Читать книгу Industrial Evolution - Lyle Estill - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIN JANUARY 2005, I shoved the security gate open and walked onto a three and half-acre campus with four buildings spanning roughly twenty thousand square feet. We had just acquired an empty industrial site.
It was creepy. Poison ivy climbed the walls, possums, groundhogs, and raccoons roamed freely about. The buildings creaked and groaned in the wind and with the slightest change of temperature.
The place was built in 1986 by a group of folks who wanted to invent a superior aluminum for use in fighter jets. They managed to get big water, and big sewer, and big electricity pulled out to the middle of nowhere, but as far as I can tell they never figured out “big jobs.”
It closed in 1996, shortly after the Soviet Union folded in the Cold War. Their better aluminum was a victim of the peace dividend.
And the park sat empty for another ten years. The buildings were strange. Two-foot thick concrete blast walls and hinged roofs that were designed to let explosions “out.” It was a white elephant on the edge of town — too complicated to even bulldoze.
We thought we could put our entire biodiesel operation in the second building, which is four stories tall and came complete with a three story mezzanine that was already painted green and yellow — the colors of Piedmont Biofuels.
The Plant began as a creepy, abandoned place.
We were young. And naïve. I literally showed up in coveralls ready to fire up my acetylene torch to cut out some equipment to make room for our biodiesel plant. I thought the first job that lay before us was to convert the abandoned industrial scrap into cash. We had electric transformers, and thousand-dollar breakers, and hydraulic presses for as far as the eye could see.
Yet when I ventured into that market I was startled to learn that such equipment was everywhere. In order to sell the remnants of an industrial plant, someone needs to be investing in industrial gear. And in North Carolina, in 2005, it appeared as if we were the only enterprise in the region that was actually building a “factory.”
Combine that with the fact that there were and are abandoned mills and industries across our state — many with transformers and breakers and hydraulic presses collecting dust.
I learned early on that if I was going to convert stuff into cash, the market would be China, the competition would be fierce, and selling off industrial gear would be a new career entirely. Rather than embark on a new career, we set about selling things off for scrap metal and went to work on designing and building our biodiesel plant.
With plantings and art and businesses we brought the Plant campus to life.
Once I figured out how to turn the electricity on, I went to work on outfitting the original Control Room as our office space. I thought it would be a suitable place to make camp while we built. And it was horrific. Leif, me, and Evan set up on tables and desks side by side with no daylight, no fresh air, with two land lines and three cell phones and a fax machine. When Rachel decided to join us, I took my torches and cut a circular hole in the control room wall and gutted what was once a wiring closet. It was just enough space to fit a desk and a bookshelf. We called it the “Hobbit Hollow” because of the shape of the cut in the wall.
From that awful little control room we designed and built and permitted North Carolina’s first B100 terminal — the first place in the state to get 100% biodiesel that wasn’t off a rail car.
Two months into the endeavor I published an entry in Energy Blog entitled “Office Downgrade”:
I thought that our office at Industrial was modest. I have a piece of plywood over a steel frame where I sit. But it is heated, and it has lights. We have a photocopier. And although it is close quarters, it works for now.
Today I came in to meet a team of electricians. The goal is to strip unwanted power that hangs in conduit from our proposed laboratory and proposed office space. Last week I had a chance to work with Tuesday again. We spent many years in the art business together, and we tapped her for some torch work at the plant. She cut out some enormous argon pipes to clear space for us. By shedding the pipes, and losing the electrical wires, we should be able to transform what was once an equipment room into a glorious office/lab/reception area.
Today I had visions of getting the electricians started, and retreating to a quiet Leif- and Evan- free office to work on Biodiesel Power.
I was going to be upstairs in the quiet office collecting my thoughts, and the electricians were going to be tracing circuits back to the distribution panels and eliminating them entirely.
Except to do that we killed power to the whole building.
Which means I am now on a pair of sawhorses, on the lawn outside of building #3. I fished a scrap of wood out of the pile for a desktop, and have run a hundred-foot extension cord out to my notebook.
It’s supposed to get up to 55 today, slight breeze, and it’s not bad here in the sun. I can occasionally hear the electricians grunt and holler from across the way.
