GETTING DOWN TO EARTH

January 19, 2011 Vol. 7, No. 2

Learned a lesson the other day. Or re-learned an old one, I suppose, about the nature of people who own and operate trucks. About the real nature of their concerns. And oddly enough, I committed a sin of the sort that I often see others making, one that I often criticize. I mis-read my audience.

I spent a half hour or so on satellite radio, on The Lockridge Report to be precise (Sirius channel 147, XM channel 171). My old friend Evan Lockridge, the host, asked me to come on to talk about engines and fuels. His interest had been piqued by my last Product Watch newsletter in which, you’ll remember, I’d talked about a future fuel called dimethyl ether, or DME.

Now, I’m pretty interested in this fuel and I think it has a future, certainly in Europe but here too. But it’s a longer-term sort of thing, not a fuel you’ll see any time soon. And therein lies my mistake.

We had a listener call in to the radio show asking a couple of perfectly useful questions: can I use this stuff in my engine right now, and if not, can I retrofit my engine to use it tomorrow?

The answer is ‘no’ in both cases. DME is somewhat like propane, needing a quite special engine and a whole infrastructure that nobody has really even thought about yet. It’s a future fuel, period. So what was I doing talking about it on a show with an audience consisting mainly of drivers and owner-operators? Their interests, and to some large extent yours too, I suspect, are in the now.

So, while my enthusiasms lead me to look quite far ahead and do a lot of  techno crystal-balling, I hereby resolve to be more grounded in this newsletter, to emphasize the practical at least as often as the theoretical. It’s no great trial — I’m happy either way — so let’s launch the revised me with simple, buy-it-now biodiesel. And then I’ll get even more down to earth and talk about drivelines.

ORDINARY CROP-BASED BIODIESEL isn’t exactly high on my list of fave alternate fuels. I’ve written enough unkind words about it to warrant receiving nasty letters from prairie farmers, though I have to qualify ‘unkind’. Mostly, I’ve simply maintained that it isn’t a long-term answer if only because there’s not enough arable land to grow the stuff from which it can be made, and then make any real dent in our dependence on fossil fuels. I’ve also written, correctly, that it’s altogether too easy to get poor-quality biodiesel because the standards governing the blending/refining of it aren’t anywhere near stringent enough. Or else the rules simply aren’t adhered to. Get a bad fuel and you may also get gelling issues, for example, which won’t occur if you have a fuel made with care from the right feedstocks and then use it intelligently.

But if nothing else I have an open mind, so some 18 months ago I visited an impressive operation in northern Ontario, some seven hours due north of Toronto. Just outside the little town of Earlton is a huge enterprise, Koch Farms, that tends 11,000 cash-crop acres. Easily the biggest farm in the north, run by Norm Koch and his two sons, Rob and Chad, they also have a grain elevator business and a small trucking arm called Koch Logistics. The 12-truck fleet hauls the grains they produce and customer loads as well.

When I went to see the Koch operation they had launched into using a B20 blend of soybean-based biodiesel (supplied by FS Partners) a few months previously. They were ecstatic — as close to that state as farmers ever get, anyway — with the results up to that point in both their trucks and their many combines and things, but I wanted to wait to see how they got through their first winter before writing about them. So I re-visited the Kochs last fall.

Man, talk about success. Norm and the boys first decided to try biodiesel because at the time it was a bit cheaper than straight diesel, but the price is irrelevant now because the other benefits are so substantial.