Biodiesel, Sustainable?
- exploring innovation and self-sufficiency.

The Good...
Rudolph Diesel would be proud of the legions of both back yard elves and government scientists amoung us who are busy inventing a way out of our addiction to petrodiesel. To empower farmers in the 1880's he built an engine that could run on hemp and peanut oil instead of pricey petroleum.ⁱ The same lure still attracts experimenters and consumers but now folks have become aware of global warming. Biodiesel is created from plants that have breathed in CO₂ during their growth in the field. The burning of the fuel returns only the same amount of the CO₂ to the atmosphere which makes it "carbon neutral". In contrast, burning petrodiesel releases carbon metabolized by plants millions of years ago thus adding carbon that has not been in the air since the Dinosaurs' era, and we're burning lots of it!

Though they now commonly use “old oil” diesel our modern power and transportation diesel engine fleet can also use Biodiesel without modification. This fact has spawned hundreds of producers, amateur or profitable, to learn how to create the fuel from dozens of different “feed stocks”, both animal and vegetable. “Waste” products like animal fat and tallow and virgin oils from crops like sugar cane, soy, corn, sunflowers, wheat, barley, sorghum, peanuts, rice, canola, mustard, palm oil, hemp, jatropha and walnut trees,ⁱⁱ etc, can all be converted into Biodiesel.

Biodiesel is created by a simple chemical process involving Methanol or Ethanol and provides Glycol as a byproduct which can be sold to soap manufacturers to reduce cost of production. The retail price at present is higher than petrodiesel but it can be made at home for less than either. This will change as bigger producers enter the picture and petroleum prices continue to rise. Various amounts can be mixed with petrodiesel to reduce emissions. A 20% mixture is called B20; 100% Biodiesel is called B100 and it is this usage that gives maximum advantage over petrodiesel.

The fuel has less toxicity than table salt and is as biodegradable as sugarⁱⁱⁱ so if it contacts you or the soil little or no damage results. It has high lubricity^iv which protects engine parts without the need for sulphur, the main culprit in acid rain. It increases engine life, makes it quieter and reduces odour. Plus, its high flashpoint (~150 C) means that it is non-flammable outside the engine it powers. All very strange and wonderful for a fuel, yes? In fact, it is the only alternative fuel to meet the 1990 US Clean Air Act standards.^v

The US Accounting Office figures we spill (or shamefully, dump) around 46 million gallons of oil worldwide annually which catastrophically effect marine and coastal wildlife. The 11 million gallons from the Exxon Valdez was only a quarter of that but it is the smaller ongoing leakage from aging piping that does much more damage without media notice.^vi Our water table is in great danger from such plumbing as surely as the air we breathe is under attack. Using biodiesel reduces a witches brew of airborne threats by these amounts: Hydrocarbons 95%, Carbon Monoxide 50%, Carbon Dioxide 78%, particulate matter 86%, aromatic compounds 75-90%. The Sulphur compounds are gone and the waste water produced in manufacturing Biodiesel is 79% less than in petrodiesel production. Nitrogen Oxide emissions are up by 5.8% but this can be reduced by 30% with standard catalytic converters. The aromatics are notable due to their being carcinogenic. US statistics show that $82 billion is spent yearly on diseases related to these pollutants which in effect are a kind of subsidy for fossil fuel usage. Everywhere in the world we pay this indirect cost just a surely as we pay at the pump.^vii

Staggering sums of corporate and public money now go into wringing declining oil resources out of the ground. The oil companies have the direct costs of lobbying, negotiation, exploration, drilling, and distribution. The public purse is involved in providing roads, airports, power, health, training and numerous similar services, often in remote areas. And then there are the unseen ecological services provided by Nature, ie. purification and delivery of water, maintenance of oxygen and CO₂ balance, creation of topsoil, planetary temperature control, balancing of species populations for land, sea and air. Add an estimate for providing, or repairing damage to, these service systems and suddenly petroleum is already way more more expensive than most of the budding alternatives.

Since agriculture is a distributed affair it lends itself to local control of fuel stocks rather than suffering the vagaries of international politics, wars and staggering trade imbalances in national energy supplies. Locally grown fuel also avoids the inefficiencies and CO₂ pollution due to long distance fuel transportation and sidesteps the potential of multinational interests' unseen rapacious and polluting cropping techniques being used in someone else's country. To the extent that the burgeoning biodiesel industry operates regionally, oriented to the community, it will benefit workers any where in the social hierarchy. This prevents wealth from being siphoned off to large corporate shareholders who are unaware of local needs. In aide of this, any government money spent on converting its own rolling stock fleet to biodiesel would pay for itself through thousands of jobs in the feed stock and service industries and the increase in revenue from existing taxes on income and sales.^viii