Our meeting with the Fire Marshal went exceedingly well. Leif and I both have plenty of work ahead of us to meet his expectations, but it can all be achieved, and yesterday we were stoked about our prospects in general…
While Piedmont was innocently building a biodiesel plant in Building 2, Tami and Matt Schlegel and I were renovating Building 1. We didn’t need it for anything. It had a nice loading dock, and a machine shop, and some office space. Tami rented it out to Eastern Carolina Organics, which put in a giant drive-in cooler and set up a distribution operation for getting produce to fancy restaurants and grocery stores throughout the region.
Tami and Matt worked with local mosaic artist Janice Reeves and Diane Swan, our celebrity cabinetmaker, and they transformed what was once a machine shop into a remarkable kitchen and break room. They stained the concrete floor, put in a clerestory window for day lighting, and a giant arched window. We have Alicia Ravetto to thank for our day lighting strategy. I bought Tami a plant-wall biofilter, for her birthday, and we had it built into the wall. It is basically an indoor air-cleaning device with a continuous flow of water. It anchored the room in a remarkable way.
I think everyone on project would agree that the kitchen was over the top. Custom concrete counter tops with embedded shards of stained glass, locally grown maple “worm eaten” cabinet wood, with artful homemade light fixtures, it became a powerful space — a complete counterbalance to our nasty office in the control room.
We had no idea what we were doing. In the creation of the kitchen we accidentally created a magnetic space that set the tone for the project. Suddenly people wanted to use it for board meetings. We outfitted it with chairs and tables and started accommodating groups. Some rented, some donated, many were free, and while the kitchen never became a “revenue stream,” it meant the place filled up with groups from the Haw River Assembly to the Chatham Soccer League — and everything in between.
Having the coolest meeting space in three counties made the biodiesel plant a destination. Which gave it buzz, and traffic, and filled our parking lot up with interesting and interested people.
In the beginning the buildings were surrounded by turf. I hate turf. Unless it gets used. I can’t see the point of mowing something that no one sets foot on. Tuesday put together a pair of soccer goals such that one patch of turf could be a soccer field.
That made us a destination for soccer. In Small is Possible I wrote, “The plant is routinely a venue for parties. Children swarm to its midst with scooters and skateboards and inline skates, and all manner of wheeled devices. A whole generation will lose their training wheels at Piedmont Biofuels. That is either a reflection of our craving for community, or of the fact that we have a strip of safe pavement.”
As the biodiesel plant progressed we were slammed to a halt by water pressure. We knew that we would have to install a sprinkler system for our high hazard work, but were caught off guard by the fact that we did not have enough water pressure to operate a sprinkler system.
After all, our abandoned industrial park was at the end of the water line on the edge of town. We only had enough water pressure to sprinkle two small rooms. Increasing pressure meant erecting a water tower. Which was a $350,000 surprise. By the time we encountered this problem, our money supply was running low and we had no way to pull it off.
So we wedged our reactors, and our high-hazard work into two small rooms in Building 3, and we built an underground pipeline that crossed the street. Whew. Good thing we had an extra building. Suddenly biodiesel would require both Building 2 and Building 3.
Upon doing so we hit another formidable snag. Building 3 was located very close to our property line. In order to pull off our plan, we would have needed to locate our tank farm, which included ten thousand gallons of methanol storage, right next to the adjoining property. We were hemmed in.
So we bought the surrounding property. That moved us from three and half acres up to a fourteen-acre campus. After closing, we ripped down a large section of fence, and built our tank farm.
As part of our cash recycling efforts, we sold Building 4 to Jacques and Wendy. They had a brisk trade in fabrics and imported art and antiques and Building 4 became their warehouse.
On one end of the campus we were giving it our all building a biodiesel plant. On the other end various businesses were popping up. Screech moved his hydroponics lettuce operation in. Piedmont Biofarm started farming the vacant lots that surrounded our buildings. Tracy Kondracki moved her “Green Bean Accounting” business into an empty office in Building 1. And the Abundance Foundation, which is driven by my wife Tami snatched up another empty office.
A stage in the lawn brought on rock concerts and festivals, and provided a venue for politicians to speechify about our low carbon future. Eventually Piedmont finished its office space, complete with a gorgeous second story porch, and moved into the new Control Room, where most of us still work today.
We found a room in Building 3 that could be converted to office space, and before the paint was dry it was rented to Cecellia as an office for her work with the North Carolina Wildlife Commission.
We came for the biodiesel. Baskets and produce and bookkeeping and lettuce were ancillary. Piedmont Biofuels accidentally became the anchor tenant of what would emerge as an eco-industrial park. What we failed to understand at the time, as we were bringing our chemical plant to life, was that we were imitating nature, and accidentally diversifying. As Piedmont Biofuels lumbered along, trying to find its way into the world of a cleaner burning renewable fuel, an eco-industrial park sprung up around it. Before we knew it there were seven unique businesses inside the fence.
