plenty of grease in an oil state

By Will Taygan

More in the Spring 2009 issue

Five years ago our 1981 VW pickup crossed the Alaska state line with a little B100 in the main tank and straight filtered vegetable oil in the old Plantdrive SVO system. 

In the bed were the last couple of jugs of homebrew from our little North Cascades biodiesel co-op.  I was hoping to hook up with a couple other brewers in Anchorage and join another co-op, but instead found a barely nascent biodiesel scene.  

There were a couple folks down in Homer; at least one guy was brewing in a 55 gallon drum system.  There was another guy in South Anchorage with a FuelMeister.  He had to insulate his entire shed just to keep the reaction warm.  

And of course there were a few other SVO conversions driving around.

I quickly learned that Alaska was exporting nearly all of its 500,000 gallons of used cooking oil and dumping salmon carcasses which contained an estimated 13 million gallons of fish oil every year.  

The local grease scene was virtually untapped.  We could turn away grease that didn't meet our clear Canola standards.  

But interest was growing- along with fuel prices- and there was a need for cooperation within the growing community.  

In late 2004, with sponsorship from the local Sierra Club, a few of us started the Alaska Biodiesel and SVO Network.  We set up booths at festivals, lobbied local government and encouraged tour operators to burn biodiesel.  

Most entities were supportive; creating a local market to recycle waste is an easy idea to promote.  The city of Anchorage even sent out letters encouraging local restaurants to donate their oil to the local backyard brewers.

Less B100, More SVO
There are a few reasons biodiesel isn't more widely used in Alaska.  
The state does not have a single commercial production facility, no one is actively distributing biodiesel and you can't buy it at any retail pumps. 

Our markets are small and remote.

For half the year it's freezing cold and biodiesel doesn't like the cold. There is one guy out in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley who runs B100 year-round, but he parks inside and makes sure his tank never really cools off.

The rest of us use a few common strategies.  The first is to run B100 all summer, blend in the shoulder seasons and run petrodiesel in the cold.  Some experimental souls skip the biodiesel brewing, and blend pure vegetable oil during the warm season, but we don't encourage that.  

The second strategy is to keep it warm. Adding heat works well, but by the time a fully heated two-tank system is installed, those with strong enough injection pumps often choose to run straight vegetable oil.

The Colder, the Warmer
Although Alaska has a healthy population of big American diesel pickups, everyone in the state needs heat for the winter. 

The main population center surrounding Anchorage burns locally drilled natural gas.  But Alaska's second city, Fairbanks, is all about heating oil.  A few folks up there are running B30 in their furnaces, but they are still searching for the holy grail of an economical, easy to use, maintenance-free boiler that will burn cheaper straight vegetable oil.  It seems that many of the waste petroleum-oil burners still gum up burning pure waste vegetable oil.

Will Taygan is the owner of Arctic Vegwerks, and coordinates the Alaska Biodiesel & SVO Network.