It may be a filling station, but Biofuel Oasis, the East Bay’s very first biodiesel outlet, screams yoga studio. The walls of its groovy communal hang space are streaked with columns of muted orange wheat-paste paint or coated with a yellowish clay, sand, and wheat-paste combination — all entirely nontoxic, thanks. And while the place sells more than just fuel, you’ll have to shop elsewhere for your Big Gulps and Pringles. Here it’s strictly biodiesel chic: piles of green disposable nitrile gloves, glassware for would-be home brewers, and red-and-white biodiesel hand pumps that resemble giant plastic candy canes. It’s all pretty much what you’d expect from purveyors of a fuel that, at least for now, is as much a lifestyle as something to put in your gas tank.
Behind the ’70s-style wet bar that serves as the Berkeley establishment’s counter, co-owners Jennifer Radtke and Sarah Hope Smith tend to the phone and chat with customers who congregate to banter about alternative fuels and browse informational pamphlets. The precious elixir is kept in a large adjoining space in two hulking green plastic tanks that lurk near the back.
On a recent evening, trucks from the north entrance of Bayer Pharmaceuticals roar past the station’s open doors, momentarily blanking out conversation and filling the small shop with heartburn-inducing conventional diesel fumes — a far cry from the french-fry aroma Radtke’s own car puts out. “We need to get those guys running biodiesel,” she says with a laugh.
Radtke is in her thirties, and prone to the girlish nervous laugh of a shy person suddenly morphing into an extrovert. Before she got hooked on refined-vegetable fuel two years ago, she drove a purple one-seater electric car that, with her dark-brown hair swooping out, made her look like a Jetsons character. “I felt passionate about having a biodiesel station that wasn’t at a gas station,” she says during an impromptu tour, “because obviously it would then be owned or associated with a petroleum company.”
Although Biofuel Oasis currently lacks the metered pumps most drivers associate with a fill-up, its owners hope to have one installed prior to their planned grand opening on February 29. For now, the fuel is sold in carboys, sturdy plastic five-gallon containers, which customers empty directly into the tanks of their conventional diesel vehicles. Radtke, despite her slight build, handily hefts a carboy filled with the amber liquid out to a customer’s car. “I want to change the whole way people relate to fuel,” she professes. “I mean, if you have a few carboys in your trunk and the tank is getting low, you can stop and fill up your car under the shade of a tree. Adding fuel to your car can be a beautiful, nontoxic experience.”
Outside, Sarah Hope Smith is fussing with her prodigious light-brown hair, which tumbles past her waistline. Smith is in her late thirties, with wide, expressive eyes. A bit of a Jewish mystic, she explains the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam and how it relates to her business. She unbraids and rebraids, never pausing in her tale of a man who, long ago, sold coal he unloaded from a train that would stop by Pacific Coast Chemicals, just across the street. “Anyway, he died very young, probably from lung cancer related to bagging up and breathing coal fumes,” she says. “Tikkun olam is the belief that as time goes on, old wrongs are righted. And I’m certain that Biofuel Oasis being here, right where that happened fifty years ago, is part of tikkun olam — to heal the world.”
Throughout the evening, customers show up one by one, the rattle of diesel engines signaling their arrivals. A woman swaddled in a multicolored knit shawl. A hipster girl wearing all black and cat-eye glasses. A solar-panel installer who lives on his sailboat.
A sheepish-looking father type, sporting Levis and polar fleece, comes in and inquires about the source of the fuel. Biofuel Oasis buys from Ukiah distributor Yokayo, which gets biodiesel from a variety of sources, but favors plants that refine waste vegetable oil. After buying ten gallons for his brand-new Volkswagen TDI, Mr. Dad looks like a kid at Christmastime. “People, when they first hear about biodiesel, think they’ve discovered fire,” explains Maria “Girl Mark” Alovert, who brews her own fuel. “And they rush out to get a diesel car.”
That’s a good choice, environmentally at least. The most recent study, completed in 2002 by the US Environmental Protection Agency, found that biodiesel cars spew 48 percent less carbon monoxide and 70 percent fewer hydrocarbons than conventional diesel vehicles. Emissions of lung-clogging particulates are cut in half, and sulfur emissions — which cause acid rain — are eliminated. Carbon dioxide — a key contributor to global warming — is reduced by 78 percent if you count the CO2 absorbed by the vegetation used to make the fuel. Biodiesel’s environmental downsides include a drop of 4 to 10 mpg in fuel efficiency, and a 10 percent increase in smoggy nitrogen oxides.
