Back then it was 1000 gallons of B100.  Today it was 850 gallons of B20.  I’ve never been much of a B20 fan.  I remember one occasion when Matt and I were working a booth at a Guster concert and I was badmouthing the band for not running on B100.  Little did I know the lead guitarist was in the booth at the time. He went away furious.

Shutting up may not be my strong suit.

It’s been awhile since Piedmont played “Fuel Attendant to the Stars.”  We generally pass up the opportunities because of all the petroleum that’s involved.

But for some reason we took tonight’s Jack Johnson show.  It could be because he’s a great guy.  It could be because he means it. And it could be because I was trying to impress Elenore-a friend of mine in New York City who was supposed to join me for the fill.

I’m thinking she would have hated it.  Filling a tour at Walnut Creek involves a bunch of driving.  We had too much B100 on the truck to make the blend level work out, so Arlo and I dropped some product off at Larry’s Beans.  We then bought 960 gallons of petroleum diesel at a truck stop near Clayton.

That alone involved a long time in the hot sun, choking back petroleum fumes, which always give me a headache.

Wet hosing trucks is arduous and painful.  Slow and hot with a lot of attention to not spilling. Elenore would have hated it.

As we were working away-Arlo on the clipboard recording vehicle numbers and gallons received, and working the hose reel for me, a Frisbee landed at our feet.

And suddenly there was Jack.  He was out throwing Frisbee with the band.  He stopped and said hello, and thanked us for filling up his tour.  Later Arlo slipped over with an unused meter ticket. Jack autographed it for him.

Later we learned that Jack  stopped by the Piedmont booth where McCayne and Sam were working, got his picture taken and reflected on the work Arlo was doing.

I accidentally pulled some booth duty myself; showing up filthy from hoses and smelling like petroleum.  We shared the booth with the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance (SBA)-or perhaps better put-they shared their booth with us.  I was glad to hear Moya cutting on petroleum so that I could take the night off.

I had a good talk with Tanner of the SBA.  He’s a seasoned veteran of the concert circuit, and I learned the SBA has partnered with Reverb to arrange a whole bunch of biodiesel for the rock stars.  One of the interesting things about having the SBA involved is their commitment to providing locally made fuel to the stars.

I have to say that it is a big logistics commitment to fuel a tour.  Tonight we had a couple of buses that were awfully full before we arrived.  Which means I came home with several hundred gallons of B20 on the truck.  Fortunately McCayne and I are about to do some farm fills and will easily be able to find homes for the left over petroleum.

I passed through the Control Room around 10:30.  Greg was there.  He was surprised to see me hanging up the keys so late at night.  He seemed happy to hear we had filled up Jack Johnson.

I have mixed feelings.  Arlo pointed out that if we didn’t do it, the buses would fill with straight petroleum diesel, and 20% is better than nothing.  And I have to hand it to Reverb, and the SBA, and to Jack Johnson. Five years later they are still trying to roll the sustainable biodiesel boulder up the hill.

And I do like seeing Piedmont’s assets deployed.  Most Saturday nights our rolling stock is collecting dust.

Who knows?  I should say there was also the concert.  It was good lounging about with Bob and Camille, and Tami and my daughter Jess got to take in the show.  Perhaps a good time was had by all, and there are a few more gallons of biodiesel being burned in the world…

Nope.

From her cover shot, I couldn’t tell if I had met her or not.  She was holding a sheep.

My summer reading pile is already toppling over, but in deference to my deep love of Frankie, I decided to give Farm City a try.  Since I am committed to the notion that life is too short for a bad review, I only review books that I love.

And Farm City fits that description.  Part memoir, part textbook, part storybook, Farm City is an absolute page turner that I wished would go on forever.  It is one “eco-freaks” tale of subsistence farming in Oakland, graduating from vegetables to chickens, ducks and bees to pigs.  The works.

It’s a book about farming, and eating, and meaning, that accidentally provides some insight into the human condition.  Part Pollan, part Nabhoff, part Salatin, Novella spins a remarkable story of raising, killing, and eating in her urban terrain.

Her writing is strong and remarkable, and yet a great deal of her West Coast vocabulary had already been introduced to our project by Girl Mark.  What she calls “seed porn,” we already knew as “tank porn,” and what she calls “farm envy” we already knew as “pump envy.”

The book has a whiff of sustainable fuels in that her boyfriend does straight vegetable oil conversions and that she appears to occasionally work at Biofuels Oasis when she needs some walking around money to feed her rabbits.  But the book is not about fuel.  It’s about the human spirit.

