In biodiesel we trust

BACKSTORY • City fleet leads way as alternative fuel rule set to kick in

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, May 22, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (15 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / P0RTLAND TRIBUNE

StarOilco’s David Gifford fills a Portland Water Bureau truck with biodiesel. The trucks use B99, a 99.9 percent biodiesel blend, most of the year but switch to a 50 percent blend in the winter months since cold temperatures turn certain kinds of biodiesel into gel.

The Dodge Ram pickups lumber by. As do the Chevy Blazers. Small yachts with wheels. All spewing stuff from their exhausts. All gobbling down some version of petroleum that — more than a few people around here will remind you — will further enrich a multibillion-dollar corporation in Houston.

And eventually, of course, some sultan in the Middle East.

But on this small island amid the exhaust fumes — at the corner of Southeast Seventh Avenue and Morrison Street in ever-sustainable Portland — people are making what they perceive to be a stand for change.

They’re putting mustard oil and canola-seed oil in their fuel tanks. Or cooking oil or animal fat. Or at least the liquid-fuel version of some or all of that.

Biodiesel.

“I said, ‘Somebody’s gotta start doing this,’ ” says Dr. Dan Berger, an emergency-room physician who lives in Southeast Portland. He says this as he fills up his 1984 Mercedes-Benz station wagon — bought two years ago with his ex-wife specifically so they could run it on biodiesel — here at Jay’s Garage at Seventh and Morrison.

Jay Dykeman started selling biodiesel — B99, the almost pure stuff, containing less than 1 percent petroleum diesel — less than two years ago and now sells more of it than anyone else in the city, he says.

“We put it in and man, about a week after we put it in, the bloggers found out and boy, the word was out and the buzz was on,” he says.

The fuel that he knew nothing about two years ago now makes up 50 percent to 60 percent of his total fuel sales.

And these days — in Portland, at least — Jay’s is no longer a desolate island amid the gas fumes.

Biodiesel quickly has become big — in a big way — in the city.

More than 600 city vehicles — especially those working in city bureaus overseen by Commissioner Randy Leonard, who has become a biodiesel evangelist over the past two years — now run on biodiesel.

And in fewer than three months, many more Portlanders will be seeing a lot more of biodiesel. That’s because on Aug. 15, every service station in the city that offers diesel will have to offer diesel partially made up of biodiesel.

The ordinance, forwarded by Leonard, also requires that all Portland gasoline contain at least 10 percent ethanol — a renewable fuel distilled primarily from corn — by Nov. 1.

Service station owners are less than happy about the mandate.

Many advocates for biodiesel, meanwhile — who see the alternative fuel as a way to clean the air, combat global warming and promote national energy independence, all at the same time — are very happy about it.

Portland may be the first city in the nation to have such a mandate, says Kevin Considine, the Sustainable Economy program director for the Oregon Environmental Council in Portland.

“This is the first municipality … saying: ‘We’re going to take control of this and do it,’ ” Considine says. “It shows that they’ve got a commitment to greenhouse gas reductions.”

But — besides wondering what biodiesel can do for greenhouse gas emissions — Portlanders might be wondering a more basic thing. Like what is biodiesel?

Does it really do what it’s advocates say it does?

Won’t it hurt my vehicle? And why does it sometimes smell like french fries?

Here are some of the not-always-simple basics:

It cleans the air — most of the time

To understand how cleanly biodiesel burns, you first have to understand that there are various kinds of biodiesel.

B5 biodiesel — what the city ordinance will require that Portland service stations offer — is mostly regular petroleum diesel. (It’s made up of 95 percent petroleum diesel and5 percent biodiesel, thus B5.) B20 is 20 percent biodiesel.

B99 generally is about 99.9 percent biodiesel. (A federal tax credit that provides a significant subsidy to biodiesel producers has the strange requirement that some petroleum be blended into the biodiesel to receive the credit.)

Most studies and experts say that burning B99 or B100 produces significantly fewer hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and particulate matter — all forms of air pollution — than petroleum diesel. Even B20, and to a lesser extent B5, produces fewer polluting materials.

At the time same time, B99, B100 and B20 all produce a bit more nitrogen oxide — a component in smog — than petroleum diesel. Some early studies seem to indicate those higher levels may decrease when the biodiesel is blended with the lower sulfur petroleum diesel that federal mandates have required since last fall.

Considine says using even B5 is “significantly better than using petroleum products.”

But Kevin Downing, with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has some reservations.

Many newer gasoline-powered cars have emissions control devices that do a much better job of containing pollution than do older diesel vehicles, or even fairly new diesel vehicles, Downing says.

So if you have already have a diesel vehicle, it makes sense to use biodiesel rather than petroleum diesel. But if you have a late-model, gasoline-powered car, it’s actually worsening air pollution to trade that in for a diesel vehicle just to use biodiesel.

“People have the idea that all they need to do to clean up a diesel engine is put biodiesel in it, and that’s not the case,” Downing says.

While many biodiesel advocates are less negative than Downing about biodiesel and air quality, he and they do agree that the biodiesel option soon will improve considerably. By 2009, all new diesel passenger vehicles will be required to have pollution control devices that in essence will make their emissions as clean as newer gasoline-powered cars. Then using biodiesel should lower their harmful emissions even more.

And biodiesel does much more to combat global warming than petroleum. That’s because the plants used to make it take carbon dioxide — which helps contribute to global warming — out of the atmosphere.

But the larger point, Considine says, is that people concerned about air pollution, global warming and energy independence need to think about more than just the type of fuel they use. “It just doesn’t make sense to have a Chevy Tahoe using biodiesel if it gets five miles to the gallon,” he says.

A funny thing happened on the way to environmental nirvana

There is always, of course, the law of unintended consequences. And so there is with biodiesel.

One of the early and predominant ways biodiesel was and still is produced is through palm oil.

But to keep up with the demand for palm oil, planters in Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere are clearing large areas of tropical rain forests to make room for their palm plantations. That clearing is destroying the habitat for a range of endangered species, and it contributes to further global warming.

That problem is the main reason that in drafting his proposal that became the city ordinance, Leonard prohibited any of the biodiesel sold in Portland to come from palm oil.

But the palm oil problem only points to the larger issue — that, in analyzing the benefits of any alternative fuel, you have to consider the environmental costs of planting, fertilizing, growing, harvesting and transporting the product that becomes the fuel.

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