By James Nestor
It's on every billboard, bumpersticker and street placard: Let's Green This City! Urban Streets Greening Project! Each election ushers in new green initiatives, task forces, and elementary school awareness fairs. Another press conference, another earthy guy in an organic-cotton denim shirt and red Crocs stands in front of City Hall pointing an accusatory finger at the uninspired plebes who won't join us, who won't dare follow San Francisco on the righteous path toward a greener tomorrow.
Meanwhile, eco-conscious drivers can't get a drop of biodiesel in city limits, while Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa and other surrounding cities offer it at public pumps. (In June 2007, city authorities closed the San Francisco Biodiesel Co-op, for - get this - having too many members.) Not one public pump in San Francisco sells ethanol. The few electric car-charging stations that remain are defunct, rundown or hidden in corners of musty garages, forgotten relics of a well-intentioned but poorly executed past. Our performance so far in fostering alternative fuels - the keystone of the green movement - is not just ironic; it's shameful.
"You know the easiest job in the world is to be a cynic," says Mark Armstrong, lifting his head from the hood of an electric-powered 1980 Plymouth Horizon. "In order to be successful you have to do absolutely nothing." Armstrong brushes his oily hands against his oily jeans and walks to the back of a cavernous concrete-floored warehouse, through a maze of Frankensteinian inventions: an electrolyzer that splits hydrogen and oxygen fuel, junky gas cars that run on golf-cart batteries, gutted petrol engines that gulp alcohol and a Mercedes motor that bakes bread and spits out edible olive oil.
"What I'm trying to do here is teach people to quit complaining about what they can't get," he adds, pushing his 6-foot-2-inch frame beneath a gutted 1976 Porsche 914 that he and his students are converting to a hydrolic hybrid. "I say if we really want alternative fuel vehicles, let's get off the couch and start making them."
Step 1: Build a Car
In his fifth semester teaching four alternative-fuel shop classes and one lecture course at Santa Rosa Junior College, Armstrong and his students have converted five cars to run on vegetable oil, one to ethanol and upgraded dozens to run on biodiesel. But the classes, which he developed for SRJC, are not just about building cars; they are also about creating a professional network that will enable anyone to kick the petroleum habit. "I realized a long time ago that if alternative fuels were going to happen, they weren't going to take off with online kits and slapped-together conversions - they were going to have to work at the ground floor, with mechanics," says Armstrong, who takes time off to teach classes from his job as owner of Mobile Truck Medic, a heavy equipment repair business he started in 1992.
Step 1 of Armstrong's three-pronged alternative-fuels plan is to offer a variety of cars to suit various needs. "Ninety percent of commuters drive 25 miles or less a day," he says. "Electric cars are perfect for this kind of use." Behind him, students prod, poke and weld gadgets to a 1990 Cabriolet and a 1997 BMW. When they are finished, each car will get about 25 to 45 miles between charges and cost about 1 cent per mile. For many, the challenge of electric cars lies not in the range or operating expenses, but the cost of conversion. The 1997 BMW, for example, will cost $20,000 to convert. Chris Jones, who has stopped by during class to show students his car, spent $30,000 to convert his 1966 Mustang convertible. In the two years he's had it, he's driven 3,200 miles, which works out to about $10 per mile. That cost will decrease the more he drives, but Jones and many other converted electric car drivers can't hope to recoup their investment.
"Right now, making these cars cheaper than gas cars isn't really the point," says Armstrong, supervising a student installing a battery mount beneath the Cabriolet. "We're developing a methodology here, and with each conversion we're getting quicker and cheaper." He mentions that the first car race across the United States took six months and cost the equivalent of a million dollars. "Car companies have had 100 years to make cars cheap and efficient," he says. "We're pretty much starting from scratch here."
Step 2: Make Your Own Fuel
Armstrong's classes include developing fuels with used cooking oil, the sun and waste crops. "We don't subsist on a single crop, and thus should not subsist on a single fuel," says Armstrong. "I tell the students; 'If you're lucky enough to be around sugary crops, run your car off of ethanol; if you live behind McDonald's, run it off used vegetable oil; if you live in a windy place, run it off that wind.' " And if you live in Sonoma County, run it off wine.
