Biodiesel: The Fuel That Doesn't Kill Us

Editor's Note: Annie Nelson, wife of Willie Nelson and co-chairperson of the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, spoke to Joshua Scheer about the myth that alternative fuels are years away.

Scheer: Did you see the State of the Union?

Nelson: Yeah, I stomached as much as I could.

Scheer: Did you see what the president said about ethanol? ... He did say one sentence or one line about biodiesel. Did any of that resonate with you?

Nelson: Yeah, about as much as it did the last time he said it. I mean, it's all a bit of -- it's just talk. You know, they give 13 gazillion dollars to the oil and gas industry as some welfare for these people who are making phenomenal historic record-breaking profits, and less than -- I think it's 7.7 [billion] for research into alternative fuels which are already here. It's lip service. It's all lip service.

Scheer: And what's your involvement in biodiesel?

Nelson: Pretty much we're proponents. I don't know how else to say it. We're in production. We have partnerships with Pacific Biodiesel Texas and Pacific Biodiesel, and we are doing community production of biodiesel. And our intent is to keep them community [based] and then promote that idea where each community ... can and should create their own fuel, and let that be the market for the community.

Scheer: What is biodiesel?

Nelson: It is the fuel that obviously powers -- I'm going to go real elementary, right?

Scheer: Yeah.

Nelson: The fuel that powers a diesel engine. Biodiesel needs to run in a diesel engine, and what it does -- where it comes from are several sources. It can come from recycled cooking oil, which then keeps that junk out of landfills; several plant seed stocks from seeds and those types of things; the rendering of animals, just you name it. There are tons of ways to get it. There's a process where they remove the glycerin -- that's biodiesel. You can put pure cooking oil into your car, but you have to have a converter inside of it. But just any regular diesel [vehicle] can run on biodiesel because it's been refined, which means the glycerin has been taken out.

Scheer: So ... you can actually drive on recycled cooking oil?

Nelson: Yes, the diesel engine was designed to run on peanut and hemp oil, not petroleum. But then again Rudolf Diesel disappeared over the Atlantic. It never was intended to run on petroleum, and in fact I think an interesting connection is if you go -- if you check out the Prohibition era, when the government was going after stills that were on farms and such, a lot of those stills were producing ethanol and biodiesel for -- mainly ethanol -- for farm production, for their machinery. That's what happened. There were so many people involved in it, in that whole deal, that Prohibition was probably a whole lot less about alcohol and a whole lot more about killing the renewable energy possibilities. Obviously the petroleum companies were behind it.

Scheer: What's the difference between biodiesel and ethanol?

Nelson: Well, ethanol is almost like -- and I'm not an expert on ethanol at all, so let me just put that disclaimer in there immediately -- it's more like a grain alcohol, almost. It's from sugar. It's a plant that needs to have a particular cellulose to create a gasoline-type fuel. But it's mainly turning the sugar into fuel.

Scheer: With ethanol we know how much money has been given to Iowa and other states where ethanol is being produced. On Biodiesel.org, they say there's no government program to support them. Do you have an opinion on that?

Nelson: Biodiesel.org is an actual biodiesel board and there are many others. They're just one entity, and they're fine. They tend to have a lot more large producers and a lot of soybean people. Our whole deal, and we just actually formed -- Daryl Hannah and I are co-chairs and Kelly King and Laura Louie, who is Woody Harrelson's wife, and a group of us just formed the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance, where our intent is to focus specifically on sustainable community biodiesel production.