Farmers were coming to drop off their wares. Some filled up with fuel in the yard.
Allen came along wanting some biodiesel as a feedstock for his bio-pesticide business. We had an empty floor on our mezzanine, so we designed and built a precision blending operation for him. That went well, and he eventually took over Building 4. On one side of the street we work hard to avoid emulsions. We then sell product to Eco Blend so that it can be emulsified. One side of the street hates free fatty acids. The other side of the street sells them for a living.
I should note that as the real estate all around us was filling up with tenants, and projects that were largely focused on sustainability, we were mostly oblivious. At the time we did not see ourselves as an escort into the low carbon future. We were merely building a biodiesel plant. Welding every weld and fitting every pipe ourselves.
Piedmont Biofuels suffers from an acute case of “Do It Yourself Syndrome,” and because we had designed and built a handful of biodiesel projects, we found ourselves squarely in the design-build business for other people. Years ago we did a complete biodiesel plant on a trailer. Which led to a second version that became our Clean Technology Demonstration rig, which we drag around to various venues to demonstrate biodiesel production.
The North Carolina Zoological Park liked the notion of a biodiesel plant on a trailer so they hired us to build one for them. UNC Pembroke liked the notion too, so they bought one. As did Clemson University, and Hill Town Biodiesel Cooperative, as did Montana State University. By the time a principal at Washington High School decided to write a grant to build a biodiesel plant on a school bus, we had shipped a bunch of mobile units.
When the financial crash hit in the fall of 2008, our design-build group was staring at a year’s worth of work, and delivering projects profitably. As the recession deepened, the work grew. Small-scale biodiesel, based on feedstock anomalies flourished, as the giant biodiesel plants — and the industry itself — began to falter.
We found ourselves offering engineering assistance to seed crushing facilities, and spending almost as much time making 3D models of how to move liquids around as we spent making biodiesel.
At the same time we entered the research and development business. Greg and David had invested a massive amount of time and energy in the development of a cavitational reactor for biodiesel production, which they were positioning for small scale plants, and Greg took his enthusiasm for the learning edge and hired on to a research project involving the creation of heterogeneous catalyst.
At the time Rachel was our quality manager. She shepherded us through the BQ-9000 accreditation process, which is a quality standard awarded by the National Biodiesel Board. We were the smallest biodiesel plant in the land to make the grade. Rachel joined Greg in his quest for science projects and we found ourselves building a second lab and entering the world of contract research and analytics.
In the spring of 2007, with some assistance from the Biofuels Center of North Carolina, we embarked on the creation of our second chemical plant, which we referred to as our “bio-refinery.” In the course of creating biodiesel, a cocktail of co-products is created that largely has no market at all. Our bio-refinery was designed to sort that cocktail into its component parts, such that it could be turned into cash.
We turned on the bio-refinery in the fall of 2008, but we could not get it working properly until the summer of 2009. Once again we were a year late.
But by the fall of 2009, when the biodiesel industry had all but collapsed, our bio-refinery was spinning like a top, and we were able to bring in co-products from other biodiesel plants — those which were mostly closed, or idle, or waiting for the economy to turn. At the time we could land co-product feedstock for about a penny a pound, and after sorting it out in the bio-refinery, we were fetching thirteen cents a pound. Refining, it seemed, was a profitable undertaking.
Another important thing that occurred in the spring of 2009 was that the Board of Directors of the Piedmont Biofuels Coop elected to “become one” with Piedmont Biofuels Industrial. The Coop was a grassroots effort that was operating out of a double wide, collecting used vegetable oil from area restaurants, and spinning it into fuel for its members.
It was losing money at an amazing rate, and had run afoul of its landlord, its creditors, its neighbors, the local fire marshal, and was about to face the EPA in a showdown it had no hope of winning. Rather than letting a beloved institution fail, the Board decided to “land it in the Hudson,” by merging it with Industrial.
When the Coop and Industrial became one, we ended up with a soap maker, who was happily making soap out of crude biodiesel glycerin. And we ended up with a rainwater collection business that was largely concerned with marrying the ubiquitous containers of chemical handling to homeowners attempting to combat our increasing drought conditions.
