Two shades of green draw firms to alternative fuel

Joe Pearson, a chemical engineering major, inspects biodiesel fuel made from vegetable oil at the University of New Hampshire, where students are working on a refinery system. (Joel Reiter for the boston globe)

The weather outside may be frightful, but it is the fear of global warming that is driving interest in an alternative-energy industry that makes diesel fuel from vegetable oil.

The alternative fuel, called biodiesel, can be used in a number of ways, including to heat homes and run automobiles. Said to be more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels, it is a chemically modified form of vegetable oil that can be refined from fresh-pressed sources such as soybean or peanut oil, or gleaned from deep-fat fryers.

And it is becoming big business for some local energy companies.

Atlantic Biodiesel, which built a new plant last year in Salem, N.H., hopes to tap both sources of the oil. The plant has capacity now for producing upward of 3 million gallons of biodiesel a year. Tim Hickey, the company's chief operating officer, said it could hit 10 million gallons when it reaches full capacity.

"We went into the alternative-energy business to make us become less dependent on foreign oil," Hickey said. "Southern New Hampshire is where we live, and we wanted to help our state the best we could."

Companies are now hauling from restaurants and other food makers the vegetable oil drained from their deep-fat fryers, once considered trash, and turning it into greasy gold. That's how Hickey gets some of his oil now, and he's confident there will be enough in the future, despite growing demand.

Not far from Salem is another New Hampshire company on the move with biodiesel: Proulx Oil and Propane of Newmarket, which has been serving customers in coastal and southern New Hampshire for 64 years.

Owners Jim, John, and Tom Proulx decided in 2004 to test the biodiesel market. They formed a partnership with MBP Bioenergy, a North Conway, N.H., company that operates a biodiesel refinery in West Bridgewater, Mass., taking used vegetable oil, filtering it, and treating it to produce biodiesel.

Today, MBP, through its affiliated restaurant services company, Green Mountain Biofuels, has signed up more than 150 restaurants and food production companies from Portsmouth to Boston to Cape Cod for their used oil.

Al Landano, owner of Green Mountain Biofuels, said that as more restaurants sign up, production of biodiesel goes up at MBP. In 2006, MBP produced about 50,000 gallons from waste oil, bringing total production to more than 150,000 gallons.

"We continue to bring on additional restaurants who want to help be part of a truly local solution to global warming," Landano said.

In Acton, Mass., fresh-pressed soybean oil is refined and sold from the pump at a service station owned and run by Jeff Bursaw, the fourth generation to run the family fuel business. He said he got involved in alternative fuels because he felt it was the right thing to do for the environment.

Biodiesel is seen as less damaging to the environment because it is refined from oil produced by plants such as soybean and peanut rather than from crude oil pumped from the ground. Both petroleum-derived fuels and biodiesel produce greenhouse gases when burned, but biodiesel is seen as better for the environment because the plants that produce it also absorb greenhouses gases. Crude oil offers no such benefit.

Biodiesel, though, sells for 30 cents more per gallon than regular diesel, Bursaw said. The price becomes more competitive when the biodiesel is blended with regular diesel fuel.

Bursaw said he gets two or three cars a day at the pump. Occasionally, he sells up to 10,000 gallons at once to bulk-fuel carriers that come from Maine, which offers a tax incentive for alternative-fuel use.

At Newmarket Mini-Mart in Newmarket, N.H., station manager Mark Patel said recent fuel price increases have helped spur interest in his biodiesel, which is now about equal in price to regular diesel because it is blended. As a result, Patel said, people from Maine and farther away are pulling up to the biodiesel pump at Mini-Mart.

"It's becoming very popular; it's just like regular diesel fuel," he said. "When people come in, they usually ask a whole lot of questions. But once they try it, they always come back."

Those questions usually are: Is it safe for cars, and is it safe for the environment? Patel said yes to both, but only if used with diesel engines. Most biodiesel is blended with regular diesel, usually with 5 to 20 percent from refined vegetable oil; however, Bursaw does offer 100 percent biodiesel.

Students at the University of New Hampshire in Durham are developing one possible means of processing more used vegetable oil into fuel. Working with a grant from the New Hampshire Innovation Research Center and in partnership with MBP Bioenergy, they are putting together a more-automated, scaled-down version of MBP's refinery system.

It's still a work in progress, said Ihab Farag, a biochemistry professor at the school. But the hope is that by April a prototype will be assembled that will allow UNH to filter and process the waste oil it drains from university fryers. Eventually, the researchers hope to patent a small-scale, self-contained biodiesel processor that users fill with the proper ingredients to produce fuel.

"There are people who are doing this kind of thing in their garages right now," Farag said. "You can go any place that discards vegetable oil, process it, and use it in your car or home."

Plenty of caution comes with Farag's explanation of the system he is designing. Most important is that harsh chemicals are involved and must be handled carefully.

There is also a lot of a waste product called glycerin from the processing that must be disposed of. Refining biodiesel from any form of vegetable oil, new or used, is not for everyone, Farag said.

"You have to follow the steps carefully," he said.

Farag said that used cooking oil will probably not be a reliable source of fuel for the processors if demand continues to climb, but that oil produced from plants like algae eventually could make a dent in the nation's appetite for fuel.

With all the environmental benefits involved, Bursaw and Hickey say they expect the market to grow, even if it costs a little more.

"It's just the right thing to do," Bursaw said. "I didn't get into it to get rich. I got into it to help the environment."

Tim Wacker can be reached at tiwack@comcast.net.