bring our jigsaw puzzle to market.  So I created a jigsaw page, and I have asked those geekier than me to bolt a link to Paypal to it so that puzzles can begin shipping in earnest.

I was touched, and inspired by my conversation with the longtime member, and perhaps I should change my message.  I’ve been so busy preaching conservation that I have forgotten to enumerate the joys of driving down the road on locally made fuel….

Original post by Lyle

These are interesting times in the Estill-Schwerin household.

A few weeks ago I was jazzed when Dr. Reese Halter addressed the United Nations, and I was delighted to see a quote from Energy Blog on the back of his latest edition of Wild Weather.

That was before the United Nations announced that biofuels are a crime against humanity.  Drat.  One moment you are on the vanguard of the fight against climate change, and the next you are likened to a war criminal in the Hague.

I sent a simple query to the Biofuels Interest Group list:  if biofuels are a crime against humanity, what does that make petroleum?  To which I suggested that if I am imprisoned in the Hague please don’t slip me a file.  Get my plasma cutter.

All of which is merely big picture stuff.

Here at home the accusations are much more bruising.

Awhile back I rented some rooms from our Mayor at a house in Pittsboro.  I nicknamed it the “Biofuels House in Town,” to go along with Oilseed Community (where we have a dozen residents or so) along with “Yellow,” and “White,” where our interns live. I tried to get the whole house, but it had some existing tenants.

Chris Jude jumped in, so that he could walk to work, and it has been used by other passersby.  Since we had leased a place in town, Tami and I figured we might as well vote in town, and we changed our voter registrations.

In the past I had asked our Town Planner if I could live at the Plant.  That is, after all, where we spend the majority of our time.  It has a well appointed kitchen, where I make my morning coffee, it is a delightful place to sleep, and it is where my library is housed.  It’s where the kids keep their bikes, do their homework, and it is where we do our entertaining.  But we are not allowed to live there.

It’s not zoned for that.

Fair enough.

An interesting sidebar is that our house is what Tami affectionately refers to as a “tear down.”  After seventeen years of renovations, the experts tell us that it cannot be saved.  In the neighborhood our place is known as “Neglectsville.”

So we figured we would move to town.  We picked out a lot and builder in Chatham Forest (no doubt named for what once stood there), and asked Alicia to design a net-zero emissions home for us.

Combine that with a newfound desire to see these kids be able to get around during their impending teenage years (with less automobile usage), and the move to Pittsboro fit like a glove.

The Board of Elections said “no deal.”  They said we couldn’t register to vote in Pittsboro.

Got it.  Oh well.

One moment you are committing crimes against humanity, the next eating, sleeping, drinking, leasing and investing in Pittsboro does not a vote warrant.

All of which amounts to a mere shrug in our family, until a post goes up on the local anonymous forum which claims we have been accused of election fraud-at which point the feeding frenzy begins.  Next thing you know Tami has been living in Pittsboro for the past two years with multiple men in one house, we’ve only been bankrupt once but our credit is coming back, and a whole bunch of other fascinating stuff about us that I guess I was previously too busy to have noticed.

When I step back from the bludgeoning we are currently taking it strikes me as obvious where this is coming from.

We are in the midst of a fierce election battle, in which Tami and I are clear about who we would like to win.  We are supporters of the Pittsboro Together slate, and we like our current Mayor.

While Pittsboro Together is out talking about water, and sewer, and smart growth and cooperation with our progressive County Board, the other side has decided the big issue should be where Tami and Lyle are registered to vote.

It makes sense, I suppose.  These are folks who launch their election bids for Pittsboro Town Council from a cafeteria in Siler City.

And I guess they need planks for their platforms.  Since they don’t show up to debate the issues, the only thing we really know about them is that they are passionate about the many details of Tami and Lyle.

At this point they do not know that I wear Krispy Kreme boxer shorts, or that Tami has a penchant for Arabian men, and while I doubt they would be able to ferret out these facts on their own, they seem ready and able to invent new ones.

Another fact is that we live in a deeply polarized community.  Our town has been so badly governed that we are at the behest of developers if we are ever to cobble together services.  As an outspoken advocate of conservation, I occasionally poke a sharp stick into the eye of the status quo, which makes me a candidate for public flogging.

One of the reasons I like Mayor Voller is that he has taken an otherwise flaccid position (in North Carolina’s “Board-Manager” system the Mayor only votes on ties), and turned it into a pulpit for change.

