New York Times Magazine, Sunday Sept. 28, 2003

Three years ago, Justin Soares stood in the kitchen of the group house he lived in, consulting a recipe as he measured out methanol (a k a wood alcohol), Red Devil brand lye and some fry grease he'd begged off a local restaurant. He poured the ingredients into a blender and punched ''puree.'' Later, he took the blender out to his driveway and tipped its contents into the tank of his 1981 Volkswagen pickup. Soares, then a student at Oregon State University, had just made his own fuel.

Eventually, he moved his operation to the backyard
-- partly out of consideration for his seven housemates, who assumed he had
been making soap. As his batches got bigger, he began sharing the fuel, called
biodiesel, with friends. ''I got them hooked,'' Soares says. In September 2001,
he and his friends started a fuel-making co-op called Grease Works, one of perhaps
a dozen such groups that have formed around the country in the last few years.
To join, you have to own a vehicle with a diesel engine -- most likely a VW
or a Mercedes -- because biodiesel does not work in gasoline engines.

By
the following year, the group decided to buy commercially produced biodiesel
in bulk. ''In the beginning, it might seem romantic to make your own fuel, but
pretty soon you realize it's greasy and grimy work,'' Soares says. Ready-made
biodiesel costs about a dollar more per gallon than gasoline, but advocates
argue that this is a small price to pay. A significant switchover to biodiesel,
they say, would reduce lung-cancer and asthma rates, clean up greenhouse gasses
and prevent countless toxic-waste spills. Moreover, if fuel was grown in Iowa
rather than imported, America might pursue a different kind of foreign policy.
Lately that has proved the most compelling argument for biodiesel. People who
drove around with ''No Blood for Oil'' bumper stickers felt like hypocrites
whenever they gassed up at the local Shell station. For them, ''veggie fuel''
represented an end to cognitive dissonance.

Taking a principled drive, though, comes with significant drawbacks. For starters,
though the exhaust smells like popcorn, it's not entirely clean. ''If you use
biodiesel instead of petroleum, you lower almost all the criteria pollutants
coming out of your tailpipe,'' says Shari Friedman, an environmental consultant
based in Washington. ''But you are increasing nitrogen oxides marginally.''
In addition, biodiesel is a fair-weather fuel. On warm days, B100 -- 100 percent
biodiesel -- works fine. But in the cold, most drivers opt for B20, which is
mixed with conventional diesel to prevent congealing.

Another problem is that less than 1 percent of Americans drive cars with diesel
engines. Though they get much better mileage -- the VW Lupo, for instance, gets
about 78 miles per gallon -- most diesel cars don't accelerate as rapidly as
those with conventional engines. And because diesel fuel was never as widely
available in the United States as regular gasoline, drivers tended to view it
as an inconvenience.

But perhaps the biggest issue facing biodiesel is that, as far as alternative
fuels go, a great big bet has been placed on another contender. Earlier this
year, President Bush pledged $1.2 billion for research into hydrogen fuel cells.
There are some who see this technology as the answer to the environmental and
political difficulties of oil, but such a sweeping change will take years and
cost a staggering amount. Other alternative-energy schemes, like compressed
natural gas, have withered because they require so much new investment. Just
building filling stations for such a technology could cost as much as $100 billion
dollars.

Biodiesel, on the other hand, works with existing gas-station equipment. ''You
feel very independent,'' says Friedman, who just bought an ancient Mercedes
that she plans to run on the fuel. ''It's something you can do completely on
your own, without waiting for the government or the car companies to catch up.
If I put a solar panel on my roof, it would probably generate enough for a couple
of light bulbs. But biodiesel will take care of almost all my transportation
needs.''

More than 150 gas stations in America now offer a biodiesel pump, which is
a tiny fraction, but it's poised to grow. More than 15 million gallons of biodiesel
were sold last year; advocates hope to see it eventually account for 10 percent
of diesel consumption, mostly going into trucks and buses. In Germany, where
diesel engines power close to 40 percent of passenger cars, more than 1,000
gas stations offer biodiesel at the pump -- at a competitive price, thanks to
huge tax breaks and subsidies for alternative fuels.

But that's Germany. Such generous subsidies are unlikely in the near term in
the United States, and that will limit biodiesel's appeal. Americans tend to
view higher gas prices as an assault on basic human rights. When Prof. Orlando
Patterson of Harvard asked 1,500 Americans to define ''freedom,'' most of them
talked about the freedom to travel, and many of them mentioned cars. Far fewer
mentioned the right to vote.

For now, the best hope for biodiesel lies with government agencies, who have
to comply with the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which mandates the use of alternative
fuel in certain fleets of official cars and trucks. The U.S. military has become
one of the largest consumers of biodiesel, and cities like Berkeley, Calif.,
Takoma Park, Md., and Keene, N.H., use it for their fleets.

Last year, Stephen Russell, the fleet manager for Keene, began pumping biodiesel
into the city's snow plows, fire trucks and ambulances. ''At first, people said,
'You're not going to put that in emergency vehicles are you?' And I said, 'I
don't have a second storage tank, so I don't have a choice.' '' This year, facing
budget cuts, the city council kept the biodiesel program even though it costs
an extra $8,000 a year. Its environmental benefits were the decisive factor.

Still, in most cities, cost trumps clean air. ''In the fleet world, there's
a bottom-line mentality,'' Russell says. ''If biodiesel were comparably priced
to diesel, it would happen tomorrow, all across the country.'

By PAGAN KENNEDY
Published: September 28, 2003 Pagan Kennedy is the author of "Black Livingstone:
A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth-Century Congo."

Original Post: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/28ARDIEST.html