By: Greg Hanscom

Watching the Great Crisco Debacle of 2007 unfold was, to use a variation on the old cliché, like watching a car wreck in slow motion. The first to go was Jenae Gates’ Volkswagen Golf. “The fuel line has gelled so much that no fuel was getting to the fuel filter, let alone the injectors,” Gates’ husband, Evan Guilfoyle, reported to a Yahoo discussion group. He added, “My Jeep Liberty … has also been sputtering at highway speeds over 55 m.p.h.” It was 2:43 p.m. on October 30.

At 3:00, Mike Tegtmeyer reported lost power and sputtering in his VW Jetta. Gus Dopke reported similar symptoms in his Dodge Ram at 5:01. Joe Sugarman checked in at 5:46: “I’ve also had some problems with my Mercedes 300DT. Thought it was the fuel filters, changed them, but the sluggishness—especially up hills—has continued. Also my car wouldn’t start these last two mornings—and it ALWAYS starts.” At 6:45, Rich Dean wrote that his VW Beetle “conked out yesterday … It is at the Autobahn on York Road (Towed at $130) as we speak being looked at.”

By the end of the following day, there were two more cars in the pile-up. Susan Smith’s Jetta was sputtering, and Ben Robinson’s had quit running completely: “I had it towed to the VW dealer … turns out the tandem pumps were clogged, and the service guy attributed it to the use of biodiesel.”

Biodiesel—fuel brewed from vegetable oil or animal fat—has taken off in recent years, in large part because it offers an eco-friendly way to stay on the road, with minimal initial investment: It works in most standard diesel engines. Compared to cars that burn traditional diesel (“dino diesel” in biodiesel parlance), biodiesel vehicles cough up considerably fewer greenhouse gases and cancer-causing nasties. “Number two diesel [made from petroleum] is probably one of the most toxic fuels on the face of the planet,” says Davis Bookhart, director of the Sustainability Initiative at Johns Hopkins University. “If diesel was introduced today as a new product, the EPA would not approve it. It would not pass any health and safety regulations.” Plus, using biodiesel allows you to quit the foreign oil habit and all the baggage that comes with it.

Through much of the 1990s, only the hardest-core eco-freaks burned biodiesel, brewing it in their garages from salvaged restaurant fryer oil. By the early 2000s, small biodiesel plants were popping up, creating fuel from virgin veggie oil, and scattered gas stations began carrying it. A parade of “veggie vans,” “greasecars,” and biodiesel-powered school buses circled the country. Celebrity endorsers like Willie Nelson told Americans that burning biodiesel was a patriotic way to support family farmers. Cities like Berkeley and Boulder began using biodiesel in their maintenance trucks, buses, and street sweepers. Legislatures—including Maryland’s—mandated that state fleets begin burning biodiesel. The U.S. Postal Service and the National Park Service started using a biodiesel blend, and Congress tossed in a dollar-a-gallon subsidy.

This year, biodiesel production in the United States will top 400 million gallons, up from 25 million gallons in 2004, according to the American Biodiesel Board, a trade group started by soybean producers. But, as the Baltimore biodiesel users would learn, the popularity has created a conundrum.

Theories abounded about what could be causing the troubles with the cars, all of which belonged to members of the Baltimore Biodiesel Cooperative, founded in 2006 to help the city’s biodiesel aficionados find a reliable, and relatively affordable, source of fuel. Some suspected there was water in the co-op’s 500-gallon tank, which sits outside the Mill Valley Garden Center and Farmers’ Market in Remington. Others suggested there might be some sort of sediment in the tank. Another theory held that the culprit was the recent cold snap: Biodiesel made from soybean oil becomes cloudy at around 35 degrees Fahrenheit; at 32 degrees it turns to, well, Crisco.

A mad flurry of phone calls and e-mails ensued. Co-op board member Mark Eckley, a microscopist at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, called the group’s supplier to see if other users had run into similar problems. He was told that tracking the fuel to its source could take weeks, but he did acquire a specification sheet showing that the fuel had begun to cloud up at 52 degrees—far warmer than it should have. Something was amiss. That something became painfully apparent on November 8, when an inspection of the tank revealed, in the words of one co-op member, “a two-ton stick of butter.”

