Climate and energy

In the Old West, used to be you had to worry about someone stealing your horse. (I’ve read the Louis L’Amours.) Having a mode of transportation meant having access to and control over resources – water, food, land, etc. Not having a horse represented a fairly serious threat to your survival.

These days in the West, you have to keep track of your diesel oil and used fry oil.  Diesel thefts from farmers are skyrocketing (CNN). One possible reason why – there is a lucrative a black market in selling diesel oil to truckers, who are hurting from the high prices of fossil fuels.

A thought – one of the commodities that truckers transport are farm products. If you steal diesel from farmers, you will probably end up with fewer farm products to transport. Right…? See where I’m going…?

Turf wars over fry oil for biodiesel. (I’m not sure this NYTimes story gets it exactly right, so I will add in a little bit – but it was the best story I could find.) Background: For a long time, Europe has imported used fry oil from the U.S. and reprocessed it for fuel.

Fry oil – yep, the yucky stuff left after your food gets fried at a restaurant. It still has the juice necessary to power a diesel vehicle. Some people use it straight, others process it a bit more, all depends on vehicle and preference.

People who collect fry oil vary widely, from major established rendering firms to backyard biodieselers. Their arrangements with restaurants, hospitals, etc. also vary, from written contracts guaranteeing pick-up to a word of mouth arrangements. The more formal arrangements seem to be along the coasts or in large urban areas, and they often concentrate on fast food franchises that can deliver a lot of volume. Also, some renderers actually never sold the oil – they just disposed of it in local dumps or ditches.

In the last year or so, however, fry oil has become a very valuable commodity. As fossil fuel costs rise, biodiesel sources are suddenly in demand in the U.S. Some restaurant owners – especially in rural areas, or smaller mom and pops – never used to be able to get people to pick up their oil.

Now everyone wants it. Truckers are said to be getting very interested in biodiesel. I also suspect that many rendering firms used to have so much supply that they maybe didn’t pick up oil as regularly as they may have contracted to do. When desperate restaurant owners had to get rid of hundreds of gallons of grease (health departments tend not to like that), they made other arrangements.

You see where this is going. On one hand, like the NYTimes story says, you do have thefts of fry oil going on – where large rendering firms are either battling with each other or facing legitimate thefts. On the other, you have smaller restaurants and backyard biodiesel folks making their own arrangements and starting to build local fuel economies.

Opportunities for social change? A mess? And/ or a possible train wreck coming – because when does the little guy ever win anymore? Dunno. I just know that everyone needs a horse.

Speaking of a mess – peak oil and high fuel prices go past food and fuel. Petroleum products are found throughout our economy. When oil prices rise, so do lots of other prices. From the CSMonitor:

“Besides gasoline, the Department of Energy calculates, there are 57 major uses of petroleum – everything from cosmetics to ballpoint pens, nylons, and even the waxes in chewing gum.

“That is why the effect of high oil prices is now spreading well beyond the pump, where gasoline hit another record price of $3.98 a gallon on Wednesday. Now, consumers will have to brace themselves for other higher costs, since businesses such as Kimberly-Clark, Procter & Gamble, and Colgate-Palmolive are raising prices on their products to recoup energy costs.”

— Maril Hazlett, www.climateandenergy.org