And it is a fantastic story.  In her acknowledgements she references Jennifer Radke, who wrote Not a Gas Station, and who is a character in the book, and Lisa Margonelli who wrote Oil on the Brain.

Those of us in the woods of North Carolina, or perhaps the wilderness that is the Eastern Seaboard, cannot help but eat up Farm City.  Despite the fact that we too have chickens and produce and bees and pigs, we long to be as hip as those doing it in Oakland.

Among other things, we can’t ride bikes as much as they do…

That’s about the same number that met up last month at Tyler’s Tap Room in Apex.   And about the same number that connected at Mez in Durham.

The idea behind Grease Appreciation Night is for us to reward those restaurants that sign up for our Partners in Sustainability program, and that provide us with the feedstocks we need to make our fuel.

Tonight, in the afterglow of another successful evening, I have several thoughts about this endeavor.  Firstly, it is wonderful to connect drivers (and eaters) with the stuff their fuel comes from.

Secondly, it is great to connect face to face with those folks who are running around on our fuel.  Ward came dinner at Mez, came down to the plant to renew his membership, and while he was at it he arranged for the sale of a Mercedes to Spencer so that Spencer could leave the world of gasoline in the dust.  His new roommate, Jeremy, made it jokingly clear tonight that he could not abide a gasoline powered vehicle in the mix.

Don came out tonight.  He’s an old timer from Sanford who has contributed mightily to our project.  Many of us were delighted to see him again.

Tonight we provided Carolina Brewery with a framed certificate for them to hang in their waiting area.  We can thank Shaine and company for that one.  We sort of stole the idea from Blue Ridge Biofuels in Asheville, who has long been bestowing plaques on their restaurant partners.

Finally, there is another aspect to Grease Appreciation Night that should be noted.  It’s not just that the restaurant gets a crowd.  And it’s not just connecting with old and new biodiesel users.  It is all of that, and it is also just “us.”

Tonight I watched Leif and Rick talk across the table.  Leif designed our plant and oversaw its construction, and Rick is our trickster welder from our Design-Build group.  In their workaday lives they might say hello in the parking lot, but they would rarely have a chance to get down to it with one another.

They got along like a house on fire.  Perhaps it was the award winning beers. Or it could have been the onion rings.  But more likely it was the simple chance to sit across the table from one another and cut loose.

Earlier this month Moya had been discouraged by “Grease Appreciation Dinner” turnout.  She wanted growth.  I pointed out that it was different faces each time and that it was one of the few occasions that I had a chance to talk to Spencer in earnest.

Tonight she came down to my end of the table and agreed. We are a big project.  We seldom get a chance to relax with one another, and “Grease Appreciation Night” is a rare and wonderful time to be together.

But last night I went to the General Store Café with Joel Salatin, and a handful of his fans, and I was thrown off my normal routine.

Joel runs Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  Like me, he spends a lot of his time giving tours of his operation.  He typically opens his tours with lines like “I’m a fundamentalist Christian libertarian grass farmer,” and he routinely bashes the USDA, the IRS, and government in general.  His latest book is Everything I Want to Do is Illegal.

He was brought to town to kick off Central Carolina Community College’s new Natural Chef Program, with help from the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.  And he came by the plant for a tour before hand.

He was not surprised to learn that fuel is more heavily regulated than food production in this country, and merely shrugs at the notion of how petroleum has externalized its true costs.  He’s up against big slaughterhouses, big hide tanners, and big renderers.  There is little we can tell him about being a small business that pushes the envelope of societal change.

At the table last night was my friend BJ Lawson, who is currently running for Congress as a Republican.  BJ is a Joel Salatin fan that has invested heavily in local resilience and is about as far “right” as you can get.  In Canadian terms he would be described as “Right wing of Gordie Howe.”

About the time that I hit the chicken plant this morning; I received a panicked call from Leif.  There was some guy wandering around the project with a badge and a gun taking pictures and wanting records of fuel sales.

I pulled in.  He’d shaken up a farmer or two.

He was with the North Carolina Department of Revenue.  And by the time I arrived he was headed for Screech’s greenhouses.

It gave me a chance to reflect.  Last week I spent 3 days with the IRS-they at least made an appointment.  This week I spent a morning with the Fire Marshal.  He also scheduled.

I set down my backpack and showed the fellow around.  Gave him a tour of how we make biodiesel, brought him up into the Control Room, and pulled some records for him.  He seemed satisfied, and indicated he would like to bring a group of “Revenuers” back for an educational tour.

