shipped a bunch of mobile units.
When the financial crash hit in the fall of 2008, our design-build group was staring at a year’s worth of work, and delivering projects profitably. As the recession deepened, the work grew. Small-scale biodiesel, based on feedstock anomalies flourished, as the giant biodiesel plants — and the industry itself — began to falter.
We found ourselves offering engineering assistance to seed crushing facilities, and spending almost as much time making 3D models of how to move liquids around as we spent making biodiesel.
At the same time we entered the research and development business. Greg and David had invested a massive amount of time and energy in the development of a cavitational reactor for biodiesel production, which they were positioning for small scale plants, and Greg took his enthusiasm for the learning edge and hired on to a research project involving the creation of heterogeneous catalyst.
At the time Rachel was our quality manager. She shepherded us through the BQ-9000 accreditation process, which is a quality standard awarded by the National Biodiesel Board. We were the smallest biodiesel plant in the land to make the grade. Rachel joined Greg in his quest for science projects and we found ourselves building a second lab and entering the world of contract research and analytics.
In the spring of 2007, with some assistance from the Biofuels Center of North Carolina, we embarked on the creation of our second chemical plant, which we referred to as our “bio-refinery.” In the course of creating biodiesel, a cocktail of co-products is created that largely has no market at all. Our bio-refinery was designed to sort that cocktail into its component parts, such that it could be turned into cash.
We turned on the bio-refinery in the fall of 2008, but we could not get it working properly until the summer of 2009. Once again we were a year late.
But by the fall of 2009, when the biodiesel industry had all but collapsed, our bio-refinery was spinning like a top, and we were able to bring in co-products from other biodiesel plants — those which were mostly closed, or idle, or waiting for the economy to turn. At the time we could land co-product feedstock for about a penny a pound, and after sorting it out in the bio-refinery, we were fetching thirteen cents a pound. Refining, it seemed, was a profitable undertaking.
Another important thing that occurred in the spring of 2009 was that the Board of Directors of the Piedmont Biofuels Coop elected to “become one” with Piedmont Biofuels Industrial. The Coop was a grassroots effort that was operating out of a double wide, collecting used vegetable oil from area restaurants, and spinning it into fuel for its members.
It was losing money at an amazing rate, and had run afoul of its landlord, its creditors, its neighbors, the local fire marshal, and was about to face the EPA in a showdown it had no hope of winning. Rather than letting a beloved institution fail, the Board decided to “land it in the Hudson,” by merging it with Industrial.
When the Coop and Industrial became one, we ended up with a soap maker, who was happily making soap out of crude biodiesel glycerin. And we ended up with a rainwater collection business that was largely concerned with marrying the ubiquitous containers of chemical handling to homeowners attempting to combat our increasing drought conditions.
By the fall of 2009 we had been making biodiesel for seven years. We had used almost every feedstock imaginable, except human fat, and despite our labors, we had never made any money producing fuel. I’m guessing we had lost money on every gallon ever produced, and we had produced well over a million gallons of fuel.
The industry was on the ropes and Piedmont was no exception. In the cold grey days of October I was astonished to see that our biodiesel production had hit an all time low — about 2700 gallons in a month, from an asset capable of making 4000 gallons in a day. We were down more than 90% from the same period a year earlier.
Yet our campus was expanding. Dan was leading volunteers in the construction of a new pole barn for Piedmont Biofarm, which was profitable on its own head of steam, and building a new greenhouse. Screech was undertaking a bold expansion, moving his operation from a lone greenhouse inside the fence to five more up on the hill.
I was building a seed crushing facility in the hallway of Building 3, to ready us for both a workshop, and a load of sunflower seeds that had been grown in wastewater by the City of Raleigh.
A new era of education and outreach had begun. Used cooking oil collection was in full swing, and Rachel tasked her sister Andrea with the creation of a new tradeshow booth.
One of the panels on the new booth was to be “Products from the Plant,” and Rachel and I went to work assembling photographs and verbiage.
Starting at the same gate I once shoved open as I walked into an abandoned industrial compound 4 years earlier, the list went something like this: Honey from Rick and his bees, organic produce from Eastern Carolina Organics, bookkeeping services from Tracy at Green Bean, festivals and events from the Abundance Foundation, biodiesel, rainwater delivery systems, vermiculture bins, boiler fuel, glycerin, design-build services and research from Piedmont Biofuels, produce and worm castings from Piedmont Biofarm, bio-herbicides and bio-pesticides from Eco-Blend, soaps from Deniece, and hydroponics lettuce from Screech.
Were we only making biodiesel, we would be bankrupt, like so many others. Instead we had accidentally diversified to the point of survival.
At the time I wrote about it in a column for the Chapel Hill News — which they titled “How Industry Evolves”:
In North Carolina, we tend to put our industrial sites in the southeast corner of every county. That’s largely so that when our industries dump their pollution in our rivers, it becomes the problem of the county next door.
That way Alamance can have the effluent of its dye houses flow immediately into Chatham County, and Chatham County can have the effluent of its resin makers, and the heat from the Cape Fear coal fired power facility, flow readily into Harnett County, which put its denim plants in the southeast corner, and so on to the sea.
Historically “county government” has been much more powerful in the south than in other parts of the world. We are accustomed to our county sheriffs, and attorneys, and county managers wielding serious power.
I am presently immersed in the writing of my next book, tentatively entitled “Industrial Evolution.” The other day over lunch Rachel and I were marveling over Piedmont Biofuels, accidental creation of a fullscale eco-industrial park in Pittsboro.
“It probably should have been in Moncure,” she said.
That’s where we both live. It’s the southeast corner of Chatham County — where all the industry is.
Moncure is where we have rail access. That’s a treasure for our economic development folks, since not every county has it. And Moncure is where we have cooling towers. And smokestacks. A few years ago Moncure was home to the highest emitter of formaldehyde in the land.
Our project is “in town.” And I suppose the reason we are in town is because we started with an abandoned industrial park. We were so focused on limiting the embodied energy of our project, that we couldn’t see the point in breaking ground on a green field. Our job is to help escort North Carolina into a low carbon future, which is why we snagged a campus of abandoned buildings, rather than breaking ground on the rail spur.
Rail
