Pubdate: Wed, 08 Aug 2001
Source: Village Voice (NY)
Copyright: 2001 Village Voice Media, Inc
Contact:  http://www.villagevoice.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/482
Author: Erik Baard
Note: Research assistance, Taron Flood

REFILL MADNESS

Hemp-Powered Car Rolls Its Own Fuel

While high-powered lobbyists clashed, seduced, and debated their way to a 
House energy bill last Wednesday that called for drilling Arctic preserves 
and left renewable fuel by the wayside, the dialogue at the helm of one 
alternative-fuel program went something like this: "Where are we parking? I 
don't see any place to park." "I dunno. Where are you looking?" "Are we 
parking here?"

Such was the chatter inside the confusedly circling Hemp Car, a 1983 
Mercedes station wagon powered by oil squeezed from cannabis seeds and 
converted into biodiesel, a cleaner vegetable substitute for the petroleum 
product. Its passengers were activists from Virginia on a U.S. tour, who 
eventually pulled up and parked on a sidewalk for a pit stop in 
Minneapolis. The situation in Bush's Washington is much the same: If you're 
looking for far-out energy resources that blow smoke in the face of Big 
Oil, you have to roll your own opportunities. Though the Hemp Car is 
trundling across the wilds of America, D.C. is never far out of 
mind--that's where the tour began on July 4 and will conclude at the start 
of October.

"We're promoting biomass for fuel instead of drilling in the Arctic or 
taking a new look at nuclear power," explains Hemp Car spokesperson Scott 
Fur. The adventure began with Grayson and Kellie Sigler, the eco-activist 
couple at the heart of the Hemp Car effort, who were itching to take a 
cross-country trip without choking the scenery. Research led them to 
industrial hemp. That's right, the industrial stuff--you won't get a buzz 
from tailgating the Hemp Car. Not that the crew would mind.

"We see nothing wrong with responsible people using marijuana. We're 
frankly sick of nonviolent drug offenders being thrown in jail," Fur fumes.

But mixing those issues may prove a bit too combustible for biofuel allies 
on Capitol Hill. Just ask South Dakota senator Tim Johnson, who introduced 
a bill to his chamber's energy committee in July requiring that renewables 
like biodiesel and ethanol, an alcohol additive made from cellulose, 
compose 2 percent of transportation fuel by 2008 and 5 percent by 2016. 
Johnson is girding for a fight with hardline conservatives in the pocket of 
Big Oil. "I would guess," notes spokesperson Bob Martin dryly, "that 
industrial hemp would be a little harder to sell than biodiesel based on 
soybeans."

If hemp is too taboo for Washington, there have been enough other 
demonstration vehicles to stage a Cannonball Run. Best known among them are 
the Veggie Van, the Grease Car, and Greasy Gretta the Volkswagen Jetta. 
They can all trace their ancestry to the diesel engine showcased at the 
1900 World's Fair, which ran on straight peanut oil. Today's Grease Car 
also runs on pure vegetable oil and used grease, but needs to be warmed 
first by burning diesel--coventional or bio. And it broke down on the 
return leg of its tour. Justin Carven, the 24-year-old who invented it as a 
college project, now sells conversion kits for $795.

Oddly enough, for the pilots of the Hemp Car, one of the bedrock rules is 
abstinence. "In the car we're trying to keep everything by the book, 
everything above board, so nothing bad happens," Fur says. He figures a 
station wagon emblazoned "This Car Powered by Hemp" and "Make It Hempen" is 
already a traveling KICK ME sign. Even industrial hemp, with THC levels so 
low you'd have to smoke a doobie the size of a telephone pole to get high, 
is illegal to grow (but not use in finished form) in America. It doesn't 
help that most Canadian farmers who started growing hemp plants--whose 
fiber can also produce paper and cloth and strengthen plastics--in a 
federal experiment in 1998 have already abandoned it. Officials there say 
processing it was uneconomical and teenagers raided fields to sell the 
drug-free clippings, misrepresented as kind bud to naive classmates. The 
Hemp Car gets most of its stash from China; it's processed by Apple Energy 
in Virginia and shipped to points along the route.

So far, so good with American authorities, Fur reports. "Actually, our only 
experience was positive," he says. "When we pulled into Detroit from 
Canada, the border cops said, 'You know, there's no way we can let you in 
with a car like that without being searched.' And so they took us into this 
room and through the window we could see the dog just laying there with his 
head on his paws and all the border cops stood around the car and got their 
pictures taken with it. Their only questions were like, 'How is the tour 
going?' and 'How many miles per gallon do you get?'

"They know the difference between marijuana and hemp," adds Fur, whose 
uncle is a New York City cop. But that doesn't spare the crew some ribbing. 
"One of the most frequent questions I get is, if we leave a trail of nachos 
behind us."

Free from the typical belching of a car on fossil fuels, biodiesel engines 
put out a fragrance likened to French fries or doughnuts. More importantly, 
the Hemp Car and its kin deliver an immediate 80 percent cut in emissions 
of the "greenhouse gas" carbon dioxide, advocates of farmed fuel say, a 
small amount the next crop of plants-for-fuel readily absorbs to grow. In 
theory, it's a closed loop of renewable energy low on smog-causing 
pollutants and free of sulfur and hydrocarbons. Biodiesel doesn't yet cut 
back on nitric oxides, or NOx, but the emerging generation of technology 
promises to mop that up.

A huge part of biodiesel's appeal is that it can be made from any plant or 
animal fat, even Soylent Green. Procter & Gamble's baby-food division is a 
big supplier. Refiners use an alcohol to break fatty acids away from 
glycerin, resulting in a fuel that's slightly goopy, with the same 
viscosity and power density as petrodiesel but with greater lubricity. 
Biodiesel is also more biodegradable, and safer to handle and transport. 
And because diesel engines are inherently more efficient than gasoline 
engines, even an old warhorse like the 5000-pound Hemp Car gets 27 miles 
per gallon.

