Not all biofuels are bad news, argues Lyle Estill

A bunch of us used to trudge down to the shop behind the house and mix up a batch of biodiesel. We would make fuel out of waste vegetable oil that had been used to fry food in restaurants. And we would put our homemade fuel into our cars and trucks, and drive away.

Today those seem like carefree days. Our objective was simple: we wanted to meet our own fuel needs, and show others how to do the same. Certainly we have been interested in sticking a hot poker in the eye of the status quo, and we have often quipped about our desire to upend the giant top-down energy infrastructure that we find oppressive. But that was before biofuels went mainstream.

In an economy that is starved for energy, any energy gets a free pass. If you can commission a nuclear plant, dam a river, catch some wind or convert some sunlight to electricity in America today, you'll get a nice tax break and find a relaxed regulatory environment.

In such a world, both biodiesel and ethanol are jumping into the trough, and the two get lumped together as one. Because they are both liquid fuels from renewable sources, and because oil is becoming increasingly expensive, few seem to notice that biodiesel and ethanol are entirely different things.

Now that biofuels are apparently coming to the rescue, we find ourselves in a big conversation about scalability. When we first started going to biodiesel conferences, we were lucky to get a candidate for the school board to address our meagre crowd. These days the head of the Environmental Protection Agency takes the stage to tell us the future lies in our hands.

Those of us who dare join the conversation, often climbing out of a dumpster, setting down our rotary pumps and searching for clothing that is not grease-stained, are startled to find we are promoting a "techno-fix".

We find ourselves pitted against scientists who are busy calculating the number of BTUs that can be extracted from the biota on an annual basis, and comparing that to the amount of fossil energy necessary to power the global economy. We stand accused of using valuable food to power vehicles. Apparently we need every single square inch of America to get started.

Which was never our intention. Today our little biodiesel co-op meets the fuel needs of a couple of hundred families. We are building a plant that will meet the needs of 800 more. Scaling up for us means meeting the needs of a small community that is in search of a different way of being.

Which means we are ill-equipped to answer those who are busy working out how devastating it would be if biofuels were required to do it all. The best argument we can muster is "Stop being silly".

On one side of the fence is a dumpster full of discarded food. On the other side of the fence is a hungry family. Hunger has everything to do with how we distribute food to those who can afford it. When we jump into a waste stream, with our 55-gallon drums and our canoe paddles, and set out to meet our family fuel needs, we are not contributing to world hunger.

But those of us in grass-roots biodiesel make lousy apologists. Our ponytails, body piercings and sandals don't always play well for the corporate biodiesel interest. And it is true that the biofuels watershed breaks into distinctive streams. One is comprised of those who are motivated by sustainability. We are the ones who preach conservation, who cry out for local economies, and who focus mightily on reducing our ecological footprints.

Another stream is commercial biodiesel, which is motivated by greed and shareholder return. Biodiesel by the balance sheet allows for the importation of soybeans from Ecuador, the freighting of used fryer oil through the Panama Canal and the deforestation of the rainforest for oil-rich palm plantations.

There is a place in Brazil, a country famous for both its biofuels and its ecological devastation, where the dark water of the Rio Negro collides with the white water of the Amazon, and the two rivers run towards the sea together without mixing. Grass-roots and commercial biodiesel flow through a similar watershed, and it is easy to tell one from the other.

Lyle Estill is vice-president of Piedmont Biofuels Industrial in Chatham County, North Carolina. His new book, Biodiesel Power: the passion, the people, and the politics of the next renewable fuel (New Society Publishers), almost won this year's Blooker Prize

Read more from the New Statesman 'Heat and Light' energy supplement at

www.newstatesman.com/supplements/energy

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