By the fall of 2009 we had been making biodiesel for seven years. We had used almost every feedstock imaginable, except human fat, and despite our labors, we had never made any money producing fuel. I’m guessing we had lost money on every gallon ever produced, and we had produced well over a million gallons of fuel.
The industry was on the ropes and Piedmont was no exception. In the cold grey days of October I was astonished to see that our biodiesel production had hit an all time low — about 2700 gallons in a month, from an asset capable of making 4000 gallons in a day. We were down more than 90% from the same period a year earlier.
Yet our campus was expanding. Dan was leading volunteers in the construction of a new pole barn for Piedmont Biofarm, which was profitable on its own head of steam, and building a new greenhouse. Screech was undertaking a bold expansion, moving his operation from a lone greenhouse inside the fence to five more up on the hill.
I was building a seed crushing facility in the hallway of Building 3, to ready us for both a workshop, and a load of sunflower seeds that had been grown in wastewater by the City of Raleigh.
A new era of education and outreach had begun. Used cooking oil collection was in full swing, and Rachel tasked her sister Andrea with the creation of a new tradeshow booth.
One of the panels on the new booth was to be “Products from the Plant,” and Rachel and I went to work assembling photographs and verbiage.
Starting at the same gate I once shoved open as I walked into an abandoned industrial compound 4 years earlier, the list went something like this: Honey from Rick and his bees, organic produce from Eastern Carolina Organics, bookkeeping services from Tracy at Green Bean, festivals and events from the Abundance Foundation, biodiesel, rainwater delivery systems, vermiculture bins, boiler fuel, glycerin, design-build services and research from Piedmont Biofuels, produce and worm castings from Piedmont Biofarm, bio-herbicides and bio-pesticides from Eco-Blend, soaps from Deniece, and hydroponics lettuce from Screech.
Were we only making biodiesel, we would be bankrupt, like so many others. Instead we had accidentally diversified to the point of survival.
At the time I wrote about it in a column for the Chapel Hill News — which they titled “How Industry Evolves”:
In North Carolina, we tend to put our industrial sites in the southeast corner of every county. That’s largely so that when our industries dump their pollution in our rivers, it becomes the problem of the county next door.
That way Alamance can have the effluent of its dye houses flow immediately into Chatham County, and Chatham County can have the effluent of its resin makers, and the heat from the Cape Fear coal fired power facility, flow readily into Harnett County, which put its denim plants in the southeast corner, and so on to the sea.
Historically “county government” has been much more powerful in the south than in other parts of the world. We are accustomed to our county sheriffs, and attorneys, and county managers wielding serious power.
I am presently immersed in the writing of my next book, tentatively entitled “Industrial Evolution.” The other day over lunch Rachel and I were marveling over Piedmont Biofuels, accidental creation of a fullscale eco-industrial park in Pittsboro.
“It probably should have been in Moncure,” she said.
That’s where we both live. It’s the southeast corner of Chatham County — where all the industry is.
Moncure is where we have rail access. That’s a treasure for our economic development folks, since not every county has it. And Moncure is where we have cooling towers. And smokestacks. A few years ago Moncure was home to the highest emitter of formaldehyde in the land.
Our project is “in town.” And I suppose the reason we are in town is because we started with an abandoned industrial park. We were so focused on limiting the embodied energy of our project, that we couldn’t see the point in breaking ground on a green field. Our job is to help escort North Carolina into a low carbon future, which is why we snagged a campus of abandoned buildings, rather than breaking ground on the rail spur.
Rail is about being “big.” We want to make a go of it staying “small.”
Today 75% of the biodiesel industry in America is boarded up. We still haven’t figured out how to turn $3.00 oil into a $2.00 fuel. Piedmont is still chugging away.
For the past five years Rachel and I have driven past “For Rent” signs on our way to work. When the “Great Recession” hit we noticed an increase in abandoned buildings with signs in the yard. And yet there is a backlog of people who are trying to get space inside our fence.
Where we work, the co-products of one business are the feedstock of another, and the waste of one business becomes the heat source for the greenhouse on the hill.
In an economy that has allegedly ground to a halt, we are pulling building permits, and hiring builders. It appears the Abundance Foundation is about to move into the first “actually green” office building in Chatham County. And it’s tucked into the back yard of a chemical plant — nestled up against the sustainable farm that surrounds us.
We offer free tours of the plant every Sunday afternoon at 1:00 —as we have always done — and we have noticed a newfound interest in sustainability. What was once “all biodiesel all the time” has shifted ever so slightly into an interest in our rainwater delivery systems, and our worm castings, and our vermiculture digesters, and the banana trees that grace our campus.
