Imagine: you pull up to a fueling station. You get out, open the gas tank, and start pumping biofuel. Then, you head inside, grab a healthy snack, and pick up a ballcap or T-shirt made from organic cotton. Not your typical road stop experience? Not yet. But it will be, if Charris Ford gets his way -- by Kathryn Gillick

Charris Ford gets pumped
about biofuels.
"I call it the 7-11 from Heaven...where everything inside the station is the best of sustainability," says Ford, the founder of Grassolean Solutions, LLC, which was the first biodiesel producer in Colorado when it opened in 2000. Ford is at least a year off from opening one of these stations, but in the meantime, Grassolean supplies the members of the group that run the company, as well as a small retail arm, with 100 percent recycled fryer grease from restaurants near Telluride, Colorado. He likes to refer to himself as the "Granola Ayatollah of Canola," and if you haven't heard of him yet, you will soon.

Ford first learned about biodiesel in 1997 from his wife’s friend, whose husband Josh Tickell wrote From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, the bible of biodiesel brewing. When Ford learned about biodiesel, Tickell was just getting ready to start a cross-country trip in a Winnebago fueled on recycled cooking grease, which was made into the documentary "Veggie Van Voyage." Not too much later, Ford’s assistant rolled his truck. "I thought, ‘well, you know, these kids out in Florida are about ready to drive across the country in a vegetable-oil-powered vehicle, I ought to have my next vehicle be a bio-fuel vehicle.’ So I started looking into biodiesel. I got my truck in 1999."

Since then, he’s been an outspoken advocate of veggie fuel, especially the recycled fryer-grease variety. When he’s not producing biodiesel, he’s educating people about it. He convinced Telluride city officials to be the first in the country to run a municipal bus on 100 percent biodiesel, he speaks at conferences, gives demonstrations, and even raps about biofuels.

The Granola Ayatollah of Canola breaks it down, old school:

after I bought my last car I said I wouldn't buy anutter
until they made an engine that ran on apple butter
and to my apple butter dream car I stayed loyal
until I found an engine that ran on veggie oil

so here is the latest on French-fried potatoes
it's a good thing that everybody's so stoked on the taste
but there's four billion gallons of fryer grease just goin' to waste

the oil from the seed of almost any vegetable plant
can fuel your diesel rig by pourin' it straight into the tank
I got that veggie fuel burnin', now I'm rollin with ease
is that the scent of French fries I'm smellin' on the breeze?
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The first 100 percent biodiesel bus, in Telluride, Colo.
Ford frames the issue of sustainable energy as a fundamental world outlook, pointing out that a large-scale move away from traditional petroleum will require a huge shift in the way people think about energy and resources. "Biofuel has a place in the future, but unless we have a change of heart or a paradigm shift in the way that we consume energy, i.e., we don’t need a (Lincoln) Navigator or a Ford Extinction so that a soccer mom can go pick up a stick of butter across town. That’s not intelligent energy use. We’ve been sort of wallowing in this abundance of energy, but… we’re going to run out of the luxury of abusing, or squandering, our energy.

"It’s too bad we didn’t realize that earlier," he continued, "because if we did, we could have designed our entire culture around the idea that we need to make it last as long as possible, but we didn’t do that. We’ve taken the other approach, which is 'Hey, I’ll drive a Hummer to the office.'"

"We all need to deal with what a sustainable human society looks like. I think there’s a lot of hope for us to make that change and get that work done, but it only really happens if we’re educated about what we need to be doing and what we are doing that we shouldn’t be doing any longer."

That attitude can’t last, though. Although no one can say for sure when global oil production will peak, it may be as early as 2016, according to Dr. Colin Campbell, founder of London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre. That doesn’t mean, of course, that the world will immediately run out of oil, but as fewer supplies are available, prices will continue to rise until either supplies run out, or an alternative, more affordable, source of energy is found.

In the meantime, there are steps we can take to make the most of what supplies are left. "We think of conservation as something that should be directed at something like baby seals or trees," he says. "I think it’s really important for us to realize that we need to apply those same values of conservation to oil, to the black sticky stuff."

Ford hopes that the mass appeal of biodiesel –- which is supported by people across political and social lines, from Republicans and farmers to city dwellers and environmentalists –- can serve as an ice breaker into a broader conversation about sustainability. "We all need to deal with what a sustainable human society looks like. I think there’s a lot of hope for us to make that change and get that work done, but it only really happens if we’re educated about what we need to be doing and what we are doing that we shouldn’t be doing any longer. You can’t have one without the other –- you need to know what the facts are, but we also need to know that there is hope, and what we can do about it. Using biofuels is one powerful step in that direction."



Kathryn Gillick is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.