... the Bad...
Critics point out, however, that biodiesel is not a fully renewable resource. Methanol is usually made from Natural Gas, a petroleum product and although fossil fuels are solar energy their carbon content was stored away aeons ago and it is not welcome in our present atmosphere due to global warming. The alternative, Ethanol, is under debate about its embodied fossil content. Our chemical agriculture methods are far from the bucolic scenes of rural fantasy we may imagine. Enormous amounts of oil go into the myriad chemical fertilizers and biocides required for industrial cropping, water tables and rivers are mined for irrigation and polluted by runoff of soil and poisons, topsoil is degraded and lost. World wide, cash crops can too easily displace peasant farmers' food crops and land ownership, forests can be removed to feed our insatiable consumer appetites just as the rest of the world tries to lift itself into affluence. Ask an organic farmer and they will stumble over the repugnant idea of converting agricultural "waste" into fuel instead of returning the biomass to our life giving soils via composting. None of this is actually wasted biomass, and is essential to the sustainabilility of natural ecosystems and the sequestration of carbon into the soil.^ix

From Vermont, Michael Feiner, in the Farm Policy Network News, notes: that "... much of the push for biodiesel has come from the soybean industry. This is unfortunate for a number of reasons. For example, most soybeans are now genetically engineered, mainly to make them resistant to (and the farmer dependent on) the heavy use of chemical fertilizer, herbicides and pesticides, [which are] all petroleum-based products with serious costs to human health and the environment. In addition, soybeans yield less oil per acre than a number of other crops, such as canola and sunflower." ^x

"According to [major biodiesel supplier] World Energy¹s own website, biodiesel is primarily made from, ''Virgin vegetable oils (primarily soybeans) redirecting the market 'surplus' of vegetable oil into another saleable form. Why is there a surplus of domestic soybean oil? Because the regulatory agencies in the much of the rest of the world have declined to accept American export of genetically engineered (GE) soy products, i.e. the US "surplus" commodity."^xi

Which is to say, "Watch out for Green Washing", the presenting of eco-unfriendly, short lived, profit oriented, and perhaps remotely designed, projects as being sustainable or citizen friendly.

... and the Possible.

Okay, now what? As in Australia where a wrangling government sits on its hands re. greenhouse gas targets, numerous private and corporate initiatives are bearing their fruit of carbon reduction goals. It now appears that the country will meet its Kyoto requirements in spite of government inaction.^xii With vigilance we can build a distributed system of fuel stocks for biodiesel that fit into our communities plans rather than mutilate them. The greatest asset we have is innovation by an informed public driving government policies and commercial markets.

One very promising reality which uses existing technologies is the growing of algae for fuel the way food supplement Spirulina is grown in ponds in deserts. The algae are highly efficient at turning sunlight into a 50% body weight of oil, yielding 4 times a s much as canola per square foot^xiii. The desert location and the ability to grow on seawater takes all the pressures off food farm land. (Hmmm, Los Angeles self sufficient in fuel ...) Also exciting are the trials underway that have other strains of algae gobbling up carbon in the flue gases of factory chimneys! This requires some space to be alloted at the factory locations for installing algae growth tubing but 70% of existing factories surveyed in the US have room to do so. “The biomass thus obtained can be used to produce biodiesel, bioplastics, or molecules of pharmaceutical interest".^xiv Other plans include waste/contaminated water for algae feed. Present estimations show these technologies could supply all the transportation and oil heating needs for that country and end its debilitating fossil oil addiction and its nasty political consequences.

There are problems to be worked out in the supply and consumption of the biodiesel like keeping B100 from getting too cold in storage tanks to avoid gelling problems in our True North temperatures.^xv Such problems apply to any fuel/engine/economics/environment cluster but this one has a big bright light at the end of the tunnel, that magnificent orb which powers all life, Old Sol.

Biodiesel is not the fuel we (eventually) want. Even being way greener than our present diet, and very nearly renewable, it is not sustainable. It's clear that we must move away from energy sources that rely on combustion altogether to eliminate polluting emissions. However, just like the much vaunted modern hybrid vehicles, it could serve very well as a transition to ... well... just what future do we want? We do know that it must be sun powered (wind, photovoltaic, hydro, biomass, tidal, wave, etc...) and be efficient if we are to continue life here on our favorite planet in perpetuity. Luckily there always has been, and always will be more than enough sun power to run all our economies if we choose.^xvi And work for it!

So although I had biodiesel as a topic in mind we can see how innovation draws us naturally to many frontiers. Like my friend Tina says, “Everything is Everything”

Peter Judd, AScTechnologist, 
Ocean Meadow Farm
Mayne Island, BC, Canada

(Continued amazement and appreciation goes to the World Wide Web and all of us contributors to it.
Credits and references for all sourced content of this article can be found at www.sustainmayne.org/biodiesel/refs.html )

Richard Iredale, Peter Judd and Michael Dunn formed the Islands Sustainability Initiative (ISUNI) in the Fall of 2005 on Mayne Island, BC, Canada, to provide information for the stimulation of public discussion and innovation concerning our collective future.