MARLBORO — Standing next to a patch of half-cleared forest, 63-year-old Dan MacArthur is hundreds of miles away from Wall Street, but he's well ahead of the game this summer when it comes to beating high gas prices.
He drives a diesel car that runs on waste vegetable oil – a “grease car.”
In fact, MacArthur uses eight different biodiesel vehicles for his farm and construction business, ranging from his Volkswagen New Beetle to an assortment of trucks to the wood-splitter for his sugarhouse. He also has a biodiesel John Deere tractor and a backhoe.
While the rest of America braces for more sticker shock at the pump - forecasters expect prices to surge toward $4 per gallon in August - MacArthur received 250 gallons of biodiesel this month that he expects will last him through autumn. The price? A cool $3.28 per gallon.
That's 33 cents a gallon less than the average gas price so far this year in Vermont, and well below the average diesel price, which has been near or above $4 per gallon in the first half of 2013.
For MacArthur, the price isn't the point of driving a grease car. But he isn't complaining.
“The reason I run my vehicles on veggie oil is to put less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” he says. “But if I save some money on it too, that's all right by me.”
As a rule, burning biodiesel reduces pollution-causing hydrocarbon emissions by 70 percent compared to petroleum diesel, and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, according to the Environment Protection Agency.
So why are biodiesel prices so much lower than gas and diesel prices during the summer driving season? The reason is simple, although not known to many – even to grease car enthusiasts. As it turns out, biodiesel prices are pegged to the price of heating oil, not gas or diesel, according to White Mountain Biodiesel in North Haverhill, N.H. Typically, heating oil hits its low in the summer months, just when gas and diesel prices are heating up.
Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine in 1890s, intended for his engine to run on peanut oil. But as petroleum became more popular and cheaper, vegetable oil took a back seat to fossil fuels. Even so, more than 100 years later, the diesel engine can still run on vegetable-based oil – with little to no modification to the car.
Biodiesel is made by refining vegetable-based oil into fuel, but grease car drivers such as MacArthur prefer biodiesel made from waste products (which is what White Mountain Biodiesel produces) to biodiesel made from crops that would otherwise be used as food. Diesel engines can run on both unrefined waste vegetable oil, which is usually filtered before use, and store-bought vegetable oil, but the former is a waste product while the latter is not, MacArthur says.
When talking to people about grease cars, it seems all conversations lead back to Barry Aleshnick. After spending most of his adult life getting around on a bicycle, Aleshnick tried driving a grease car and never looked back. That was a decade ago, when there was plenty of waste vegetable oil available in the area for free – what he calls “the golden age” of grease cars.
Back then, restaurants had to pay to have their waste vegetable oil hauled away and were only too happy to give it to Aleshnick and other grease car owners. Now, as biodiesel refineries pop up all over the country willing to pay about $1 a gallon for the vegetable oil, Aleshnick has only one restaurant left that hasn't cut off his supply – and he won't name it.
MacArthur agrees that rising demand for vegetable oil has led to a surreal turn of events. “The Thai restaurant locks up its veggie oil now,” he says with a wry grin, referring to Thai Bamboo on Main Street in Brattleboro.
These days, Aleshnick runs a local co-op that purchases biodiesel in bulk from White Mountain Biodiesel, which gets its vegetable oil from restaurants across New England and refines it for large distributors.
Robert Kuhsel, one of the founders of White Mountain Biodiesel, says bulk purchases by locals are rare and that Aleshnick's co-op is an exception.
“Barry is the heart and soul of the renewable energy movement,” he says.
Looking ahead, he says he fears government regulations may eventually prevent him from selling biodiesel to smaller, non-EPA licensed co-ops such as Aleshnick's. That would present an obstacle for grease car drivers such as MacArthur, who relies on Aleshnick's co-op for roughly 1,000 gallons of biodiesel a year.
While biodiesel is far from mainstream, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that since 2005, 4.6 billion gallons of biodiesel have been burned, cutting emissions by 74 billion pounds – comparable to removing 5.4 million cars from the road.
Large-scale biodiesel production presents its own set of problems, says Aleshnick.
Commercial biodiesel is made predominantly from crops such as corn and sugarcane, which can contribute to deforestation and increased global food prices. As a result, Aleshnick says, he is careful to only source biodiesel that does not cut into the global food supply.
MacArthur, who has been using recycled vegetable oil and biodiesel in his cars and trucks for more than 25 years, says he was the first one on his street to do so. His family has lived on several hundred acres of land on Marlboro's MacArthur Road for four generations – a road now filled with grease cars owned by his family and neighbors.
In a world with an uncertain future, he says, his goal is to respect the land and environment, and create a place that his grandchildren can always come home to.