I told him I would be happy to, and talked about how we got the law changed back when Norris Tolson was Secretary of Revenue.  Back then home brewers in NC were required to post a 2000.00 bond in order to pay their road taxes.  That’s been changed to the first 2000 gallons of homemade are tax-free.

As he pulled away from the gate it dawned on me that I’ve spent four of the last five days on regulatory compliance.  For Leif it is closer to two of the last three months.

By the time we stay right with the EPA, the IRS, DOE, USDA, and NBB, we are pretty much “good” on the federal front. Then all we need to do is look after the compliance requirements from NC DENR, NC Revenue, NC Commerce, and the State Energy Office.  After that we merely need to conform to NFPA and SPCC codes for the Fire Marshal, and keep our business license current with the Town of Pittsboro.

When that is done, we can do some work.  Possibly try to make something and sell it to someone so that we can be in business.  Or something like that.

On days like this I feel the socialist in me is dying.  And I think I see how libertarians are created in the first place….

A RIN is a 38 character numeric code that we are required to generate each time we produce a gallon of fuel.  A gallon of biodiesel, in fact, is worth a RIN and a half.

The program was imposed upon the refiners of petroleum in order to force them to have some renewable fuels in their portfolios.  A RIN is sort of the renewable fuel equivalent to a “Renewable Energy Credit” or REC in the wind or solar business.

And like the early days of RECS, it has taken awhile for the market to evolve.

We’ve never been good at RINS.  When my brother Mark was alive, and running the administration side of the company, I used to complain that we were “not in the RINS business.”  He used to tell me to go out to his car and search the space between the seats, because I could find more money there than I could in RINS.

And he may have been right about that at the time.

I used to have a Monday morning conference call with my brothers Jim and Glen, and I used to tell them that I thought there was big value coming in the form of RINS.  They humored my enthusiasm-after all they have been listening to me talk about how “this is going to work” for years.

We’ve transferred RINS to obligated parties, we’ve given RINS away, we’ve cursed the regulatory burden they have imposed upon us, and we have benefited from a higher price per gallon from our petroleum customers, but we’ve never really been in the RINS market.  Until now.

A couple of months ago Leif was spending all of his time making biodiesel and running the plant.  I suggested he hire on some help to free him up to get us into the RINS business, and he leapt at the chance.  Link came back to join us, and Leif invested a bunch of time and brain cells in getting us registered, and into the RINS business.

Tonight we executed our first big trade, resulting in a nice raise on every gallon of fuel we deliver.

And from this point forward we will be monetizing the RIN value of every gallon.  Just as we have learned to monetize the spare pallets in the yard, we have now learned how to gain in the RINS market.

I’m delighted.  Finally.  If Mark were alive he would be “high fiving” every one on project.  And I think the future of the RINS market is strong, since the EPA’s approach has been to phase the RINS program in over time-obligating more and more petroleum vendors over time.

Here’s hoping that the RIN is one part of the policy layer that helps biodiesel find its proper home in America’s fuel mix…

It’s hard to say where it began, exactly.  It may have been at the sustainability pavilion at Shakori, where Pierre and a handful of folks got to talking about how they wished they could put their money to work locally.

I like to say it began with a loan I made to Diane and wrote about in the “Financing Ourselves” chapter of Small is Possible.

But  the beginning is perhaps less important than where we are now.

Mike and Tony brought Woody Tasch to town, and invited about thirty people to a conversation at the college.  Woody is the author of Slow Money, and the founder of a national movement that is currently under way.  The idea is to get people to invest in local food enterprises in a way that preserves capital and brings about resilience as a return.

His visit catalyzed our efforts and inspired us to get busy.  I’m not sure who it is who said “We need slow money fast,” but the notion stuck.  The Abundance Foundation had already dabbled in some micro-finance, and their board quickly  approved of our project. Within a week of Woody’s visit we had arranged 15K worth of pledges for loans and extended one to Lynette.

She’s the new baker in town.  And she needed two thousand dollars to get some baking equipment so that she could provide bread to Keenan’s Baker+Farmer CSA.

With a solitary loan in hand Tami and I headed off to the national BALLE conference in Charleston.  Woody was there.  He’s simply trying to change capitalism.  And the story of our little loan got some traction.

Carol took the story to the national Slow Money Conference in Vermont last weekend and was well received.  Last night at the General Store another 30 people showed up, and another 12K was pledged.