But when it comes to passenger cars, Americans are still wed to the 
gasoline-fired, internal combustion engine. Diesels do the heavy lifting, 
with trucks, buses, earthmovers, tractors, generators, and mining equipment 
usually powered by the cheaper fuel. That's why, when Washington seeks 
biofuels, the pols think first of ethanol.

One Hail Mary pass at alternative energy would be biogasoline--as opposed 
to biodiesel--which could run most current cars. The late Nobel laureate 
chemist Melvin Calvin started the quest at the University of California. 
Now Purdue University researcher Bernard Tao has taken up the search, with 
hopes of genetically engineering a plant that could produce clean, 
efficient gas.

Still, Volkswagen is keeping a toe in the diesel market on a gamble that 
America might swing Germany's way, where about half the cars carry that 
kind of engine. If biodiesel hits the mainstream, it'll most likely be in 
the tanks of Volkswagens. No other major company is selling diesel 
passenger cars here. "We're fighting an uphill battle in the United States 
because diesel has a bad rap," complains company spokesperson Tony 
Fouladpour. Despite the Volkswagen's quiet, clean-burning engine, American 
consumers still imagine stinking, knocking old clunkers.

Though diesel sales are up sharply in the U.S., they account for just 10 
percent of Volkswagen's market. The industry and its regulators set 2007 as 
the year diesels will run cleaner than today's natural-gas engines. By 
then, the fuel of choice may not be pumped from the earth, but grown. "The 
cars will perform perfectly fine on biodiesel," Fouladpour says. "And we 
would welcome that."

Another lead Germany has over America is in biodiesel distribution. There 
are 900 public filling stations vending biodiesel in Germany, which has an 
area smaller than California. The continental U.S. just started installing 
public biodiesel pumps in May. Olympian, the proprietor of a pump in San 
Francisco, is thrilled. "I am tickled to death with the results of this 
one," says company executive Tom Burke. "We had another alternative fuel 
before, E85 gasoline [85 percent ethanol] in a four-thousand-gallon tank 
that sat for five years. We decided to put biodiesel in that tank, and 
since May we've sold over 5000 gallons. We think the success has been 
phenomenal."

There are plans for biodiesel pumps in a dozen states before 2002.

For a traditional petroleum company like Olympian, the novel venture is an 
"easy in, easy out," Burke observes, because the pumps work the same as 
ones for standard diesel. The per-gallon price remains 50 cents higher, he 
adds, but once the gap closes, biodiesel "will be a very common fuel."

Homemade brews already seem hokey now that the government has biodiesel 
vehicles plying the highways of California, Minnesota, and Florida, as part 
of complying with a 1992 law mandating greener fleets. The Pentagon and 
National Parks Service have also taken biodiesel to heart. As demand grows, 
new sources beyond cooking grease will have to be found, but the answer 
isn't likely to be hemp.

"Hippy-dippy" projects don't use the full power value of fats and don't 
reward the processor enough to be financial viable, says Dr. K. Shaine 
Tyson, renewable-diesel project manager at the Department of Energy's 
National Renewable Energy Lab in Golden, Colorado. Her own idea is nearly 
as exotic though: the lowly mustard seed. Tyson says its oil would make 
inexpensive biodiesel, and the remains could pull a profit as organic 
pesticide instead of being pushed off as animal feed, as happens with 
soybeans once they've been mashed.

But don't look for miracles, she cautions. "We're never going to replace 
all diesel in America. We'd be lucky if we made a 10 percent dent," she 
predicts. As for passenger cars, biofuels won't even make the radar unless 
Americans radically change their auto buying habits.

Olympian's supplier, World Energy, is working overtime to promote 
biodiesel, but company president Gene Gebolys agrees with Tyson. He 
described biodiesel as "an existing intermediate-wedge technology 
unparalleled in its ability to have quick impact." But as he drove through 
California's behemoth Tehachapi Pass wind farm, he commented, "We don't 
expect it to be the end-all, be-all. Years ago everybody wanted to find the 
quick fix, a pill we could take to make fossil-fuel ills go away. Well, 
it's going to take a buffet of technologies."

That explains some of the resistance World Energy, based in Massachusetts, 
has gotten from Northeastern states, including New York. Environmentalists 
here have committed themselves to compressed natural gas and view biodiesel 
as a threat, he says. Even California, while pioneering public access to 
biodiesel limits the sale of diesel cars, a remnant of how diesel was 
perceived in decades past.

In the end, that battle might be moot, with arguing over combustible fuels 
at the start of this century like arguing over superior horse feeds at the 
start of the last. Even Olympian's Burke argues that hydrogen fuel cells 
may be poised to supplant the lot of them in a generation or two. Some 
biodiesel enthusiasts cite Dr. Rudolf Diesel's prediction that vegetable 
oils may seem insignificant today, but over time may become "as important 
as petroleum and the coal tar products." Others recall his French 
contemporary, Jules Verne, who prophesized that "water is the coal of the 
future. The energy of tomorrow is water broken down into hydrogen and 
oxygen, using electricity. These elements will secure the earth's power 
supply for an indefinite period." Then again, experts suggest that 
biodiesel could reposition itself as a source of hydrogen.

Regardless of the outcome, the trippy Hemp Car will be a burnout. "We all 
have gasoline automobiles. After this, it's back to gasoline, 
unfortunately," admits Fur. But will the crew still find use for cannabis? 
"Well," he says, revealing everything and nothing, "y'know. . . . "

Research assistance: Taron Flood
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D