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 will lose their training wheels at Piedmont Biofuels. That is either a reflection of our craving for community, or of the fact that we have a strip of safe pavement.”
As the biodiesel plant progressed we were slammed to a halt by water pressure. We knew that we would have to install a sprinkler system for our high hazard work, but were caught off guard by the fact that we did not have enough water pressure to operate a sprinkler system.
After all, our abandoned industrial park was at the end of the water line on the edge of town. We only had enough water pressure to sprinkle two small rooms. Increasing pressure meant erecting a water tower. Which was a $350,000 surprise. By the time we encountered this problem, our money supply was running low and we had no way to pull it off.
So we wedged our reactors, and our high-hazard work into two small rooms in Building 3, and we built an underground pipeline that crossed the street. Whew. Good thing we had an extra building. Suddenly biodiesel would require both Building 2 and Building 3.
Upon doing so we hit another formidable snag. Building 3 was located very close to our property line. In order to pull off our plan, we would have needed to locate our tank farm, which included ten thousand gallons of methanol storage, right next to the adjoining property. We were hemmed in.
So we bought the surrounding property. That moved us from three and half acres up to a fourteen-acre campus. After closing, we ripped down a large section of fence, and built our tank farm.
As part of our cash recycling efforts, we sold Building 4 to Jacques and Wendy. They had a brisk trade in fabrics and imported art and antiques and Building 4 became their warehouse.
On one end of the campus we were giving it our all building a biodiesel plant. On the other end various businesses were popping up. Screech moved his hydroponics lettuce operation in. Piedmont Biofarm started farming the vacant lots that surrounded our buildings. Tracy Kondracki moved her “Green Bean Accounting” business into an empty office in Building 1. And the Abundance Foundation, which is driven by my wife Tami snatched up another empty office.
A stage in the lawn brought on rock concerts and festivals, and provided a venue for politicians to speechify about our low carbon future. Eventually Piedmont finished its office space, complete with a gorgeous second story porch, and moved into the new Control Room, where most of us still work today.
We found a room in Building 3 that could be converted to office space, and before the paint was dry it was rented to Cecellia as an office for her work with the North Carolina Wildlife Commission.
We came for the biodiesel. Baskets and produce and bookkeeping and lettuce were ancillary. Piedmont Biofuels accidentally became the anchor tenant of what would emerge as an eco-industrial park. What we failed to understand at the time, as we were bringing our chemical plant to life, was that we were imitating nature, and accidentally diversifying. As Piedmont Biofuels lumbered along, trying to find its way into the world of a cleaner burning renewable fuel, an eco-industrial park sprung up around it. Before we knew it there were seven unique businesses inside the fence.
Farmers were coming to drop off their wares. Some filled up with fuel in the yard.
Allen came along wanting some biodiesel as a feedstock for his bio-pesticide business. We had an empty floor on our mezzanine, so we designed and built a precision blending operation for him. That went well, and he eventually took over Building 4. On one side of the street we work hard to avoid emulsions. We then sell product to Eco Blend so that it can be emulsified. One side of the street hates free fatty acids. The other side of the street sells them for a living.
I should note that as the real estate all around us was filling up with tenants, and projects that were largely focused on sustainability, we were mostly oblivious. At the time we did not see ourselves as an escort into the low carbon future. We were merely building a biodiesel plant. Welding every weld and fitting every pipe ourselves.
Piedmont Biofuels suffers from an acute case of “Do It Yourself Syndrome,” and because we had designed and built a handful of biodiesel projects, we found ourselves squarely in the design-build business for other people. Years ago we did a complete biodiesel plant on a trailer. Which led to a second version that became our Clean Technology Demonstration rig, which we drag around to various venues to demonstrate biodiesel production.
The North Carolina Zoological Park liked the notion of a biodiesel plant on a trailer so they hired us to build one for them. UNC Pembroke liked the notion too, so they bought one. As did Clemson University, and Hill Town Biodiesel Cooperative, as did Montana State University. By the time a principal at Washington High School decided to write