This year we are not going to have to argue about climate change. We will simply show our guests a locally grown banana. At long last our banana trees in the yard are bearing edible fruit.
When you go down to the industrial plants in Moncure, you tend to be stopped by a security guard. Free tours are hard to come by.
And while both Rachel and I live down that way, I think we are glad to go to work in town…
In the early eighties I was fortunate enough to hire on to my brother Jim’s computer distribution business. I started out hanging drywall in his office, became a technical writer for his fledgling custom engineering group, moved into order processing when the administrative anchor of the business, Suzanne, quit. From there I launched a career in sales. We were lucky. Jim started selling computers out of the trunk of his car before Microsoft was invented. When IBM entered the industry we successfully retooled our business and our business exploded like the industry itself.
Lyle was delighted with his first edible banana harvest.
Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates went on to become the wealthiest man on earth and a popular computer evangelist. I met him once, on the show floor of the first ever “Windows World” in Atlanta where he rode the escalator like all the rest of us. And he was gracious, thanking people for coming to his show.
But I always thought Bill Gates was confused. He was always preaching “convergence” in which all of our technologies would arrive at the same point, and do everything for us. That struck me as being the opposite of how things happen in nature. In nature, species divide, they don’t converge. I believe the same logic holds true for business. Businesses naturally diverge.
The world that Bill Gates described had us balancing our checkbooks, and getting our entertainment, and reading our books on one splendid device that would allow all of our needs to “converge.” Yet it seems to me I have multiple devices piling up. My boys have a Wii console for playing one type of computer game and are saving up for an Xbox to allow them a wider range of game choices. I have a notebook computer where I tend to do different work than I do with our desktop model, and apparently I am in need of a separate electronic device with which I can download the books I want to read. While it is true that my cell phone has way more computing firepower than I can possibly understand, it’s not where I play games or do my banking.
I think “divergence” is what business does. When my brother Jim’s custom engineering business was floundering, he spun it out as a stand-alone company, where it found a niche and prospered.
That is certainly what Piedmont has done.
Another juncture where we depart from mainstream corporate America is when it comes to sharing information. We are the originators of “Open Biodiesel,” which borrowed heavily from the software industry.
In the software world there is a radical notion called “open source,” where the source code is often free to its users. In the parlance of the open source world, it is “free as in speech, not free as in beer.”
At the heart of the open source software proposition is the notion of a “community” of developers who work together to improve the product such that new features and functions can evolve rapidly. “Release early, and release often” is a common mantra from the world of open source.
The idea is that a small company with a community of contributors can have a larger development reach than it can afford, thereby permitting it to compete with giant “proprietary” competitors with large bankrolls.
In Small is Possible, I discussed how the principles of open source software development spilled over into community scale biodiesel. This caught the attention of Michael Tiemann, one of the founders of the open source movement.
Michael invited me out to his company, Red Hat, to speak to a lunchtime crowd as part of their “Lunch and Learn” speaker series. That began a friendship that has spanned a bunch of readings, and speaking events, and panel discussions in the public eye that are not half as interesting as the lunches and breakfasts we have had along the way.
At one point he introduced us to Tim O’Reilly’s venture capital firm. Rachel and Leif and I found ourselves in a San Francisco board room discussing our little biodiesel project with some extremely interested, well heeled, and powerful members of the open source community.
When Red Hat launched opensource.com they invited me to contribute something on how open source principles can transcend the software industry. Here is the column I wrote called “Open Biodiesel”:
I’ve had a number of career changes. I went from poetry to technology to metal sculpture to the Internet to biodiesel. And I must admit that although I have brushed against “open source” a number of times, I have had a hard time getting my head around it.
Once I was working the show floor of USENIX in San Antonio, in 1998, the year Free BSD was released. It created quite a buzz. But I wasn’t sure what to do with such a thing.
I later ended up as the CEO of an Internet company. The “bubble” had burst, the company I was to run was pretty much bankrupt, and my job was to fix it. As part of the turn around I invested in OpenNMS, which is an open source network management company. At the time I still didn’t know what “open source” meant.
OpenNMS was (and still is) run by Tarus Balog. He’s a charismatic champion of the movement and I quickly fell under his spell.
Tarus told me to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which I did. Tarus took me to the Triangle Linux User Group. For a moment in time “open source” was my life.
