One of the salient aspects of the Control Room these days is the activity of our members.

It seems that every other email, or phone call, is from someone who is either pulling fuel from the B100 Community Trail, or wanting to join the B100 community.  It’s nuts.

With our new “lean administration,” I’m on memberships.  Rachel is off having a baby, Amanda took a job with the government as a soil and water expert, and BP lost their grip on the Deepwater Horizon well in the gulf.

I’ve long made jokes about how our members like being “off the petroleum grid,” and being “free of Haliburton,” and of “having nothing to do with the war in Iraq,”   But this is ridiculous.

Last night Scott changed the routing on our Efueling system so that I could process new memberships from home.  Today I put nine new membership cards in the mail.

I believe that the highest the membership ever got was around 500.  After a winter on poultry fat derived fuel, and a price hike to 5.00/gallon-that is, after plenty of abuse, the membership shrunk dramatically.

I think that when we “became one” with the Coop we were down to about 200 members.  Rachel is working from home these days-to escape the pressure of the Control Room and the lab-and she figures we are back up to around 350 members.

We are back to adding one a day.

And I have to say the renewed interest is powered by BP’s gusher.  Apparently people are coming home from work, turning on the tube, being sickened by what they see, and taking personal action by joining us.

I don’t get any visual coverage from the Gulf, and my favorite coverage of the event comes from Evan, who used to deliver our fuel to the Trail and handle the membership.

Now that he is out there writing, I am busy activating fuel cards, and driving trucks around.

One thing I will say is that pressure like this makes tank inventories difficult.  In order to make Greg happy I have started delivering monthly graphs of Trail consumption.  As a forecasting tool they work great in the sleepy months of winter, but today they are largely useless.  Every time we add 5 new users to the 500 gallon tank in Carrboro, the game changes entirely.

I should note that Pittsboro has ironically become one of the hardest locations for which to gauge volume.  And I am not sure why that is.

I should also point out that Carolina Biodiesel in Durham is now well stocked with B100 and that people can pull product from them without a membership.

Today about 30% of our fuel is distributed to the membership on the Trail.  The rest goes to oil companies who deliver it to fleets in the form of lower percentage blends.  And today selling B100 on the Trail at 3.50 a gallon, plus an annual membership fee of 50.00 is a marginal undertaking.

But that’s OK.  I think the B100 Community Trail is the reason we came to biodiesel in the first place.  I like the current “membership crush.”  I’m glad that people are fleeing the petroleum grid and signing up.

I would like to see the membership be a higher percentage of the business.  This summer Chris is  building a station in Saxapahaw, over at Jeff Barney’s five star gas station.  Put us down for one more location.  And who knows what that will do to spike the membership.

Today I heard that BP has started taking crude oil onto a ship.  9,000 barrels per day.  Hopefully that is the beginning of the end of the nightmare.  Which might mean that membership in Piedmont will fall back to its usual background pace.  Nobody knows.

Right now I just want to do two things:  send out membership cards with bumper stickers and welcome letters, and move to Lousiana with a keg full of Dawn detergent to rescue wildlife from the “spill.”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 10:14 pm and is filed under Energy Blog. 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.