Welcome to the party

By Jason Burroughs

Welcome to the newest addition to BiodieselSMARTER! On these pages, you will find news about the biodiesel industry, updates on regulatory issues, legal matters, announcements, and sometimes personal philosophy. My grandmother used to tell me I had diarrhea of the mouth, and I have sometimes been known to put my foot in my mouth (don't mix those metaphors).

Before we begin, let me tell you a little about myself. After test driving a Prius in 2005, I heard about biodiesel from a friend. A google search led me to an local messageboard, which led me to a meetup of people interested in using biodiesel. To sum up the next year, I wasted a lot of time trying to put together a coop on unsuitable land with unsuitable people. The fruit of the labor turned out to be the business formed - DieselGreen Fuels was born as a biodiesel distributor with an initial delivery of 300 gallons of B100 to my back yard, complete with full body spray as the hose popped out of the tote and onto my driveway.

Two and a half years later, we've got a vac truck, a fuel truck, employees, and a loyal customer base. Austin went from no biodiesel to the most number of biodiesel stations in America (35), thanks to my predecessors at Austin Biofuels. No thanks to our overreaching regulatory body, Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, we now have ONE biodiesel station. We are working hard to change that, and our collection of used cooking oil gets turned into the B100 that we sell to hundreds of customers.

Along the way, I've tried to further the cause in a number of areas. Things I've worked on: In 2007, I was the first company registered with the IRS to sell vegetable oil as a fuel in order to get a refundable tax credit; in 2008, I began an arbitration against the National Biodiesel Board to break their lock on health effects testing data for biodiesel, and bought a 2009 Jetta TDI to record my experiences using B100. In 2009, I was elected to be the Vice President of Membership of the Biodiesel Coalition of Texas, helped with the SBS conference, and started to participate in an effort to understand the effects of the brand new emissions systems on the ability to run B100 in 2008+ vehicles.

I've spoken at the Collective Biodiesel Conference every year; given presentations to vendors, partners, and customers; educated producers and distributors about the credits from RINs generated from producing biodiesel; shared my experiences through my company's blog; and through it all, managed to hang on to my job at a major tech company, where I work from home and consult enterprise customers on how to manage data storage. Since discovering biodiesel, I've traveled around the state of Texas, to California, Colorado, and even Colombia. I also got married and had a son, which mean more to me than all the biodiesel in Texas (there's not quite as much as tea in China, but we're working on it).

In addition to news I pick up on my own - from blogs, press releases, and personal connections - I invite you to share your news with me. Email me plant openings, plant closings, layoffs, hiring notifications, regulatory updates, lawsuits, industry gossip, or anything else that's on your mind. The IRS tells you that B100 isn't subject to road tax because it's not 4% paraffin? Email me! You hear about that Monsanto patents the DNA of an emu to make biodiesel from it's blood? Email me! For now, use jason@dieselgreenfuels.com and put "BLOG" in the subject line. Dedicated email address to come soon.

Stay up to date by subscribing to the RSS feed - right now, we just have a single feed for the magazine - feed://www.biodieselsmarter.com/rss.xml - but hope to have a feed just for the blog soon.

You may be wondering about the title, Through the Sight Glass. For those not familiar with the Appleseed biodiesel processor, a common element is the sight glass, a glass plug that gets inserted into a T fitting so that you can see the flow of liquid through the pipe. The title of the blog is a word play on Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Alice looks into a mirror, where nothing is what it seems. I chose this title as a reflection (pun intended!) of the incredible complexity of the biodiesel industry, and how issues are often nuanced to the point of being ridiculous. So let's take a look through the sight glass together and see what's on the other side.

My next post will talk about the biodiesel credit extensions that were passed at the last minute (including details you may not realize), a proposed change in taxation for biodiesel at the producer level, the 400 gallon "exemption" for homebrewers, ASTM changes, and more.

I want to thank Frankie for inviting me to blog here, and I'm looking forward to helping us all learn more about the industry we are part of!

Jason Burroughs