In The Media - The Heart of the City Runs on Biodiesel Fuel

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Posted by: Community Fuels

11/6/2005

San Francisco, CA- An emergent technology that might qualify for sainthood but smells of sinful fried foods when burned, biofuels are an alternative fuel that has gotten a motley array of folks -- from hard-core environmentalists to businessmen to farmers -- very excited.

Sunday, November 6, 2005 The Heart of the City Runs on Biodiesel Fuel
San Francisco, CA- An emergent technology that might qualify for sainthood but smells of sinful fried foods when burned, biofuels are an alternative fuel that has gotten a motley array of folks -- from hard-core environmentalists to businessmen to farmers -- very excited. San Francisco Chronicle By Carol Lloyd http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/11/06/REGVTFJA041.DTL Last month as I slalomed through the city streets to pick up my kindergartner in my 1989 Mercedes, a latte in a paper cup wedged between my knees, I thought about how slippery the slope of urban life often is. The Green Festival was coming to town this weekend, and as usual there were a thousand commendable building-related subjects: bamboo cabinets, eco-friendly solar design, green prefab houses. But I was thinking about cars. The high price of gasoline and the even higher cost of war coupled with my commute across town suddenly made the city seem more about cars and fuel than any house or office tower or museum. And like so many San Francisco drivers, I'd been living a contradictory existence between spouting off about the geopolitics of the oil industry and pumping gallon upon gallon of its increasingly unaffordable dino-juice into my tank. Furthermore, I had just learned the ugly truth about myself when I went to get my car smogged: I am a "gross polluter." In her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs evoked the city as an organic entity -- a living, breathing place that thrives or dies, and that influences the life of its inhabitants in a million unseen ways. I like to think of myself as fairly green in my habits, but getting tagged a gross polluter made me stop. I'm very aware of my city's effect on me. With a kid in public school across town and a house in a neighborhood not easily accessible by Muni, I needed a car. But as a driver, I worried about my effect on the city. Without becoming a car-free evangelical, how could I redeem myself? I looked into hybrid cars like the Prius, which offer great gas mileage but still produce the noxious by-products of gasoline engines. And the price -- ouch. A couple of assiduously worded Google searches led me straight into the viscous underworld of biodiesel and veggie oil fuel. An emergent technology that might qualify for sainthood but smells of sinful fried foods when burned, biofuels are an alternative fuel that has gotten a motley array of folks -- from hard-core environmentalists to businessmen to farmers -- very excited. As one biodiesel advocate put it at a Canadian rendering conference last year, "Biodiesel is the hottest, sexiest thing going on in Canada right now." Virtually any diesel car can run on biodiesel, a fuel made from veggie oil processed with methane and lye. Unlike petroleum-based diesel fuel, this green alternative burns far cleaner and makes your engine run smoother, longer. According to an Environmental Protection Agency study (www.epa.gov/otaq/models/biodsl.htm), no-sulfur, carbon-neutral fuel has 47 percent lower carbon monoxide, 67 percent lower hydrocarbon emissions, 78.5 percent less carbon dioxide and lower particulate emissions than petroleum diesel. The one area of equal or greater emissions is nitrous oxide (known by dentists and their patients as laughing gas). Even more intriguing was the concept of straight veggie oil. Diesel engines, if converted for the purpose, can run smoothly on the old vegetable oil used to fry prawns and doughnuts! Old diesel Mercedes (not like my regular gas guzzler) are wonderfully affordable candidates. Plus, if you're willing to collect it from restaurants and filter it yourself, the oil is free. After spending a few weeks in a self-taught crash course about biofuel, I found myself face to face with the local prophet of biofuel himself, Ben Jordan. A 28-year-old civil engineer and founder of San Francisco Biofuels Cooperative, Jordan isn't a gearhead at all. He became interested in biodiesel and veggie oil fuel because of its relationship to the city's infrastructure. In a sense, he saw the city as a living organism in ways that even Jacobs failed to explore. Every year, the city spends precious resources cleaning out its sewers of FOG -- fat, oils and grease -- that have been poured down the drains by restaurants. By law, restaurants must dispose of their waste products -- grit, yellow grease (veggie oil) and brown grease (meat fat and scrapings). But because renderers charge $45 a month for the service, some restaurants skirt the law and pour it down the drain. "This is basically clogged arteries for the city," Jordan says. He estimates that the cost to the city related to grease in sewers runs into the millions of dollars, combining direct sewage maintenance, wastewater treatment and landfilling. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission says that the costs are difficult to estimate and that even if FOG were eliminated, the city would still need to maintain the sewers. "This isn't to throw cold water on the idea of biodiesel," the PUC's Steve Medbery says. "We support whatever will get FOG out of the sewers." Any way you look at it, grease in sewers is a staggering and senseless expense. According to a Wall Street Journal article in 2001 about grease in New York's sewers, local governments across the nation spend $25 billion a year maintaining their sewers, virtually all of that focused on grease removal. How much waste veggie oil do the city's restaurants produce? It's difficult to say, but Johnson estimates it's at least 500,000 gallons a year, with the rest of the Bay Area producing an additional 2.5 million gallons. Ideally, biodiesel created from the city's restaurant veggie oil could fuel the diesel Muni buses and the brown grease (animal fat and food particles) could be turned into methane, which can create a biogas, for compressed natural gas cars. But as with all visionary plans, there are political and logistical hurdles on every front. Darling International, the multinational rendering giant that collects most of the waste oil in the city, has a powerful lobby and has helped shape legislation that makes collecting used veggie oil increasingly complicated and expensive for individual waste veggie oil fuelers. But for Jordan, cleaning out the arteries of San Francisco to produce a relatively eco-friendly fuel is only part of his vision of an emerald city. As an engineer, he believes we need to rethink some basic assumptions about what urban life entails. "I see the absurdity, the unethical, unquestioning approach that we have to building our cities," he says. "We keep pouring concrete for more roads ... even though we know that 20 percent of greenhouse gases come from concrete production. We keep building cities that create an overdependence on cars." In his private practice as a civil engineer, he helps clients set up composting toilets -- toilets that use no water -- and gray-water systems that catch water from showers to irrigate gardens. But health codes ban all such practices in San Francisco. "All I ever wanted to be was an organic gardener," Jordan says. "But somehow I ended up being a civil engineer and living in the city. But then I realized that that's perfect. Cities are just like farms -- it's all about water and soil." He says that for the city to reinvent itself, it would need to change not only its sewers but its street life. "Look at this," he gestures at the idling cars lined up at a nearby take-out fast-food joint, and points out the roar of the nearby freeway and the landscape of cars and concrete: "This is bleak and gray. ... There's trash everywhere and convenience stores filled with junk food." He recommends that San Francisco somehow give one-fifth of its concrete space back to nature. By narrowing streets in neighborhoods like the Outer Sunset where streets are wide and little used, the city could create green belts with edible fruit, rainwater catchers and gray-water systems. "When I travel though the streets of the city, I see cherry trees, plums, figs. I see birds and bees, and small cisterns catching rainwater. We could catch enough rainwater to use all summer," he says. "Living in the city could be extremely lovely." Although this may sound like whimsical "daygreening," Jordan has kept in mind a fact that we too often forget: The city runs on energy -- be it the fuel from oil drilling or our imaginations. It's what we make it, and as we make it, so too it will make us. Page K - 4 E-mail Carol Lloyd at surreal@sfgate.com.
	Carol Lloyd

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