By Stephanie Schupska
University of
Georgia
The biodiesel topic is hitting the lips of those working in
places ranging from labs to government regulations offices. As
fuel prices continue to mount, many Americans have started
hunting ways to make transportation more economical.
And that includes the production of biodiesel.
“Biodiesel has true scale-ability,” said Rob Del Bueno of the
Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. “It can be made in a
multimillion-gallon tank or in a 2-liter bottle in a kitchen
if done carefully.”
Del Bueno knows this firsthand. After college, he promoted a
band that played gigs wherever they could get them. To save
money, they converted the tour van to run on vegetable oil
taken straight from the fryers at the bars where they played.
Del Bueno was hooked, not on the band, but on the fuel they
used. He started tearing apart engines, making his own
biodiesel and running his car on it. He then started making it
for his friends. After an article in a local newspaper, the
Environmental Projection Agency and the Internal Revenue
Service also got interested, and he was audited and slammed
with fees.
From the curious to the Georgia legislature, interest in
biodiesel is picking up steam.
According to Ryan Adolphson, director of the University of
Georgia’s Biomass Processing Pilot Plant Facilities, from 1995
to 2005, four Georgia bills on biomass were introduced. In 2006
alone, at least eight bills came before the state legislature
pertaining to biomass energy in general with six bills directly
targeting biodiesel.
In fact, Georgia Senate Bill 636 that passed in 2006 makes it
illegal for someone to produce biodiesel for resale if that
biodiesel does not meet standard specifications. And testing
for those specifications is expensive.
A license for a small biodiesel producer, who is someone who
produces less than 250,000 gallons a year, costs $2,500 per
year. That doesn’t include the costs for extensive tests to
make sure the product is engine and road-ready.
“It’s really easy to make biodiesel. To make it right is really
hard,” said Dan Gellar, who is on the UGA engineering
department faculty and has been researching biodiesel for the
past 10 years.
According to Dan Walsh of National Tribology Services Inc.,
those hoping to produce biodiesel for resale should expect to
ask for a loan between $1 million and $2.5 million just to
cover startup costs, and then expect to pay between $800 and
$1,300 for each complete test a lab runs on each sample from
each batch they produce.
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” Greg Hopkins said
of the biodiesel movement. “It’s a chemical manufacturing
operation from the largest scale to the smallest. You have to
factor agriculture on one end and fuel on the other and
regulations on both. The bottom line is that it’s hard, but
it’s incredibly rewarding if you do it.”
Hopkins is a biodiesel producer and owns U.S. Biofuels in Rome,
Ga. It’s his fuel that’s flowing through the first biodiesel
pump in Athens, Ga., which opened Tuesday, May 16, at the price
of $2.92 per gallon.
As the new industry takes its first few steps, “the biomass
industry needs to work together and be directly involved in the
legislative process,” Adolphson said. “This means that
agriculture and industry have to determine together what
realistic goals and targets can be achieved.”
This includes everyone from people who want to run biodiesel in
their own tractors to large producers, he said.
(Stephanie Schupska is a news editor with the University of
Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.)