But any would-be environmental crusader would be smart to consider the realities of this gateway alternative fuel before rushing out to buy a diesel car. First, it’s expensive. Converting vegetable oil to fuel requires a chemical reaction called transesterification, in which lye and methanol are mixed with hot vegetable oil to make biodiesel and its waste product, glycerin. Making biodiesel in quantity involves costly equipment, and that, plus limited supplies of the stuff, translates into high prices. The only other station in the greater Bay Area, Western States Oil in San Jose, charges $2.92 per gallon. Biofuel Oasis charges $3, plus a refundable deposit of $7.50 per carboy.
Many converts feel it’s worth the price. Wallace Brooks, a Berkeley-born, sweater-tucked-into-jeans kind of guy, is one of them. He’s been using biodiesel for two and a half years because his job requires him to drive 26,000 miles annually. “I don’t feel so bad about using a car when I use biodiesel,” he says. “I feel good about not supporting the oil wars.”
Brooks is a model biodiesel consumer — a guy willing to pop the hood of his ’78 Mercedes 300 and tweak hoses, and explain how the sooty particulates spewed by conventional diesel engines blow up north and melt the polar ice caps. His advice to people considering biodiesel? “Do it.”
Monty Mykolas, also from Berkeley, did it about a year ago. He bought a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit diesel pickup and immediately made the switch. His maiden voyage was to pick up his brother at the San Jose airport, but the Rabbit broke down on the way home, halfway through its first tank of fuel. “We were cruising along, reveling in the clean conscience of a biofuel vehicle, when suddenly the car began losing power,” he recalls. “Within a couple of minutes I had to pull off the freeway and the car died. After a few minutes, it started again and I was able to get it to limp to a parking lot where it died again. No problem; it must be a clogged fuel filter, and I just happened to have picked up an extra one for just such a biodiesel-induced occasion.”
But that wasn’t the problem. At midnight on a Sunday, Mykolas and his brother changed the filter and bled the fuel system in a BART parking lot, yet the truck still wouldn’t work. They ended up sleeping in it that night. The problem turned out to be in a fitting on the fuel line known as the banjo bolt. Biodiesel loosens up particulate residues that accumulate in the fuel tanks and fuel lines of old diesel cars. The particles had broken free and clogged the narrow banjo bolt, cutting off fuel to the engine. “We fixed it with nothing more than a pipe cleaner,” Mykolas says. “But what a pain it was to figure out, and how unfun to break down forty miles from home in the middle of the night.”
His next car, a 1981 Peugeot, also had problems, this time because of biodiesel’s tendency to corrode rubber. Many diesel cars handle the switch without incident, but to be safe, it’s best to follow biodiesel rule #1: If you buy an older car, replace every rubber part that will make contact with the fuel. (New cars use synthetic hoses that can handle biodiesel.) And to steer clear of clogged banjo bolts and other parts whose names you never wanted to know, it’s a good idea to remove the gas tank and scrub out the old diesel sediments.
For people who’d rather not get this close to their engine, or who fear or can’t afford breakdowns, biodiesel may prove a bit much. It takes a hardy soul, like Mykolas: “Having gone through these two ordeals from my biodiesel usage,” he says, “I still continue to be addicted to the greasy stuff.”
But even Bay Area drivers who don’t mind getting dirty, and who yearn to make their No Blood for Oil bumper stickers legit, may find their local sources about as reliable as electrical power in Baghdad. Wallace Brooks, for instance, says his San Francisco supplier abruptly stopped selling the stuff this past October. Now he has Biofuel Oasis, which he gripes is “more of a hobby” for its owners. He’s referring to the station’s spotty hours, which are subject to change without notice.
The dearth of stable biodiesel stations, Radtke says, comes down to one thing: There’s no profit in it. After scrutinizing the numbers, she says, most businesspeople would laugh, or flee. On this particular evening, Biofuel Oasis had twenty customers, netting the women about $60 to cover rent, power, and overhead. Which explains the hours: Both women work “real” jobs in addition to running the station.
Because of the financial precariousness of their enterprise, Smith and Radtke have dreamed up other revenue sources. Following the nonprofit model, they are offering customers the chance to become Biofuel Oasis “supporters” by donating $50 or more. Supporters get to sign their names on one of the big fuel tanks, and receive a commemorative bottle of basil-infused biodiesel. (Warning: Don’t put this on your salad.) They are also hosting various alternative-fuel panel discussions with a suggested donation of $5 to attend.
“We went into this thing so naive,” Radtke concedes. “Naive about the permitting, how long it would take [the pair had hoped to open last August], the costs, everything. And now we’ve spent our retirement money and all of our savings to start this business that probably will never make money.”
Yet when asked whether they would do it again, both women nod vigorously. It seems you need to be just a little bit crazy if you’re looking to save the planet.