I’m not really a “turn around” guy. My brother Mark used to joke about my work on the Internet, saying, “They wanted a ‘turnaround artist’ and all they got was an ‘artist.’”
During my time with OpenNMS I was migrating toward biodiesel. Biodiesel is a cleaner burning renewable fuel that is made from fats, oils, and greases. I was making the stuff in my back yard, and signed up for the fledgling Bio-Fuels program at Central Carolina Community College.
I was busy scaling up biodiesel, and scaling down my life in the technology sector. Technology was making me narcoleptic. Biodiesel was lighting my fire. Tarus and OpenNMS went on to build an open source success story, while I abandoned them for a fifty-five gallon drum and a canoe paddle.
I jumped in with Leif and Rachel (my instructors at the college), and together we founded Piedmont Biofuels. We had some early successes making fuel and were immediately confronted with a critical decision: Should we tell the world what we had learned or should we keep it a secret in order to parlay our knowledge into cash?
We decided to take an “open” approach, and instead of applying for patents, and sealing our lips, we published our successes and failures on Energy Blog. Our work was free for the entire world to see.
At the time the biodiesel industry in America was in its infancy, and as such it was shrouded in proprietary secrets and great advances, and complicated licensing schemes.
Our work stood in stark contrast to an evolving industry, in which charlatans came and went, and “black box” solutions regularly emerged and disappeared. It was the Wild West for biodiesel and no one was sure what stories to believe.
Piedmont’s notion of “open source biodiesel” immediately got traction in the grassroots biodiesel community and became the standard for how small projects should interact with one another. We had our flops. And we had our successes. And we published them all.
In no time we found ourselves with an active consulting business. Our rates went from being a member of our Coop ($50.00 per year) to $50.00 per hour to $100.00 an hour to $200.00 dollars an hour in order to slow things down a bit. I’ve often thought, “Tarus would be proud.”
As public money started flowing into our project in the form of grant awards, we stuck to the knitting. We offered free tours, and free information to anyone. Interest in our project built rapidly. Part of our message to public funders was that we would tell anyone anything they wanted to know.
The fact that we were open source appealed to those with public money. I’m not sure any of us clearly knew what it meant, but funders wanted to know that if they bestowed grant money upon us, our stewardship of that money would benefit others. As a result we accidentally became a frequent recipient of both federal and state grants.
But our commitment to open had a broader benefit. The biodiesel industry has had a bruising ride since its inception. The public doesn’t really understand biofuels, and the industry doesn’t tend to be “open” in an effort to make itself clear.
When we were making fuel in the backyard we were quirky. For a moment there, when biofuels were going to save the world, we were sexy. We had a moment as rock stars. But when global commodity markets climbed to record highs in the summer of 2008, the whole food vs. fuel debate came to the fore and biofuels became evil. That’s when our industry made the cover of TIME magazine as a sham. And that’s when the United Nations accused those responsible for making biofuels of being guilty of “crimes against humanity.”
We went from quirky to sexy to evil, and we continued to publish our stories along the way. As a result we had credibility that allowed us to survive where others died. As biofuels projects collapsed under the weight of “evil,” we persevered on the strength of our transparency alone.
We have been “open” at every step along the way, and we feel that our openness has been critical to the success of our enterprise.
At Piedmont Biofuels we have a lot of “firsts.” We have a number of breakthroughs under our belt. And we have shared both our “firsts” and our breakthroughs freely with the world along the way, and we have watched our industry rise and fall as it fumbles about with policy decisions that will determine the role of biodiesel in our energy mix.
By some measures it is fair to characterize community-scale biodiesel as an industry that is open. Surely we receive as many good ideas as we contribute. And there is no doubt that we have benefited greatly from the community of small-scale producers.
Just as the small open source software company can successfully compete with much larger proprietary rivals, our small biodiesel company looms larger than life because of its many contributions to industry knowledge.
Which might not matter in the least. We still haven’t figured out how to eat fame. And we are still paying off the vast “tuition” we have paid as pioneers in the biodiesel industry. But we are resilient. And we are “open.” And we wear both of those monikers with pride.
We came for the fuel, and after a few sharp detours, found ourselves intact because of all the divisions along the way. When fuel production was down, design-build was booming when design-build was soft, our research and analytics would sometimes carry the day. We’ve diverged. We’ve held on. We’ve innovated. And we feel that our accidental diversification is rather the way things occur in nature, and that it is a critical reason we are still alive.
