A Nutty but Natural Power Source
Fed up with the high cost of natural gas needed to fire its boilers, St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach has found an alternate source of energy: soybeans.
The hospital this year switched to a fuel mixture derived from 100% soybean oil, and except for the faint popcorn smell coming out of the boiler room these days, the hospital’s facilities staff say they can’t tell the difference.
But the accountants can. St. Mary officials figure the change will save more than $100,000 this year, not exactly chicken feed for a nonprofit hospital on a tight budget.
“That goes straight to the bottom line,” said facilities manager Michael Mathis. “Plus, we’re using a fuel that’s clean and renewable . . . and helps American farmers.”
California’s energy crisis has put the spotlight on alternative fuels such as wind and solar. But St. Mary is hoping its experience can raise the awareness of “biodiesel.” That’s the term for a family of fuels made from vegetable oils or animal fats.
Long used in Europe to power cars and trucks, biodiesel is gaining a toehold in the United States, thanks to federal air quality and energy security mandates, as well as the muscle of the farm lobby.
Throughout the last few years, government-owned vehicle fleets nationwide have begun embracing the fuel, whose big attraction is that it can be used in conventional diesel engines while burning cleaner than petroleum-based diesel fuel.
But boosters say users such as St. Mary represent a whole new frontier for the renewable energy source. The hospital is one of only a handful of places in the country using it to power something besides vehicles. Advocates see a world of opportunity in California, cleaning up dirty diesel-powered generators that may be needed to keep the lights on in homes and factories this summer.
“We’re getting a lot of calls out of California,” said Gene Gebolys, president of Chelsea, Mass.-based World Energy, one of the nation’s largest suppliers of biodiesel. “If diesel generators can run cleaner, they can run longer, which means more power” for the state.
The concept of using plant oils for a fuel source might seem a little nutty. But when Rudolph Diesel unveiled his now-famous engine at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, he ran the contraption on peanut oil.
Then, as now, the world was powered by oil and gas. Thus, Diesel watched the technology that bore his name become synonymous with dirty fossil fuel. But he never gave up the dream that plants, not petroleum, would someday gain widespread acceptance with the motoring public.
“The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today,” Diesel said in a 1912 speech. “But such oils may become in the course of time as important as petroleum and the coal tar.”
Nearly nine decades later, Shaq Diesel is better known than biodiesel in the United States, where petroleum-based products maintain a huge cost advantage. The average price for a gallon of diesel fuel in Southern California is about $1.63, while a gallon of biodiesel can cost upward of $3 a gallon.
High taxes on petroleum products have narrowed the gap substantially in Europe, where automotive biodiesel technology is flourishing. But interest began growing in the U.S. in the early 1990s, when Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 1992.
That legislation was aimed at increasing America’s energy security by encouraging the use of domestically produced alternative fuels. One of its requirements was that federal and state fleets increase their use of alternative-fuel vehicles such as electric cars and natural-gas hybrids. Biodiesel advocates caught a break in 1998, when the act was amended to allow these fleets to use biodiesel to help them meet their requirements.
“That was the takeoff point,” said Jenna Higgins, spokeswoman for the Missouri-based National Biodiesel Board. “A lot of fleets started jumping on the bandwagon.”
Higgins said about 80 government and public utility fleets across the country now use biodiesel to power some of their vehicles. Although overall use remains minuscule, the growth numbers are impressive. The U.S. industry is on pace to produce 20 million gallons of biodiesel to meet demand this year, up from 6 million gallons last year.
Fleet managers love it because they can simply pump it into their existing diesel fleet instead of spending big money on new vehicles powered by batteries or natural gas. Still, hardly anyone expected the fuel to become cost-competitive with fossil fuels any time soon. But that was before last summer, when California--and St. Mary’s Medical Center--found themselves mired in an energy crisis.
The hospital’s Mathis had never heard of biodiesel. All he knew was that natural-gas-powered boilers that provided the medical center with hot water and heat were costing the nonprofit a fortune as prices skyrocketed. So he was willing to give it a shot when Chris Sellars, a sales representative with the Long Beach office of Supreme Oil Co., came calling with the proposition to run the operation on soybeans instead of natural gas.
“At first they kind of looked at me like I was a snake-oil salesman,” Sellars said. “But I knew it could work.”
Sellars figured the hospital was a perfect guinea pig for the biodiesel experiment. The law requires that hospitals have backup generation systems, so St. Mary already possessed the huge liquid fuel tanks that would be needed to store the biodiesel. In addition, the hospital had a massive boiler capable of running on liquid fuel or natural gas, so there would be no extra expense there.
The real trick would be meeting emissions limits set down by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. Although the Energy Department has found that biodiesel combustion emits less heavy hydrocarbons, particulates, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide than petroleum-based diesel, nitrogen oxide emissions can actually increase.
That’s a huge hurdle in Southern California, where nitrogen oxide emissions are tightly regulated by the AQMD. But Sellars’ firm had developed an additive he was sure could bring the hospital within its nitrogen oxide ceiling.
It took several months and lots of fine-tuning, but today the hospital says it’s running far below its pollution limits and still saving money on fuel, even though natural gas prices have dropped well below their winter peak.
“I like the idea that our [fuel] dollars aren’t going to the Middle East,” said senior electrician Bill Chiahk, who runs the boilers. “Plus, we’re helping the planet.”
Some environmentalists don’t think so. Natural gas burns cleaner than both biodiesel or conventional diesel, said Todd Campbell, policy director for the Santa Monica-based Coalition for Clean Air. He said a mass migration of industrial users away from natural gas toward biodiesel would be a huge step back for clean air.
“I commend [St. Mary] for trying something new,” he said. “I just think it’s the wrong choice.”
But biodiesel advocates such as World Energy’s Gebolys say that the technology is still in its infancy, and that there is plenty of room to bring down nitrogen oxide emissions even further. He said the greatest potential for the fuel in California over the short haul is in helping the state clean up its dirty diesel backup generators.
