 |
| Top Rod: Ford powers Telluride's biodiesel bus down Main Street. (Gregg Segal) |
 |
|
Grease is the Word (Cont.)
CHARRIS'S KETCHUP air freshener sways in the breeze. He launches into a rap he will perform at the Mountainfilm festival. He pounds out a beat on his wheel and spits Bobby McFerrin-style bass notes: "KA-doon-doon-WHACK! We could get driven to extinction just for spinning our wheels / Up an' offin' ourselves with our own automobiles... You see, I need a vehicle to meet my vehicle needs / You know, for carryin' loads, you know, to travel at speeds / 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?"
Charris began writing raps in high school, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and then sang them in his head during a decade spent on his family's organic farm, in the backwoods of Tennessee. A Woodstock-era baby, Charris was conceived right after his mother's last acid trip. He says his name comes from charisma and a type of Indian hashish. His father, once a Madison Avenue ad exec, dropped out to experience the sixties, moving the family to Haight-Ashbury and then to a remote Colorado cabin. "I was a handmade-Jesus-slipper-wearing kid," says Charris.
But now Charris has very, very big plans. He wants to start a national chain of Grassolean stations that sell everything from biodiesel to organic candy bars. "I have dreams of becoming the Steve Jobs of green energy," he says. Currently he's making do with his plant, a bunch of metal drums and a ramshackle building in nearby Montrose, where Grassolean Solutions produces about 100 gallons of biodiesel a week for its own use. Within a year, Charris and his team of investors and workers—which includes a local dentist, an eco-contractor, and a recent Harvard grad who mixes the potent grease-lye-alcohol cocktail in coveralls and a Dr. Seuss hat—plan to produce more than 6,000 gallons a week. They're pursuing a petroleum distribution license from the state of Colorado so they can officially sell their product to the public and to their beloved city bus, the Galloping Goose. (Although Charris is the one who convinced the local government to convert the Goose to veggie fuel, the U.S. Department of Energy is underwriting Telluride's high-altitude transit experiment and requires the town to buy its biodiesel from a legit supplier in Denver.)
Charris is gambling that we are approaching biodiesel's Big Moment. He may be right: Germany has more than 1,000 biodiesel stations, and in Austria, McDonald's happily hands over its grease. In the United States, some 12 companies manufacture about 20 million gallons of the stuff annually, mostly from virgin crops like soy. From California to New York, there are about 100 biodiesel stations, which mainly service small commercial fleets. (There is no conversion necessary for existing diesel engines, except that when using pure biodiesel in cold climates, you might want to heat the fuel line to avoid having your grease turn into Jell-O.) Less than 2 percent of cars in the U.S. have diesel engines, but that could change, given their enviable fuel efficiency. Though U.S. automakers have explored biodiesel as a future wonder fuel, for now most are focusing on the long-range promise of fuel-cell and hybrid technology.
In the meantime, petroleum diesel contributes to some acute respiratory problems. One of the dirtiest fuels, it emits polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are carcinogenic, as well as carbon dioxide, arsenic, sulfur, benzene, and formaldehyde. Biodiesel exhaust, by contrast, is almost as pure as mountain air. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency—which recently ordered strict sulfur-emissions standards for diesel big rigs—has found that veggie fuel cuts particulates and carbon monoxide emissions by more than 40 percent and hydrocarbons by 67 percent.
It all goes back to Rudolf Diesel, really. When the German mechanical engineer unveiled his efficient engine, in Paris in 1900, he intended it to run on peanut oil and envisioned a world of farmers growing their own regional fuel. This is the scene Charris wants to construct in Telluride—except, in this case, the oil has played host to a dead chicken wing.
|
