Industrial Evolution. Lyle Estill

“the Coop,” and to our “big” biodiesel plant as “Industrial.”

      “Industrial” was the place with the stage for live music, the playground, the giant chess set in the yard, and the place where people gathered for soccer night. In our town, Industrial is where you might be headed for lunch, or to pick up a box of sustainable produce, or to attend a Pecha Kucha presentation.

      For many of us, industrial is an honorific term.

      By now the boilers have largely been extinguished on the industrial age in America. Most of our manufacturing has moved away. But “industry” is a term that I would like to reclaim. Industry can evolve. It doesn’t have to look like the industry of our fathers. Ants are industrious. People can be industrious. And industry can be a good thing. Ours is an industrious project.

      On one occasion I gave a tour to Pamela Bell, who was one of the founders of Kate Spade. Unlike me she really is a captain of industry, with an intimate knowledge of the textile trade, outsourcing, and global commerce. We finished our tour and pulled up a couple of rocking chairs overlooking Piedmont Biofarm. She has an insatiable appetite for business ideas, and she was smitten with our little eco-industrial park. She’s the one who coined the phrase “Industrial Evolution” as the title for this book.

      “Evolution” is something I know considerably less about. My friend Michael Tiemann once hosted an international meeting of the Open Source Initiative in Pittsboro, where our plant is located. Some of his guests were stranded in an air traffic tangle in New York, and he was unable to start his meeting. To kill some time he brought those who had arrived for an impromptu tour. I led them around for an hour or so, and when I was done, he suggested that most people have misinterpreted the work of Charles Darwin.

      “People sum it up as survival of the fittest,” he said, “but really On the Origin of Species is about adaptation.” He then went on to explain how Piedmont Biofuels had been forced to adapt time and again to shifting trends in the global marketplace, and to ever-changing government policy that is not quite sure what role biodiesel will play in America’s fuel mix.

      In the end, I’m just a storyteller. The stories I tell are the ones I have lived, which makes me sometimes wonder if I should shift to fiction so that I could suffer less. My first two books have occasionally inspired others to start projects or take action on changing their worlds.

      I think of Megan, who started the farmers market at the marina in Lion’s Head, Ontario. And of Tammy who threw in the towel on her rat race life in Atlanta to create an asparagus farm in Southern Pines, North Carolina. I think of Cole, who after a day at our park with his elementary school insisted that his parents allow him to plant peanuts in their backyard. And I think of the many smallscale biodiesel projects we have inspired along the way.

      In my travels, both on the Internet and in 3D, I have learned that we have many people cheering for us, and hoping our project will succeed. As such I frequently find myself conflicted when I’m asked, “How can we replicate that here?” Whether I’m on stage as a speaker, or on the net, or simply having lunch, it’s a question I can’t easily answer.

      I don’t have a specific system, or a plan, or a solution. But I do have some stories to tell…

2

       Breaking into the Business

      WE TURNED ON OUR BIODIESEL PLANT in the fall of 2006. It sort of sputtered to life. We would make some fuel, then screw up some oil, then make some fuel, then throw a batch away. And by the time we had the hang of it the weather had grown cold. Cold is not your friend in the world of biodiesel.

      So we adjusted our plant, and tweaked the process, and putzed around through the winter and by the spring of 2007 we were ready to make some fuel.

      Chris Jude was at the helm. He singlehandedly kicked out forty thousand gallons of fuel, and for the first time in my biodiesel life I had a sales problem. I’d been making fuel since 2002 and never had enough to go around. When our plant began to spin like a top, our terminal filled up and I needed to get busy.

      Sales problems don’t scare me. I’ve been a traveling salesman for most of my adult life, and I thought it would be fun to move some fuel. So I visited almost every petroleum company in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina.

      Petroleum enters the world in a strange and complex way. I had a sense of it from Lisa Margonelli’s book, Oil on the Brain, in which she starts at a convenience store in California, and attempts to follow it back to its source. I entered the tangle just above the gas station level, at those firms who are delivering fuel “to the street.”

      On the distribution side, small family-run oil distributors have what are called “bulk plants,” from which they fill most gas stations. They typically have a large investment in trucks and tankage, and they are essentially in the logistics business.

      Chris Jude, Piedmont’s first intern, went on to drive our early production efforts.

      Everyone buys from the “rack,” where petroleum enters the state, and from there it finds its way through an octopus of trucks and tanks and dispensers. In North Carolina, petroleum fuel enters primarily from two pipelines that terminate in Charlotte and Greensboro, and begin in Louisiana. (We have limited coastal offloading capability as well.) Which means that when a hurricane slams into Louisiana, North Carolina runs out of fuel.

      When I arrived at the door of the petroleum marketers I was generally treated as a curiosity. Almost all of them have the same story. It begins with “My granddaddy got a short truck and started hauling fuel for the…” and “My Daddy built up the business…” and so on.

      Today, family-owned petroleum distribution companies are in a quandary. Most of them are too profitable to abandon, and too entrenched to sell. Many of them have been grandfathered into new environmental regulations that would prohibit their existence today; the installation of an underground tank today is an expensive, protracted, regulatory challenge — much tougher to do than it was in Grand Pappy’s day. But a tank that has been in the ground for 30 years? Easy. Fill it up and roll.

      Which means many of these petroleum distributors are sitting on sites with contaminated soil, marked by years of spills, and often surrounded by inadequate spill containment. No one wants to buy a petroleum distributor because of the liability threat. And because they are hard to sell, they tend to stay in the family for generations. They even tend to bear the family name.

      I found myself in the lobbies of these companies, waiting patiently for my appointments with the owners. And I found the owners to be wonderful, down-to-earth people. The problem is that they moved half a million worth of product in the morning, and they planned to move another half-million gallons in the afternoon, and they were wary of that guy in the lobby who wanted to sell them 7,500 gallons of biowhat?

      They tended to pat me on the head, wish me luck, and send me on my merry way. “Go away, little boy,” was understood.

      Which was a problem for me.

      Biodiesel tends to be distributed as a blend with petroleum. It finds its way into the world as “B20,” which means 80% petroleum and 20% biodiesel. Or “B5,” or “B2.”

      There I was with 100% biodiesel. I needed petroleum marketers to get my product into the world, and they weren’t interested in my piddly volumes. But without a petroleum platform, I had no way to go to market. So I lined up a tanker truck and driver, and we got trained on how to buy petroleum from the rack, and the next thing I knew we were buying tanker loads of petroleum diesel, bringing them to our biodiesel plant, giving them a squirt of biodiesel, and sending them off to market.

      Chris objected to the word “squirt.” He was killing himself moving big liquids around, but the reality was that we would buy 6,000