The co-op was learning the hard way that the business of biodiesel is changing. Until recently, most biodiesel was made from soybeans grown in the United States. But this summer, the price of soybeans shot up, and biodiesel producers began looking abroad for new “feed” crops—in particular, palm oil from South America, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Horror stories emerged about farmers burning rainforest to make way for palm plantations.

Palm oil, it happens, coagulates at around 50 degrees. “It took a while to settle in, but it finally dawned on us that we had something that probably wasn’t soy,” says Bookhart, the co-op’s president. “It might have come from South America. It might have come from one of those burnt rainforests.”

On the evening of November 15, co-op board member John Shepley headed to Mill Valley, toting a small tank equipped with a heating element. Shepley, an engineer by training who now grows plants for green roofs, heated forty gallons of biodiesel to about 150 degrees, then poured it into the tank. His plan was to melt the massive clot inside, then pump out the oil. But after three hours, the scheme had melted only about a third of the tank’s contents.

It was time for extreme measures, and the man for the job was the co-op’s vice president and unofficial “tech guru,” Ilya Goldberg, a researcher who works with Eckley at the National Institute on Aging. “I’m going down to the co-op tomorrow morning to unleash a ghynormous can of woop-ass of medieval proportions on that beeyo****,” Goldberg announced in an e-mail the following afternoon. He rented a pair of diesel-powered “salamander” heaters and fired them, point-blank, at the tank. That evening, he had good news: “Over a million BTU-hours and 15 gallons of diesel later, the salamanders melted 150 gal. of Agent X.” The co-op’s landlord hauled the fuel away to his farm, where it will sit until spring.

When all was said and done, the Crisco clogged close to a dozen cars, precipitating hundreds of dollars in mechanics’ fees. Remarkably, the co-op seems to have lost only a handful of its seventy-odd members because of the incident. Volunteers re-opened the filling station at Mill Valley in late November, selling a “winter blend” of biodiesel and kerosene, which stays liquid at much colder temperatures. By late December, Eckley reported that sales were close to pre-debacle levels.

If the Great Crisco Debacle holds a lesson, it is something like this: With biodiesel, as with organic food, you miss the point if it’s done on an industrial scale and shipped all over the planet. Now, many in the movement are returning to their roots, to fuel that is brewed locally, on a small scale. Except for homebrewing, the approach has not yet worked in Baltimore. “It’s very difficult to convince banks and financial institutions to invest,” says homebrewer Sebastian Sassi, who looked into building a plant that could process about two million gallons of biodiesel annually. The biggest barrier, he says, is the high price of feedstock such as soybean oil.

But there’s a way around this, according to Rob Del Bueno, an Atlanta entrepreneur and musician. Del Bueno (surf-rock fans know him as “Coco the Electronic Monkey Wizard” from the band Man or Astro-Man?) says there is an economic “sweet spot” for small-scale biodiesel manufacturing. He gets his feedstock free: His nonprofit Refuel Biodiesel collects waste oil from restaurants and cafeterias, then creates biodiesel in a custom-made manufacturing plant housed in an industrial shipping container. He makes about 250,000 gallons a year and distributes it from a mobile fueling station housed in another shipping container. Refuel Biodiesel has started manufacturing the mini processing plants and is considering turning the business into a franchise.

On the national level, an outfit called the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance—co-founded by Willie Nelson’s wife, Annie—is trying to teach people about the difference between eco-friendly and not-so-friendly biodiesel. Actor Woody Harrelson narrates a new film on the subject called Revolution Green, and the alliance is working on a certification program to stamp biodiesel as locally and responsibly grown. “Willie and Daryl Hannah and Woody Harrelson did a good job of promoting biodiesel,” Nelson says. “But people didn’t recognize that there was a difference.”

The Baltimore Biodiesel Co-op, meanwhile, has tracked the soybean oil in its winter blend, now selling for $4.30 a gallon, to an outfit in Cincinnati. Southern Ohio isn’t exactly “local,” but it’s better than the alternatives, says Bookhart. Down the road, he predicts that we’ll all be driving electric cars, but biodiesel can provide a relatively green way to get there. In 2007, the co-op sold 10,000 gallons of biodiesel. “That’s 10,000 gallons of regular diesel we’ve displaced,” says Bookhart. “It’s a drop in the bucket, but our co-op is making a real calculable difference.”

—Greg Hanscom



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