Greg came to us from New York. His internship was for the winter semester of 2007. When he finished in the spring, he gave up his amateur status as fuelmaker, and joined us at Industrial. Here is his
journal :

Biodiesel Man

Greg went from Intern to Grease Collector to Production to Research, where he lives today. He has become a critical part of our management team and a central part of Piedmont's Brain Trust.

In the little world which I inhabit, biodiesel somehow creeps into every conversation. It’s like I have a friend with a very exciting life that we can live vicariously through. The first time I met him (it’s him to me, no offense) was in Flagstaff, Arizona where I was thinning forest and building trails in an Americorps program. I was impressed by the fuel, but somewhat unimpressed by the bus full of hippies that brought him. He and other alternative energies where on my mind in Moldova, where I stayed for 2 years trying to accomplish something useful, but the timing wasn’t right. Finally, when I returned to the US in November of 2006, I could put some energy into getting to know him.

I came across Piedmont Biofuels searching for internships and jobs at idealist and I was lucky enough to come down for my interview when Girl Mark visited Pittsboro to do a short biodiesel class. The first thing you notice about the folks who really hang out with biodiesel (not the one’s who just say they do) is that they are never quite normal. Girl Mark’s name, in every informal and most formal uses, is still Girl Mark. Matt Rudolf went to Guatemala with the money he got from selling his car and had no institutional backing whatsoever (the undertone of our first conversation was “Peace Corps is for wussies”). I’m always hearing the tail end of stories about what Lyle did “in his youth”. The other thing you notice is that they are motivated, sharp, and have a different and very valuable view of the world. The uninitiated might confuse them with some segment of hippies, but then frankly, most of the uninitiated can’t even keep up with them.

I was out of my element in every way possible. I knew little about biodiesel. I could not weld, nor plumb, nor choose the appropriate pump based on the situation. I haven’t worked in a lab since 11th grade when I did assays to measure protein levels in egg yolks. These were skills that biodiesel likes (not the egg thing exactly, but certainly the others), and I had none. I thought if I could buddy up with biodiesel maybe I could pick up a thing or two. So when Matt said I was in, I prepared to learn.

The coop is a great place to get to know biodiesel and to learn what biodiesel needs from you because nothing is ever (ever!) finished. The wetlands, the oil water separator, the bubble wash and dry, and the heat exchangers in the reactor were just a few things that we interns changed. We accomplished these tasks in the time honored tradition of trial and error, with a healthy dose of error. We soon realized that plumbing is pretty easy, pumps can be understood if you know where to look, and that most of the time you don’t need to know how to weld. Experience in making batches helps to improve your visual, tactile, and sometimes olfactory understanding of biodiesel and it can save you time. It didn’t take long before we were being productive and though clearly still novices, we knew biodiesel better than Joe Public.

And thankfully we got to tell Joe Public that at least once a week. A large part of our job was to go around to community colleges, seminars, sustainability events, and generally wherever Matt said to let people briefly cross paths with biodiesel with the hopes that they want to meet him again soon. This served as a big confidence booster for us interns. At Piedmont we were at the bottom of the biodiesel knowledge totem pole, but we could give a great and convincing speech to most anyone else. It also gave us a chance to understand the reality of people’s perceptions of biodiesel, from the “how much does it cost to convert my car to run biodiesel” person to the ever-present “what about NOx” guy. And even though there are a lot of questions, it usually doesn’t take much convincing for people to see that biodiesel has an important role to play in our energy present and future.

My internship at Piedmont Biofuels was a perfect stepping stone into the industry, just as internships should be. I feel lucky that they offered me to stay on to make fuel at the industrial facility, so even though the housing is not great, the pay is worse, and the grease stains are permanent, the experience was truly one-of-a-kind.

In staying on project, not only do I get to continue to hang out with biodiesel on a daily basis, but I also see the rest of the not-quite-normal Piedmont staff. It’s not every day that you meet the type of people who work at Piedmont, and it’s almost never that you see so many in the same place. It takes a pretty special someone to attract so many good folks – that’s our friend biodiesel.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 8:50 am and is filed under Intern's Journals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.