Standing on 100-year-old train tracks in a corner of southwest Sebastopol, Damon Knutson is one of a handful of green-fuel pioneers in Sonoma County realizing Armstrong's local-fuel vision. To Knutson's right is a two-story barn, which was once an apple distribution depot, then a pencil factory and is now the Reed Brothers furniture fabrication warehouse. It is also where Knutson and his cohorts are making fuel.
"Wineries are always throwing out bad wine," he says, pointing to about 100 cases of wine that lean precariously against the barn. "They used to put it down the drain or pay people to get rid of it. We've been taking it and making alcohol." Knutson and the 20 or so partners that make up the Green Energy Network distill the wine to pure alcohol in an "alcohol distillation column," a 20-foot tower of wires, copper pipe, plastic buckets and garden hoses propped on a dirt patch near the barn's loading dock. It's a glorified still that uses the same technology once used to brew moonshine at the turn of the century.
The first step is decanting 30 to 40 gallons of wine into a boiler at the base of the column. As the alcohol vaporizes and rises, it loses water. The end product is 185-proof alcohol. "Our goal is to get about 195 proof, but we're not there yet," he says. Alcohol can only be used in engines if it is 195 proof or above, otherwise it won't mix properly with gasoline, explains Knutson. To extract the rest of the water from their blend, Knutson uses a chemical compound called Ziolite. Since starting about a year ago, the Green Energy Network has produced about 120 proof alcohol gallons.
"The problem now is that we have about 1,600 gallons of grape juice left over," Knutson says with a laugh, pointing to a black cylinder filled to the rim with black liquid. "We're working on ways to use it as fertilizer or something." The Green Energy Network has converted about 30 vehicles to run off pure alcohol, a simple procedure that involves installing a few switches along with a device that modulates the mixture of gas and alcohol before it enters the engine. Converting a car to run on alcohol is illegal in California per Vehicle Code 7156, a regulation initiated more than 30 years ago by the California Air Resource Board. "Apparently a few years ago people were doing crappy natural gas conversions to their cars to get tax credits; they ended up polluting more," says Knutson. "As a result, CARB banned all types of conversions, which is really silly."
CARB claims the legislation was never intended to deter alternative-fuel enthusiasts, but ensure that any device altering the fuel or emission controls of a car would not increase emissions. "We appreciate the motives of these people," says John Swanton, CARB Air Pollution Specialist. "But cars, especially later model cars, have very sophisticated pollution control devices, and when you alter those you can end up as a worse situation than you started with. Our laws are simply saying that manufacturers of these devices have to prove their products are staying within initial emission control levels."
Knutson says his conversion has made his car run significantly cleaner than before. According to the EPA, alcohol made from living plants burns with 25 to 30 percent less carbon monoxide emissions than gasoline. As well, alcohol proponents claim if it is farmed responsibly, plant-derived alcohol fuel offers a 100 percent cut in carbon dioxide per lifecycle. "The benefits are really huge," says Knutson, walking from the still to his 2004 Nissan Frontier pickup, which he runs on 70 percent alcohol. "Pretty soon people won't be able to say 'I'll just blend 20 percent ethanol with gas' - and feel good about that - no, let's get out of petroleum entirely."
Step 3: Old Is the New Green
Mondays are long - Armstrong begins his first class at 7 a.m. and finishes his last at 10 p.m., then drives to Petaluma, where he lives with his wife and two daughters. "She [his wife] understands but also feels like she has to take a number to see me," he says, walking briskly along a footpath at the back of campus. In the coming year, his schedule looks like it will only grow more hectic, as his classes expand. The first semester Armstrong, who is 40, offered his first class (which is housed misleadingly under the diesel equipment Technology department), six students registered, three of whom were prodded into attending by friends and family. Last semester, Armstrong's four classes were full within a day and capped by the admissions office at 60 students.
