Industrial Evolution. Lyle Estill

      IN JANUARY 2005, I shoved the security gate open and walked onto a three and half-acre campus with four buildings spanning roughly twenty thousand square feet. We had just acquired an empty industrial site.

      It was creepy. Poison ivy climbed the walls, possums, groundhogs, and raccoons roamed freely about. The buildings creaked and groaned in the wind and with the slightest change of temperature.

      The place was built in 1986 by a group of folks who wanted to invent a superior aluminum for use in fighter jets. They managed to get big water, and big sewer, and big electricity pulled out to the middle of nowhere, but as far as I can tell they never figured out “big jobs.”

      It closed in 1996, shortly after the Soviet Union folded in the Cold War. Their better aluminum was a victim of the peace dividend.

      And the park sat empty for another ten years. The buildings were strange. Two-foot thick concrete blast walls and hinged roofs that were designed to let explosions “out.” It was a white elephant on the edge of town — too complicated to even bulldoze.

      We thought we could put our entire biodiesel operation in the second building, which is four stories tall and came complete with a three story mezzanine that was already painted green and yellow — the colors of Piedmont Biofuels.

      The Plant began as a creepy, abandoned place.

      We were young. And naïve. I literally showed up in coveralls ready to fire up my acetylene torch to cut out some equipment to make room for our biodiesel plant. I thought the first job that lay before us was to convert the abandoned industrial scrap into cash. We had electric transformers, and thousand-dollar breakers, and hydraulic presses for as far as the eye could see.

      Yet when I ventured into that market I was startled to learn that such equipment was everywhere. In order to sell the remnants of an industrial plant, someone needs to be investing in industrial gear. And in North Carolina, in 2005, it appeared as if we were the only enterprise in the region that was actually building a “factory.”

      Combine that with the fact that there were and are abandoned mills and industries across our state — many with transformers and breakers and hydraulic presses collecting dust.

      I learned early on that if I was going to convert stuff into cash, the market would be China, the competition would be fierce, and selling off industrial gear would be a new career entirely. Rather than embark on a new career, we set about selling things off for scrap metal and went to work on designing and building our biodiesel plant.

      With plantings and art and businesses we brought the Plant campus to life.

      Once I figured out how to turn the electricity on, I went to work on outfitting the original Control Room as our office space. I thought it would be a suitable place to make camp while we built. And it was horrific. Leif, me, and Evan set up on tables and desks side by side with no daylight, no fresh air, with two land lines and three cell phones and a fax machine. When Rachel decided to join us, I took my torches and cut a circular hole in the control room wall and gutted what was once a wiring closet. It was just enough space to fit a desk and a bookshelf. We called it the “Hobbit Hollow” because of the shape of the cut in the wall.

      From that awful little control room we designed and built and permitted North Carolina’s first B100 terminal — the first place in the state to get 100% biodiesel that wasn’t off a rail car.

      Two months into the endeavor I published an entry in Energy Blog entitled “Office Downgrade”:

      I thought that our office at Industrial was modest. I have a piece of plywood over a steel frame where I sit. But it is heated, and it has lights. We have a photocopier. And although it is close quarters, it works for now.

      Today I came in to meet a team of electricians. The goal is to strip unwanted power that hangs in conduit from our proposed laboratory and proposed office space. Last week I had a chance to work with Tuesday again. We spent many years in the art business together, and we tapped her for some torch work at the plant. She cut out some enormous argon pipes to clear space for us. By shedding the pipes, and losing the electrical wires, we should be able to transform what was once an equipment room into a glorious office/lab/reception area.

      Today I had visions of getting the electricians started, and retreating to a quiet Leif- and Evan- free office to work on Biodiesel Power.

      I was going to be upstairs in the quiet office collecting my thoughts, and the electricians were going to be tracing circuits back to the distribution panels and eliminating them entirely.

      Except to do that we killed power to the whole building.

      Which means I am now on a pair of sawhorses, on the lawn outside of building #3. I fished a scrap of wood out of the pile for a desktop, and have run a hundred-foot extension cord out to my notebook.

      It’s supposed to get up to 55 today, slight breeze, and it’s not bad here in the sun. I can occasionally hear the electricians grunt and holler from across the way.

      Our meeting with the Fire Marshal went exceedingly well. Leif and I both have plenty of work ahead of us to meet his expectations, but it can all be achieved, and yesterday we were stoked about our prospects in general…

      While Piedmont was innocently building a biodiesel plant in Building 2, Tami and Matt Schlegel and I were renovating Building 1. We didn’t need it for anything. It had a nice loading dock, and a machine shop, and some office space. Tami rented it out to Eastern Carolina Organics, which put in a giant drive-in cooler and set up a distribution operation for getting produce to fancy restaurants and grocery stores throughout the region.

      Tami and Matt worked with local mosaic artist Janice Reeves and Diane Swan, our celebrity cabinetmaker, and they transformed what was once a machine shop into a remarkable kitchen and break room. They stained the concrete floor, put in a clerestory window for day lighting, and a giant arched window. We have Alicia Ravetto to thank for our day lighting strategy. I bought Tami a plant-wall biofilter, for her birthday, and we had it built into the wall. It is basically an indoor air-cleaning device with a continuous flow of water. It anchored the room in a remarkable way.

      I think everyone on project would agree that the kitchen was over the top. Custom concrete counter tops with embedded shards of stained glass, locally grown maple “worm eaten” cabinet wood, with artful homemade light fixtures, it became a powerful space — a complete counterbalance to our nasty office in the control room.

      We had no idea what we were doing. In the creation of the kitchen we accidentally created a magnetic space that set the tone for the project. Suddenly people wanted to use it for board meetings. We outfitted it with chairs and tables and started accommodating groups. Some rented, some donated, many were free, and while the kitchen never became a “revenue stream,” it meant the place filled up with groups from the Haw River Assembly to the Chatham Soccer League — and everything in between.

      Having the coolest meeting space in three counties made the biodiesel plant a destination. Which gave it buzz, and traffic, and filled our parking lot up with interesting and interested people.

      In the beginning the buildings were surrounded by turf. I hate turf. Unless it gets used. I can’t see the point of mowing something that no one sets foot on. Tuesday put together a pair of soccer goals such that one patch of turf could be a soccer field.

      That made us a destination for soccer. In Small is Possible I wrote, “The plant is routinely a venue for parties. Children swarm to its midst with scooters and skateboards and inline skates, and all manner of wheeled devices. A whole generation