Friday, October 10, 2008

Wes Sander

Monterey-Salinas Transit will soon run buses on a diesel blend created from a new, locally grown oil crop - mustard seed.

Once the seed is crushed and processed into usable motor fuel later this month, Monterey-Salinas Transit will begin running its entire 80-bus fleet on a mix of the seed oil with petroleum diesel.

It`s the result of a project initiated by Carl Sedoryk, chief executive officer of Monterey-Salinas Transit. Because production occurs entirely within a local region, the cost is kept to a minimum. Sedoryk said Monterey-Salinas Transit`s cost will be, at worst, the same as it is using petroleum diesel - and possibly lower, depending on a farm bill provision.

"If you can keep the whole circle within a single county, that`s pretty impressive," Sedoryk said. "(In other scenarios we considered,) the biomaterials were coming from Texas, shipped by train to be processed into biofuel. In our mind, that probably defeats the purpose. So the thought then came to us: Why, in one of the most fertile areas of the country, can we not produce biofuel?"

So the transit agency huddled with orchard growers in Santa Cruz County and learned that mustard seed, which was being used as a ground cover, could produce far more biofuel than corn or even soybeans.

"Basically, we did some calculations that said if we could plant 1,900 acres of mustard seed, we could produce enough oil to run our buses on a 20 percent oil blend," Sedoryk said.

Running its buses on that blend, termed B20, would save 120,000-150,000 gallons of petroleum diesel annually, Sedoryk said.

The byproduct of crushing the mustard seed, meanwhile, can be processed and sold to organic farmers as a natural pesticide.

Sedoryk said the project might qualify the transit agency for a tax credit under the 2008 Farm Bill. If not, using mustard-seed B20 will cost about the same as running diesel, he said - meaning the organization is able to meet county clean-air mandates without extra costs.

Sedoryk suggested a future in which seed-oil plantings could offer a higher-value alternative to the cover crops that alternate with Monterey County`s row crops during winter. Farmers often use barley because they can harvest and sell it, helping their bottom line, but seed-oil crops could fill the same niche and make farmers more money, Sedoryk said.

The processor that will produce the mustard-seed oil is Energy Alternative Solutions Inc. The company, also called BioEASI, is a Watsonville firm with a plant in Gonzalez. BioEASI has mostly focused on producing biodiesel from used restaurant oil. By the time Sedoryk came along, it had already been investigating local oil production, working with area growers to look for a convenient oil crop that would fit with existing planting schedules.

"They had spoken to us some time ago about converting to biodiesel," said Rich Gillis, CEO of BioEASI. "The only difference is you need a crusher. Actually, there`s less processing than there is (with restaurant oil)."

Making the system work involves using crops that work well for farmers. Mustard seed fits that profile, although other crops bear considering because they can produce more oil, Gillis said.

One possibility is jatropha, a plant common in Central America. Where soy produces around 46 gallons of biofuel per acre, jatropha produces 200, Gillis said.

"Everything we do is designed to keep our biodiesel (cost) lower than petrodiesel," Gillis said.

"The educational aspects of this are huge," he said. "In California, one of the single biggest problems we have is particulate matter. People are debating this business of global warming, whether it`s real or not, in terms of human significance. Global warming is the result of the problem - the problem is dirty air."


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