Which means we now have a potential pot of 25K to lend to area food shed projects.  Not a bad start.  It appears lots of people are interested in lending money to  growers, and processors, and chefs and to those folks who are engaged in keeping us fed.  What is rapidly emerging looks like a peer to peer matching service in which those with extra money are able to loan it to those in need.

I’m sure I am not the only person who came home impressed by the evening.  As the meeting ending, Paul pulled me aside and joked that when the financial collapse comes at least we will be eating well.  And I couldn’t agree with him more.

Nick Fox caught this shot of "The Crowd." He asks that Creative Commons "Non Commercial Rights" apply.

It’s funny.  In Small is Possible I had chapter titles like “Feeding Ourselves” and “Fueling Ourselves,” and when it came to the notion of “Financing Ourselves,” I gave our community pretty low marks.  It looks like that is scheduled to change.

It appears lots of people are interested in slow money, and that many of us want to see it happen fast.



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.”

I have to say I was stunned.  BALLE is an acronym for Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and in recent years it has been emerging as a poignant business based counter point to the Chamber of Commerce.

One of the first things that struck me was what a literate crowd it was.  It seemed everywhere I turned someone was talking about this book or that.  As someone who is chronically behind in my reading, it made me long for a quick hour a day to simply keep up with the sustainability space.

If that is even possible.

David Korten, author of The Great Turning, and founder of YES! Kicked things off with his usual pitch about how if we can change the stories we can change the culture.  He is sort of the elder statesman of the movement for a wholesale change in the way we do business with one another.

He was followed by  Marjorie Kelly, author of The Divine Right of Capital.  She described the improbability of anyone stopping the runaway train that is our current economy, but eloquently talked about how we might lay new tracks.

Surely the “presentation of the day” award would have to go to Eric Henry from T.S. Designs, who walked the audience through their “Cotton from the Carolina’s” project, where they can go from “dirt to shirt” in less than 750 miles.  He brought a maker of cloth and a cotton grower onto the stage, and their talks could not have been more genuine.

Tami and I split up for afternoon sessions.  She took in a session on fundraising, I went to an excellent session on ownership moderated by Jerry Gorde of Virginia Textiles.  By far the most compelling story of the session was the fellow from Organic Valley, a 600 million dollar farmer’s co-operative that has managed to preserve local supply chains.

David Orr, author of Down to the Wire, stole the show on Sunday, laying down the most articulate and heartfelt argument for change I have ever heard.

Michael Shuman, author of Small Mart Revolution is one of the brains behind BALLE, and he was his usual razor sharp self.  When he introduced me at Sunday’s plenary session he mentioned my “great book, Small is Possible.”  I did a PowerPoint that Tami helped me cook up, and it brought down the house.  At one point I was able to reference a recent review of Small is Possible that said “Estill gives faces and names to the statistics and studies of Shuman’s work.”

I did a breakout session on Sustainable Community Design and Development with David Orr  and David Feldman on Sunday afternoon, and our classroom at the College of Charleston was packed tight.  Standing room only.

Orr travels effortlessly through any speaking style and approach you could want.  One moment he is an insightful scientist, the next he’s an economic developer, and if need be, he can break away from all charts and graphs and simply regale the crowd with storytelling.

I spent a fair bit of time with Woody Tasch, author of Slow Money since he stopped by Pittsboro for a conversation at Central Carolina Community College and a plant tour on his way to Charleston.  He cites Orr as having the best description of Slow Money ever.  In the prologue to Slow Money Orr writes, “There is an appropriate velocity for water set by geology, soils, vegetation, and ecological relationships in a given landscape.  There is an appropriate velocity for money that corresponds to long term needs of communities rooted in particular places and to the necessity of preserving ecological capital.”

Orr goes on to talk about how there is an appropriate velocity for information, and I have no doubt exceeded my ability for absorption after a weekend at BALLE.

One of the remarkable aspects of the conference is that all of the “rock stars,” are just there, in the audience.  You will bump into Judy Wicks, founder of the White Dog Café, and BALLE, walking down the hall, or standing in line for a beer at the many after hours events.  If you have a question for David Korten about a point in one of his books, or about BALLE in general-just ask.  Chances are he will be standing at the urinal next to yours.

Beyond the literary star power is the remarkable audience.  It seems each one of them has founded a movement, or has just opened a bank, or is about to embark on wholesale societal change.  The energy is palpable.

And the conference was flexible.  Full of spontaneity.  Relaxed.  When my slides would not project for my afternoon session, a young woman emerged from the crowd and offered to go to the Apple Store around the corner.  She took my computer, purchased the proper “dongle,” and the problem was solved.  When I offered to pay her, her response was, “Never mind, I like what you guys do.”

