undertaking. Most of America’s crude oil supplies today come from “stripper” wells, most of which are family owned, down on the ranch in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Those are the lone pumping rigs in the middle of the field of cows or sagebrush, that are slowly going up and down like one of those glass birds with a belly full of water that is pretending to drink from a glass.
Many of these wells require something like sixty dollars of cost to produce a single barrel of oil, and many produce as little as ten barrels a day. So when you are driving down the road and hear that oil hit a record $61.00 a barrel, keep in mind that some fellow in Oklahoma could be fetching $10.00 that day.
The oil business is like any other. Everyone who is in it assumes there is more money to be made somewhere else. The producers envy the refiners, the refiners envy the pipelines, the pipelines envy the distributors, the distributors envy the gas station operators, and on it goes. The driving public, and the Attorney General, tend to be oblivious to the entire industry.
Surely fortunes have been made. And lost. People gamble. People win. People lose.
The notion that Piedmont Biofuels is any different from any other business undertaking is incorrect. We decided to become a processor. We developed an expertise in making fuel. Our petroleum equivalent would be the “refiner,” and that is where we placed our bet.
As the industry matures, it turns out that making biodiesel is an extremely marginal activity. We spend our days wishing we were producers of feedstock. We wish we could create poultry fat, or crush seeds into oil, or be anywhere other than at the mercy of those who control the resource upon which we depend. But those who control our feedstocks envy our position, to make fuel. And those who are distributing the fuel have a prurient interest in our business as well, since they, too, are living on razor-thin margins.
We put our money on biodiesel. We were convinced it would either “win, place, or show.” It’s been a long race, and so far we have yet to scrape winnings off the table. We haven’t given up, but the word to those who envy the producers of biodiesel is “Pick another horse.”
Fortunately for Piedmont we don’t just make biodiesel. On the winding road to our eco-industrial park, we spawned a number of internal and related businesses that allowed us to hedge our bets.
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.
