Charris Ford cruises Telluride with his fuel of the future: used French-fry oil. (Gregg Segal)
CHARRIS FORD is a perpetual parade float. In his black, convertible 1980 International Scout, he drives up and down the main drag of the absurdly picturesque town of Telluride, Colorado, where the San Juans' jagged granite peaks rise up on three sides in curtains of pine, rock, and snow. He smiles, he waves, he catcalls to his many well-wishers. The cross section of Telluridians out and about today—some of them skateboarding, some rolling sport-utility baby carriages, many lounging on the benches outside the Steaming Bean coffee shop—all look unhurried, well caffeinated, and fit.
"Hey, you'uns, whassup?" whoops Charris.
They respond with wolf howls and fist pumps. In a few minutes he'll pass them going the other direction. They'll raise their coffee mugs in salute. To them, 33-year-old Charris (pronounced "Char-iss")
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represents everything they love about their own well-ordered and enlightened place in the universe. He is youthful, good-looking, hip, and eminently politically correct. He is well connected, with friends in Hollywood, at newspapers, and in politics. He raps and sometimes speaks in iambic pentameter. He cooks ostrich eggs. He talks on a cell phone while sitting on a composting toilet. And he has brought biodiesel to Telluride.
A concoction of vegetable oil, lye, and alcohol, biodiesel can supplant standard petroleum diesel. (The lye reacts with the oil, leaving glycerine as a by-product and methyl esters as fuel.) Thanks to Charris's vision of a world powered by processed veggie grease, a handful of locals now use the stuff in snowcats, tractors, backhoes, generators, school buses, golf-course maintenance vehicles, and a construction crane. And, of course, Charris's Scout runs on the green-friendly fuel. A dozen restaurants currently hand over their spent cooking oil to Charris and his band of biodiesel confederates, and more are ready to sign up when the fuel-brewing capacity of his company—Grassolean Solutions—increases. Although communities like Breckenridge have launched transportation fleets powered by "B20," a relatively timid blend of bio and petroleum diesel, Telluride has become the first town to run a public bus on "B100," a mixture as pure as biodiesel gets.
