Grays Harbor port readies for biodiesel plant, TexCom Awards Contract to Lurgi PSI 35 mgy Biodiesel Facility

Grays Harbor port readies for biodiesel plant
Seattle Post Intelligencer - USA
Grays Harbor County will be home to an enormous biodiesel production plant under an agreement announced Tuesday involving Seattle-based Imperium Renewables. ...
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TexCom Awards Contract to Lurgi PSI 35 mgy Biodiesel Facility
RenewableEnergyAccess.com - Peterborough,NH,USA
... TexCom has executed a preliminary engineering agreement with Lurgi PSI, of Memphis, Tennessee, to build a 35 million gallon per year (mgy) biodiesel plant at ...

OK, OIL 'ER UP
San Jose Mercury News - CA, USA
... Her 1983 diesel runs on refined biodiesel from the pump, or cooking oil from Costco or used frying grease from a restaurant near you. ... Think biodiesel. ...

VEGETABLE OIL SMOOTHS STUDENT'S COSTLY COMMUTE

• Audio: How do you run a Mercedes on vegetable oil?
• Find ongoing coverage of rising gas prices in our special section

Three days a week, 29-year-old Autumn Chute hops into a car nearly as old as she is for a monster round-trip commute from Napa to San Jose.

She doesn't scowl, growl or grumble about the price of gas. In fact, she smiles at her good fortune. No, she's not nuts. She's high on vegetable oil, the cheap, clean-burning fuel that makes her Mercedes go.

Just what kind of vegetable oil, you ask? Whaddya got?

``Soybean oil, if you can find it, works the best,'' she says, ``or straight canola.''

Chute, a speech pathology student at San Jose State, is among a small army of drivers bypassing the gas pump and heading for the Wesson when it comes to filling up.

Her 1983 diesel runs on refined biodiesel from the pump, or cooking oil from Costco or used frying grease from a restaurant near you. All she needed was a veggie-oil conversion kit she had installed for about $700.

Fringe fuels are moving mainstream as gas prices soar. Think biodiesel. Willie Nelson is selling it. Daryl Hannah is drinking it. And manufacturers are producing it -- 75 million gallons sold in 2005 compared with 25 million the year before.

Chute didn't start out trying to beat the high cost of gas. She just wanted to save the planet and liberate herself from big oil, which she sees as a cause of the war in Iraq.

Asian cuisine

But spending half of what she would each month on gasoline doesn't hurt.

While you're scrambling for the cheapest gas in town, Chute is grilling Napa restaurants on their fryers.

``I find the best sources to be Asian food, sushi, Japanese, Vietnamese, because they're frying mostly vegetables,'' she says.

That means no animal fat. Animal fat and shortening are bad news. They clog things, like fuel pumps, fuel lines and arteries.

``If they say shortening fryer oil, I say, `OK, no thanks,' '' Chute says of restaurants. ``And then I also know I'm not going to eat there either.''

Chute has found two spots in town that are four-star when it comes to feeding her Mercedes.

One is a Vietnamese place that puts grungy oil out for weekly pick-up. The other is a falafel joint that calls when it has enough grease to make it worth her while.

Chute, who collects about 25 gallons of grease a month, pours the dirty oil into five-gallon jugs and carts it home. There she dumps the lubricous liquid into a 55-gallon drum. Within a week, any water in the brew separates from the oil. Chute siphons the oil off the top and pours it through a cloth filter to screen out fried crumbs.

$2.40 a gallon

Used grease is the best deal. Restaurants give it away. If Chute needs more fuel than her connections can supply, she heads to Costco for jugs of soybean oil at $2.40 a gallon, compared with $3.18 for regular at the pump outside or $3.40 for petroleum diesel elsewhere.

``I get some funny looks because I'll pour it right into my tank in the Costco parking lot,'' she says. ``People look at me like, `What the heck are you doing?' ''

Or she can go the more conventional route and for about $3.32 a gallon fill up at one of the handful of gas stations that sell refined biodiesel at the pump.

Chute says Sparky gets about 30 miles to the gallon on biodiesel and about 28 running on clean or dirty vegetable oil. Sparky? Oh yes, the car has a name. It's a scruffy 1983 silver four-door 300 Turbo Diesel, with more than 250,000 miles on it. Chute and Sparky are close, seeing as they can spend up to four hours together in heavy traffic during her 160-mile round trip.

Why live in Napa? Chute's partner, Moxie Stratton, is studying in nearby Vallejo. And why should both of them have miserable commutes?

Maybe miserable is too strong a word. Chute delights in the reactions of other motorists who get a whiff of her car.
``It depends on what oil you're burning, because they all smell a little bit different,'' she says. ``The Vietnamese place smells like tempura. That's the one that makes me hungry.''

After class earlier this week, Chute fired up her diesel on Third Street and pulled away -- smokelessly -- from the curb. With gas prices soaring, Sparky smelled like only one thing that day.
A winner.