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Changing World Technologies plant in Carthage, M0.
If diesel growth is inevitable, then clean fuel is about to become a growth industry. Starting Oct. 6, clean diesel fuel is supposed to be available at the pump.

There is no debating future demand for more clean fuel. Already, leading engine manufacturers have announced they are ready to meet the 2007  standards. Spokesman from Caterpillar, Cummins, Detroit Diesel, International, Mack Trucks and Volvo declared they are on track to deliver next generation diesels. In the beginning, they will turn their attention to heavy off-road and over-the-road trucks, but car and SUV diesels will soon follow.  Honda, known for developing very clean combustion in gasoline engines, just announced that they will be developing two new diesel engines targeted for the 2008 time frame, and Toyota is working on diesel powerplants as well.

Question is, where do we get all this clean fuel?  It will be a challenge for North American refineries, set up for producing gasoline, to generate enough #2 diesel, let alone clean diesel. Will we have to import diesel? Will we become dependent on foreign diesel sources?

Not coincidentally, Big Oil has plans to become a significant player in biodiesel.  In late May, Chevron said they would acquire a stake in a company to build a 100-million-gallon a year biodiesel plant in Galveston, Texas. This one plant, which uses soy beans to make oil, will increase U.S. bio-diesel output by 54 percent.  The plant will cost between $100 million and $200 million to build-a drop in the bucket, (no pun intended), for an oil company awash in profits. On top of that, the operation will benefit from a $1-a-gallon tax credit for each gallon of fuel made from fresh vegetable oil.

 A smaller-scale investment, something on the order of $4000, represents another proposition all together.  The Extreme Biodiesel Extractor, which you can read about elsewhere in this issue, represents a way to convert used cooking oil into diesel fuel through a chemical process called Transesterification. The small-scale system can generate about 100 gallons of fuel in about 12 hours, with a resulting product that can be poured directly into your vehicle's tank.  There is probably not enough free used vegetable oil kicking around to allow everyone to go this route, but there are certainly tens of thousands of tons of it, enough for more than a million gallons of biodiesel, going into landfills every year.

Yet other investments are being made in a bio-waste process called Thermal Conversion.

This process, which can render practically anything into oil, is of particular interest to operators of beef processing plants, which need to get rid of beef byproducts that formerly were converted into animal feed.

The practice of rendering animal waste to feed to other animals ended with the discovery of Mad Cow disease.  But you can still make fuel out of them.  The Thermal Conversion method allows food processors to profitably convert the now-unusable byproducts of the beef business into diesel fuel.

The Thermal Conversion process uses very high temperatures and very high pressures to extract oil. A byproduct is a high-nitrogen fertilizer. The oil meets D396 specification, suitable to power the type of stationary generators utility companies. With further distillation or blending, it can be used as vehicle-grade diesel.

Perhaps the best example of the process can be found in the Carthage, Mo. plant run by Changing World Technologies, a multi-million dollar investment that shipped about 250,000 gallons (6000 barrels) of fuel last April.  The Carthage plant processes large amounts of turkey parts, among other things, into oil. Last April, they shipped about 6000 barrels (250,000 gallons), which represents about a third of the plant's future capacity.

Then there is USCAR, the consortium of DaimlerChrysler, Ford and GM, working on how to recycle automotive debris. They have already conducted a test in which Changing World Technologies used their process to create usable light oil from leftover wiring, various plastics, carpet fabrics and so on. Since more than 10 million cars are junked each year, there could be millions of tons of this material to process.

Who will win?  Maybe all of the above.  Maybe none...but the race is certainly on.

Point

It's still early to see how the fuel fights and bio wars will turn out. Winners and losers have yet to be selected. But if I were a betting man, I would bet the farm that there will be far more people burning diesel 10 years from now.