I wish I knew her name so I could thank her.  She saved my presentation.  And blew twenty bucks.  Which struck me as being rather in the spirit of BALLE.

At Piedmont Biofuels we have been “working on a different way of being” for the past eight years.  Sometimes we feel like we are getting there.  Sometimes we slam up against the walls of the status quo.  For me to be able to tell parts of our story to a conference like BALLE was truly an honor.  And I have come home revitalized and ready to re-enter our project with new vigor.

The first time I published a blog entry entitled “Price Intersection” was in October of 2005.  We were smug when petroleum diesel hit 3.69.  The next time I addressed the issue here was in November of 2007.

The world of Piedmont has changed a lot since then, and with the summer driving season approaching, I thought I would take a pre-emptive look at what “price intersection” might mean were it to happen again.  I would also like input and suggestions from readers, and especially from those members who run around on our fuel.

High diesel prices have never been good for Piedmont.  We found that global commodity markets rose in harmony with one another, meaning that rising oil prices meant rising feedstock costs.

Nowadays we are much more insulated from global commodity markets since the lion’s share of what we produce comes from  food service organizations, and from our Partners in Sustainability.  Since we no longer pay for most of our feedstocks, we are at long last disconnected from the price of a barrel of oil.

We believe 3.50 is a fair price for our fuel, and we have just started making a little money making biodiesel and selling it for that price.

Having said that, the last time we felt 3.50 was a fair price, we stood pat while petroleum went above 4.00.  At that point we encountered a new phenomenon:  new members with Hummers and trailers and totes who wiped us out of fuel in ten minutes.

I remember an irate call from a member telling me Carrboro was empty, and I said that was impossible since Evan had just returned to the plant after filling it.  But the member was right.  Someone had drained 500 gallons in 20 minutes to save a bunch of money.  At that same time our Raleigh tank was vandalized and we had fuel stolen.

The employees of Piedmont are split on what to do if petroleum reaches 3.50.  Some want to “cap the membership,” until petroleum comes back down.  That way long suffering members who have paid a premium would get an economic reason for membership-a reward of sorts.

Others say that would make us exclusive, and that they don’t want to work at a “Country Club” to which only a few can belong.

Others think we should commit to being a higher price than petroleum always to make sure we always have fuel for our loyal members.

I’m not sure what to do.  Any ideas?

It was the dead of winter, and somewhere along the way it was decided that our members would be happier if we delivered a “blend” to their vehicles, rather than making them do it themselves.

So I would load the truck with a thousand gallons, and run off to the gas station to drop in a couple hundred gallons of petroleum, and then I would stock the trail.  Each time I handled the petroleum I would get a headache.

It’s funny.  I’ve been running around on biodiesel since January 2002, and as such I have become extremely sensitized to petroleum products.  Doing the petroleum part was a distasteful aspect of my new job, and I am please to announce that is it coming to an end.

Today I have a load of B80 on the truck, and I will be filling up Carrboro, stopping in Saxapahaw to talk with some folks about the new location we intend to build at Jeff Barney’s Five Star Gas Station, and pushing on to fill up Burlington.

Once the B80 has been offloaded, I will be back on B100 until the leaves begin to fall.

What’s interesting about the B100 Community Trail is how it has been a misnomer.  It started out life on B100, from which it got its name.  Then the IRS passed the infamous Blender’s Credit, which meant anyone dispensing fuel needed to be B99 in order to qualify for that pesky dollar of subsidy.  Then the IRS changed the rules to allow B99.99, which is the blend level that we moved to immediately.

There was a moment there when the EPA would only allow for RIN generation on blend levels of B80-at which point we started distributing B80 throughout the B100 Community Trail.  Nowadays RINS can be generated from B100, and the Blender’s Credit has lapsed, so we are back to distributing B100 on the B100 Community Trail.

It’s funny how the policy layer in biodiesel has not yet settled in.  It seems no one is clear on where they want biodiesel to fit into America’s fuel mix.

But I’m clear.  I like being petroleum free again, and I am looking forward to delivering fuel throughout the summer.

At long last our fuel has total and complete integrity.  Feedstocks coming from within 100 miles, comprised of waste vegetable oils, most of which we collect from restaurants, and fuel distributed out into that same hundred-mile radius.

That is, after all, what we set out to do.  And I am looking forward to hanging up the gas mask until the fall…