I’ve only been doing business in Pittsboro for seventeen years, but in the past I would show up for re-zoning rulings, only to find an absent Mayor, a board member on vacation, and another one who is not feeling well, meaning the decision would have to wait a month.

Lost paperwork, handshake agreements which are broken by the new board, and lack of interest characterize our past regimes.  In the past all power lay with the Public Works Director, because he was the only one who knew where to find the key to the gate.

I’m a fan of good governance.  Which is not a secret.

And I’m a fan of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which is why Tami got me a fake PhD on the occasion of my 44th birthday.  It hangs in the hallway of Building One, at the end of Industrial Park drive on the east end of town-which is where I can generally be found.

If I’m not there-I’m probably on the porch of Building Two-in my recliner, where I like to foment conspiracies and also take naps…

Original post by Lyle

These are interesting times in the Estill-Schwerin household.

A few weeks ago I was jazzed when Dr. Reese Halter addressed the United Nations, and I was delighted to see a quote from Energy Blog on the back of his latest edition of Wild Weather.

That was before the United Nations announced that biofuels are a crime against humanity. Drat. One moment you are on the vanguard of the fight against climate change, and the next you are likened to a war criminal in the Hague.

I sent a simple query to the Biofuels Interest Group list: if biofuels are a crime against humanity, what does that make petroleum? To which I suggested that if I am imprisoned in the Hague please don’t slip me a file. Get my plasma cutter.

All of which is merely big picture stuff.

Here at home the accusations are much more bruising.

Awhile back I rented some rooms from our Mayor at a house in Pittsboro. I nicknamed it the “Biofuels House in Town,” to go along with Oilseed Community (where we have a dozen residents or so) along with “Yellow,” and “White,” where our interns live. I tried to get the whole house, but it had some existing tenants.

Chris Jude jumped in, so that he could walk to work, and it has been used by other passersby. Since we had leased a place in town, Tami and I figured we might as well vote in town, and we changed our voter registrations.

In the past I had asked our Town Planner if I could live at the Plant. That is, after all, where we spend the majority of our time. It has a well appointed kitchen, where I make my morning coffee, it is a delightful place to sleep, and it is where my library is housed. It’s where the kids keep their bikes, do their homework, and it is where we do our entertaining. But we are not allowed to live there.

It’s not zoned for that.

Fair enough.

An interesting sidebar is that our house is what Tami affectionately refers to as a “tear down.” After seventeen years of renovations, the experts tell us that it cannot be saved. In the neighborhood our place is known as “Neglectsville.”

So we figured we would move to town. We picked out a lot and builder in Chatham Forest (no doubt named for what once stood there), and asked Alicia to design a net-zero emissions home for us.

Combine that with a newfound desire to see these kids be able to get around during their impending teenage years (with less automobile usage), and the move to Pittsboro fit like a glove.

The Board of Elections said “no deal.” They said we couldn’t register to vote in Pittsboro.

Got it. Oh well.

One moment you are committing crimes against humanity, the next eating, sleeping, drinking, leasing and investing in Pittsboro does not a vote warrant.

All of which amounts to a mere shrug in our family, until a post goes up on the local anonymous forum which claims we have been accused of election fraud-at which point the feeding frenzy begins. Next thing you know Tami has been living in Pittsboro for the past two years with multiple men in one house, we’ve only been bankrupt once but our credit is coming back, and a whole bunch of other fascinating stuff about us that I guess I was previously too busy to have noticed.

When I step back from the bludgeoning we are currently taking it strikes me as obvious where this is coming from.

We are in the midst of a fierce election battle, in which Tami and I are clear about who we would like to win. We are supporters of the Pittsboro Together slate, and we like our current Mayor.

While Pittsboro Together is out talking about water, and sewer, and smart growth and cooperation with our progressive County Board, the other side has decided the big issue should be where Tami and Lyle are registered to vote.

It makes sense, I suppose. These are folks who launch their election bids for Pittsboro Town Council from a cafeteria in Siler City.

And I guess they need planks for their platforms. Since they don’t show up to debate the issues, the only thing we really know about them is that they are passionate about the many details of Tami and Lyle.

At this point they do not know that I wear Krispy Kreme boxer shorts, or that Tami has a penchant for Arabian men, and while I doubt they would be able to ferret out these facts on their own, they seem ready and able to invent new ones.

