Student’s idea turns roadsides into biodiesel cash cropland
Although the North Carolina program is currently only farming 10 acres, as it grows and begins to produce more fuel, it will help the state DOT meet new requirements for renewable fuel usage. Veal says it will also help the state meet criteria for a program that encourages wildflower growth along highways.
The project does have aesthetically pleasing aspects.
With flower crops growing along highways, “It would be more like you are driving down a botanical center,” Whitesides says. “It takes just a run-of-the-mill freeway and turns it into a more attractive location if we can make it work right.”
In the five years since biodiesel has been commercialized, Jobe says, the industry has built 150 processing facilities through the country and created 53,000 jobs.
Until recently, the biodiesel industry enjoyed a federal tax credit that allowed it to compete with petroleum-based diesel fuel. However, Jobe says that tax credit expired in the midst of the congressional health care debates and has not yet been renewed. In recent months the industry has shed 23,000 jobs, he says.
“Our industry is absolutely on life support,” Jobe says. “It’s absolutely imperative that Congress act immediately to reinstate the tax credit.”
Farmers can make own fuel
Yet programs like FreeWays to Fuel have their own markets built in. The biodiesel fuel produced from the crops has a guaranteed market with the public entities that provide the land and use the fuel to run government vehicles. Given the right equipment, the farmers can even use the biodiesel to run their machines, Hanks says.
“As a farmer you could see the advantage,” he says. “You could make your own fuel easily.”
Hanks currently serves as the national director for the FreeWays to Fuel Alliance. Following graduation, he hopes to increase the project’s national scope, focusing on unused lands at military bases and roadsides in the state of Texas.
Of the 10 million acres of unutilized roadsides across the nation that can be used for oilseed crops, 2 million acres are in Texas alone. If all 10 million acres were utilized, they could produce upwards of 1 billion gallons of biodiesel feedstock, Hanks says.
The plot near Salt Lake International Airport is near the site of a former landfill and on the future site of a wastewater-treatment facility owned by Salt Lake City. The program already has the cooperation of three different city and county governments in addition to the state. Even the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has donated equipment and volunteers to the project, Hanks says.
With bugs from the first few years worked out — including the determination of which oilseed crops grow best in Utah’s dry climate — Hanks is optimistic. The safflower crop is planted, the camelina crop is sprouting, the canola crop is blooming and the idea is spreading across the country.
-Brian Passey