"We could have easily filled it to 100, but the college thought that would be too much work for me," he says. Armstrong is petitioning the governing board of SRJC to turn his course into a full-fledged program, which would give him more funding and gain a respite from his 15-hour Mondays.
For tonight's lecture, 30 students have gathered in a dowdy-looking hall in the back of campus. They are mostly middle-aged men, engineer and mechanic-types wearing fleece vests and old T-shirts, threadbare automotive baseball hats over long gray hair. In the back is the younger set, a couple of hippies with wispy beards and four frowning women. On an overhead monitor, Armstrong begins a PowerPoint presentation. "You know that you only need about 1/6th to 1/24th of the power of your engine to drive your car once you're up to speed," he says, then discusses how hybrid systems can run more efficiently and could be used to construct a 100-mile-per-gallon car. He also talks about how countries destroying forests to make biofuels may do more harm than good, then offers more efficient and sustainable alternatives, such as closed-loop farming systems where manure is used to make methanol, methanol is used to make and process corn, corn feeds the cows, cows make more cows, more poo, more methanol, more corn.
It's this sustainable approach Scott Mathieson has taken at Laguna Farms, the family farm he runs in east Sebastopol. "I appreciate Mark for his knowledge, how he's making this stuff real, the whole community he's creating," he says. Mathieson, who consulted with Armstrong about his Biofuels Research Cooperative, is one of dozens of self-taught green investors in the area developing backyard technologies to increase efficiency and reduce the pollutants of cars.
Behind the Laguna Farms co-op store, Mathieson walks on a weedy path into a field of rusting cars, camper-shell tops, 500-gallon plastic tanks encased in vines and other remnants of alternative fuel experiments gone awry. "You know, all this technology with efficiency that we're playing with is pretty low tech, it's not rocket science," he says, "We're not so much creating these technologies as we are rediscovering them."
It's true. Mathieson made his cars less polluting and more efficient through simple parts and methods that are, in most cases, 100 years old. He mentions a generator on which he rigged a nozzle to shoot atomized water into the air intake, a technology originally used in World War II to increase the range and power of airplanes. To his left is a dirt driveway with a diesel Mercedes he converted to run off reclaimed vegetable oil, the fuel Rudolph Diesel originally intended for his engines when he debuted them at the 1900 World's Fair. Mathieson has two electric scooters and an electric ATV, which he powers from a pool-size board of solar panels; 100 years ago there were more electric cars on the road than gas cars. It's a strange (yet inspiring) irony to discover that some technologies for greener, more efficient, locally fueled cars are not in the future but in the past. We as consumers have just grown too apathetic in the past 50 years of cheap oil, cheap steel and cheap labor to bother using them. Today, as resources grow more limited and gas costs continue to rise, Mathieson, Armstrong, Knutson and the thousand or so other green pioneers in Sonoma County are automotive archaeologists, using yesterday's methods to refind the way to a greener tomorrow.
Epilogue
The following Tuesday, Armstrong is in a parking lot along Pier 48 in San Francisco, upgrading a line of engines to run on biodiesel for the One Big Man, One Big Truck moving company. "My goal is to make doing this, getting a truck on biofuels, a really non-eventful job, like doing a brake job or oil change," he says. "It shouldn't be a big event."
It's a late-fall day, the air crisp and bone dry. In the distance, a gauze of flat-orange smog lines the horizon - a rare sight in the city. You can feel its sting when breathing deep. This is the season when the east winds howl in from the Central Valley, giving back to San Francisco the pollution we usually send to them nine months of the year. Seeing it, feeling it, one gets an unsettled feeling of comeuppance, of having made one's bed and having to now lie in it, all red-eyed and short of breath.
"You know, if you want to change this, maybe you have to work a bit now," says Armstrong, walking over to a moving truck. After an hour, Armstrong had converted the moving truck to run on biodiesel. The truck will now spend the rest of its life polluting up to 70 percent less than it had before. "I mean, are you going to sit there and do absolutely nothing?" he asks, then ducks his head back into the intestinal maze of hoses beneath the hood.
"Remember what I said about being a cynic?"
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