Another fact is that we live in a deeply polarized community. Our town has been so badly governed that we are at the behest of developers if we are ever to cobble together services. As an outspoken advocate of conservation, I occasionally poke a sharp stick into the eye of the status quo, which makes me a candidate for public flogging.

One of the reasons I like Mayor Voller is that he has taken an otherwise flaccid position (in North Carolina’s “Board-Manager” system the Mayor only votes on ties), and turned it into a pulpit for change.

I’ve only been doing business in Pittsboro for seventeen years, but in the past I would show up for re-zoning rulings, only to find an absent Mayor, a board member on vacation, and another one who is not feeling well, meaning the decision would have to wait a month.

Lost paperwork, handshake agreements which are broken by the new board, and lack of interest characterize our past regimes. In the past all power lay with the Public Works Director, because he was the only one who knew where to find the key to the gate.

I’m a fan of good governance. Which is not a secret.

And I’m a fan of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which is why Tami got me a fake PhD on the occasion of my 44th birthday. It hangs in the hallway of Building One, at the end of Industrial Park drive on the east end of town-which is where I can generally be found.

If I’m not there-I’m probably on the porch of Building Two-in my recliner, where I like to foment conspiracies and also take naps…

Original post by Lyle

These days we are anticipating cold nights ahead, and among other things, our thoughts turn to heating the greenhouse.

Last year we tried to fire a waste oil burner on vegetable oil and biodiesel, but we never got it working properly and lost a greenhouse full of bedding plants.  It was heartbreak, and a big setback for the farm.

This year we have decided to install a woodstove.  Firewood is something we have in abundance, and there are a bunch of us around who have plenty of experience heating with wood.

The other day I found myself in conversation about North Carolina’s electrical mix, and I mentioned the 48 megawatt wood fired generator over in Craven County.  I always include them in my thinking because they are the state’s largest renewable energy installation.

And I was cautioned not to think of wood as renewable.

Whoa.  If wood is not renewable, we are in deeper trouble than I thought.  I know it is fashionable to think of trees as “the lungs of the planet,” but as someone who heats with wood, I prefer to think of them as batteries.  They sequester the carbon, which I release with fire, to keep my family warm.

I spent one summer in the timber business.  After Hurricane Fran decimated our place, I built a swimming hole with a couple of friends.  My role was on the chainsaws.  I would liberate twelve foot rounds, and skid them up into piles, which we would then ship to market.

I would fetch one price for a load of southern yellow pine which would go to the construction markets, and another price for a load of gum which would go off to pulp and paper.  My highest dollar load was hickory, which went off to be made into pallets.

Most of America’s hardwood goes into making pallets.  We need pallets to ship “stuff” around on.

And as anyone who has ever run low on firewood knows, pallets make for great heating.

Call me old fashioned, but I’m going to leave wood on the renewable side of the energy ledger…

Original post by Lyle

On Friday we celebrated the passing of the first half million gallons through our fuel Terminal.  Our primary fuel maker, Chris  Jude,  called for a celebration.

I think the Abundance Foundation ran out and got some champagne.  We all gathered around and made a toast to five hundred thousand gallons.

Last year about one hundred thousand gallons of other people’s fuel flowed through the meter.  Most of the last four hundred thousand gallons have been made by Chris with help from Leif, and Greg, and Link.

Surely there are others on project who would like to say they helped too, but since they don’t have fuel making badges on their uniforms we can’t really include  them on the fuel makers list.

Last Friday I figured out how to receive 1200 gallons of waste vegetable oil.  I showed up at staff meeting today ready to receive my badge, only to find out that I had failed to return some valuable tools and a drum that was being used by design build.

Instead of a medal, I got a lecture.

Anyway, here we are, raising a  glass to celebrate the  milestone.

From left to right we are Angela, who works on the farm, and Katie who is hidden by Amanda, who works in administration–and does scheduling and dispatch for fuel.  I am the handsome bon vivant in blue pants, and yes, that is Girl Mark behind me.  Rachel and Link are back there too, and it is Evan who is successfully blocking the meter with his champagne flute.  I believe the meter was originally intended as the center of interest.

Front and center is Tami (who they named a tank after), and David who appears ready to serve.  Interns Lindsay and Caleb are on the back wall, and Chris Jude himself is flanked by Pamela from House and Grounds, and Jessie, who invented our CSA.

It is not often that we stop in the middle of the day to imbibe alcohol, but Chris thought it was important, and I have a perclivity for providing Chris with whatever he wants…

Original post by Lyle