Defining Sustainability

The Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance (SBA) is well underway, with an Executive Director in San Francisco (Heidi Quante), a Board of Directors, some funding from somewhere, and a booth booked on the show floor of the fourth annual National Biodiesel Board conference that is coming up in February in Orlando.

Along the way they are rustling up stakeholders and pushing forward on the arduous process of defining sustainable biodiesel.

From time to time I jump into the SBA conversation, and I suppose it is no surprise that it hits the same road bumps and pitfalls that every sustainability conversation encounters. That is, what is sustainability?

I've bumped into this again and again--from sustainability banquets where I have collected awards, to sustainability luncheons where I have spoken, to entries in Energy Blog where I have raised the ire of many by spouting off on what I call "Coat and Tie Sustainability."

We are so busy hitching our wagons to the sustainability horse that we easily lose our way.

I've seen sustainability conversations run the gamut from sustainable golf tees to adolescent mental health in rural India to cocoa harvests in the Ivory Coast performed by child slaves. We get so wrapped up in shade grown fair trade organic bird safe coffee that we forget there is nothing sustainable about integrating a beverage into our daily diet that comes from three thousand miles away.

Which causes me to take the easy way out. Rather than engage in cryptic theoretical arguments about what could be sustainable with what, I revert back to energy. And the BTU, as it pertains to biodiesel, easily measures energy.

In order to be sustainable, we simply need to produce more energy than we consume. Every transaction needs to be equal to, or greater than the energy required for its completion.

In other words, we need to put a little more into the pot than we take out. And if we are not doing that, we are unsustainable.

Applying that logic to biodiesel, the greatest hope lies with the homebrewer. Those scavengers, making fuel from waste that is passing by, with minimal amounts of embodied energy in their operations, have the greatest chance of producing sustainable biodiesel.

Surely there are a handful of small commercial producers, like Piedmont Biofuels, who are working hard at producing sustainable fuel. But we are nowhere close to the target.

Today we are taking vastly more energy out of the fossil pot than the renewable energy we return to the world. Our operation is propped up by coal, petroleum, natural gas and propane, with a little assistance from the sun.

And a whole bunch of help from passionate people who are sacrificing their time and money in an attempt to figure out a way to make sustainable biodiesel feasible.

Our Co-op facility, which has been cobbled together over the years, and is powered exclusively by used fryer oil, designed largely by volunteers, is probably much closer to achieving sustainability than is the Industrial plant, where I work. And in the final analysis, it's not there yet either.

Like Industrial, the Co-op it takes more out of the pot than it puts back in.

Many claim this argument oversimplifies the matter at hand, and I often find myself in theoretical debates.

Imagine Darth Vader has opened a biodiesel plant on the other side of the fence from us. It is staffed by enslaved ewoks, but has an identical efficiency to ours, produces the exact same amount of fuel, and has the same embodied energy invested. Should we get more sustainability credit for being locally owned, for attempting to treat our people fairly? For not killing dolphins in our process?

Um. I suppose. But not really. I hate to sound heartless when it comes to enslaved ewoks, but the whole debate strikes me as off topic.

We can be as safe, as just, and as egalitarian as we want, but as long as we are consuming more energy than we produce, we are unsustainable.

I am glad the SBA exists, and I am happy to contribute where I can. I would like to see the debate shift to a laser focus on the creation of a Sustainable Biodiesel Label which consumers could use in their decision making for what sort of fuel they want in their engines.