Well, Lyle’s gone and done it again.
Lyle’s my boss, and his antics often grace the pages of this blog. In order to increase awareness of clean, renewable diesel fuel made from vegetable oil, he has founded
To get people to use biofuel, first you have to get them to buy a vehicle powered by a diesel engine. Second, you have to have a reliable supply of fuel available.
While the hope is that Piedmont Biofuels will eventually have a local refinery, in the mean time Lyle has purchased a truck to deliver and pump B100 (as 100% biodiesel is known) to local customers. He had it painted “grease yellow” and stenciled with the Piedmont Biofuels logo. I think it turned out pretty well.
I’m still undecided about biofuel, at least for my own personal use. While small diesel-powered cars (I’m thinking about Andrea’s old Rabbit or the Jetta TDI) can get 40-50 mpg, diesel is foamy, nasty and smelly. Unless biodiesel was readily available, I wouldn’t want to drive a petrodiesel car.
Outside of availability, there’s cost. Biodiesel will sell for about US$3.50 a gallon. Now, if I were to exchange my pickup truck, which gets 20 mpg, for a 40 mpg car, it would be easy to justify the difference in price (i.e. even if I pay double for fuel I would still be getting twice the mileage for no net gain or loss). But being the frugal person Andrea has made me into, I would lean toward buying petrodiesel and halving my energy costs (albeit with a greater cost to the environment).
Also, there is a lack of small vehicles with diesel engines in this country. If I’m gonna do this, I want to do this. I want a vehicle that gets 100 mpg on diesel. Then I can run biodiesel and still come out ahead.
I just did a quick search on Autotrader.com for small diesels, and I found an ’84 Rabbit on the west coast for $1500. The funny thing was that for fuel type you could choose Gas, Diesel or “Alternative”. You can’t globally search on “Any Make”, but a search on Volkswagen and Alternative turned up a Passat – that runs on natural gas.
Oh well.