"This Biodiesel Plan's a Spicy One!" Green Car Advisor

This Biodiesel Plan's a Spicy One!

By Scott Doggett, Contributor

A transit company, a biofuel producer and a vineyard in California's Monterey County are partnering to see if seeds from locally grown mustard plants can be pressed into a viable biodiesel for transit buses

Monterey area farmers now plant hay, barley or other cover crops during the rainy, unproductive winter months to keep their valuable topsoil from washing and blowing away. The cover crops then have to be plowed into the soil before a commercial crop (broccoli, lettuce and other salad and table vegetable crops predominate in the region)) can be planted.

The idea behind the mustard experiment is to see whether mustard plants, which require no irrigation or other tending, can be grown and harvested without interfering with the commercial crops, and to see if it makes dollars and sense to produce biodiesel this way.

Sowing Wild Mustard
If so, the partners hope to persuade farmers to let them grow mustard plants on their land during unproductive periods, – which would save the farmers the cost of tending to other cover crops.

To that end, two varieties of the mustard that grows wild throughout the region have been planted on 30 acres donated by San Bernabe Vineyards.

Energy Alternative Solutions, which presently makes biodiesel from recycled cooking oil, will crush the seeds, extract the oil and make B20 (a blend of 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent mineral diesel) from it. Because of warranty issues, few transit buses in the U.S. run on blends that contain any more than 20 percent biodiesel.

Fuel For Buses
Monterey-Salinas Transit, which initiated the experiment with the help of Robert Van Buskirk of Farm Fuel Inc., will then use the fuel to power its buses.

The beauty of this endeavor, says Energy Alternatives President Richard Gillis, is that mustard plants, because they'd be growen only in the unproductive periods, would not displace or otherwise reduce the production of food crops. Also, mustard plants don't harm the environment, unlike, say, biodiesel made from palm oil, which is contributing to rainforest destruction.

The production of biodiesel from mustard plants is also fully sustainable -- the spicy mustard meal created as a byproduct after the oil is extracted could be used as a biopesticide and fertilizer for crops, including those grown by the many organic farming operations in Monterey County.

Keeping it Local
Unlike other biofuel feedstocks that are often trucked across state lines to be refined, everything involved with the mustanrd experiment -- from harvest to refinement to use -- would be contained in one county.

"We're trying to be our own little biosphere here," said Hunter Harvath, director of administration for the transit authority. "We want to keep all the ingredients -- the inputs, the outputs -- all here in Monterey County."