Bioride2008 on Biodiesel+WVO, Amazing Foreclosure Help, Biobutanol News, McCain/Palin+DemCongress=?

You´ve got to admire a guy like this. I´m not sure if his adventure is as difficult as it sounds to me to be but often enough I have been involved in projects where the budget included the word "scrounge" and such things are almost never without unexpected tribulations and challenges. This man, Jeremiah Johnson, not the legendary one portrayed in the movies, may someday become a legend in his own right.

Jeremiah and some of his acquaintances have put together a project called Bioride 2008. They gathered sponsors as diverse as Starbucks ® and a local auto shop, a slightly modified a 1985 vintage Chevy Suburban and set off on a 10,000 mile journey intent upon scrounging waste vegetable oil from restaurants along the way to fuel the journey. Starting with a North to South tour of the West Coast they have now reached Arkansas with a plan to end in Maine. But even such an epic journey is not the thing that will earn Mr. Johnson and friends the status of legend, it is what Baxter Bulletin describes in their opening paragraph as: "an adventurous road trip by a group of Seattle friends has grown into a quest to provide biodiesel to Third World countries."

All of that is not to say that the trip was without its flaws. Their old Chevy broke down several times and a recent blog report indicated they had installed a new heater for the vegetable oil. Whether said replacement was in anticipation of colder weather in the coming weeks, and more Northerly latitudes of Maine, or because of ailing health of the original they didn´t mention, or if they did I missed it in my cursory read of only the most recent couple of postings. On the other hand, if Mr. Johnson and friends have a good GPS with them, presumably it wouldn´t be all that hard to find a Burger King or McDonalds, as opposed to when I was that age and travel stops were tricky enough just trying to space the refueling out to match the brand on my oil company credit card. Since our company, too, is looking to put biodiesel and other green energy projects into economically and technologically underdeveloped locations around the globe, we have invited the Bioride2008 folks to contact us.

Other worthwhile efforts I want to acknowledge this week are outside the normal scope of this column, but the good work being done it worthy of note, especially because of the dynamic and impressive lady behind the accomplishments. I am talking about Carla Douglin of the Douglin Group. The Douglin Group works with home owners to avoid the devastating situation of foreclosure. They offer individual counseling, books and DVD-based training. Ms. Douglin spoke briefly at a recent conference I attended in New York. Her books have been so well received she now had a standing order with a federal government agency for literally truckloads of her books to be distributed by that agency to their clients. As you may know there are federal spending "set-asides" to help grow small businesses, women and minority owned businesses that have traditionally been under-represented in federal government dollar terms. That may have been a factor here. Carla is tall, exceptionally handsome, black, and bouncy. As I said, she cuts an impressive figure in person, and her shaved head is a fitting crowning glory. She and her group have helped thousands of people avoid foreclosure by negotiating with their mortgage lender. If you are in that situation yourself, or if you know anyone who is, I highly recommend that you check out the Douglin Group website.

The news from the field of biobutanol is that everyone seems to think, or at least claim, that their innovations are putting them at the head of the pack. Several companies have announced new strains of the bacteria that has been used for 100 years to produce the butanol, acetone and ethanol. Generally speaking these new strains are intended to tolerate living in their own sewage better than prior strains. That is, since the ethanol, acetone and butanol are all excreted by the bacteria as "waste" products of their metabolism, this is, in effect, the bacteria´s own "sewage" in a sense. The problem is, the Clostridium bacteria can only live in an environment with relatively low percentages of any one of all three of these byproducts surrounding it. If you´ll pardon a silly analogy for a moment, it is rather like an athlete who decides the best way to get those "6 pack" abdominal muscles is to hang upside down from "gravity boots", and do mid-air sit-ups, only to find that after doing a hundred of them, he is sweating so severely that he drowns from his own sweat running off his chest and up his nose.

Sorry about that. I am so out of shape that I feel compelled to mock the physically fit. On many days my wife stops by my desk to demand I stand up once an hour, which is often the entirety of my physical fitness regime for that day, as it is for most days.

Science Daily, reports that the Agricultural Research Service scientist Nasib Qureshi has a process that allows simultaneous uses of "pre-digesting" enzymes that break down cellulose and hemi-cellulose into more rudimentary sugars and the more robust Clostridium to metabolize butanol, while at the same time using a "gas-stripping" technique that keeps the concentration of the "waste" byproducts low enough to keep the bacteria alive and healthy for a prolonged period. Combining this with a progressive batch processing method (as opposed to strict, single, isolated batches), Dr. Qureshi says he has double the effective yield. From a ton of rice hulls he estimates his process would get about 99 gallons of ethanol, acetone and butanol (combining all three for this raw total).

Cobalt Biofuels is claiming an improved strain of Clostridium to justify the series C financing round to expand to a production sized facility. But Khosla and Branson backed GEVO are hot on their heels, as are Chicago-based Tetravitae co-founded by Professor Hans Blaschek, a recently acquired friend and colleague from my Boston trip. Dr. Blaschek mentioned that "gas-stripping" technique before I had a chance to bring it up in our discussions in Boston, so I gather Tetravitae is at least aware of it, and probably using it themselves as well. The difference with GEVO is that they are producing isobutanol using a modified version of E. coli created by Dr. James Liao of UCLA.

I´m going to try to keep it short this week (well, we´ll see). With the election happening on Tues, Nov. 4, 2008 I may be tempted to write an extra episode of this column this week. But there is one subject I´d like to address.

There has been very little talk about what might happen if there was an "upset" which led to Senator John McCain turning into President John McCain. There is not a lot of question that in most of the Senate and House of Representative elections across the nation there is a widespread feeling that follows that old political battle cry: "Throw the bums out!" In the, one might hope, unlikely event of a McCain Presidency, that would leave him facing something close to a filibuster-proof Senate majority of Democrats, together with a nearly overwhelming Democratic majority in the House as well.

It is the prescription that the McCain Campaign has been tossing into the mix in the last few days, "villainizing" Congressional Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi as "socialists", and saints-preserve-us "liberals" and predicting dire consequences if a President Obama has an opportunity to govern with their collusion. Sadly, the most likely conclusion to any scenario I can currently imagine for a McCain Presidency and a Democratic controlled Congress is 4 more years of the legislative constipation we have been seeing for the last couple of years. With the Republicans controlling the White House and the Congress we got the war in Iraq (which I keep reminding everyone ISN´T a war, because only Congress can declare "war" on behalf of the country, so this is a little personal vendetta based on a presidential fiat), and the Patriot Act (which because of a lack of judicial oversight in the Republican "stacked" Supreme Court) took away at least a couple of our Constitutional Rights (privacy and habeus corpus).

My "entertainment" of late has mostly been the political news, although I have enjoyed Tina Fey´s perfect portrayal of Governor Sarah Palin. For that matter, I must commend their sense of humor (and the good judgment to know that showing your sense of humor is more likely to win votes that castigating the satirists) of both Governor Palin and Senator McCain for appearing on Saturday Night Live in the last couple of weeks. To be honest, Palin could win an Emmy if the only standard by which her appearance was judged was the abominably BAD acting of Alec Baldwin in his scene with her. He couldn´t even read the cue cards, and almost completely failed to look at or even attempt to look LIKE he was looking at the Governor when he was supposed to be addressing her. Tina Fey was, of course, delightful in her skit with Senator McCain in which she turned to a different camera (as Palin) saying, "I´m going rogue, here," and proceeding to hawk "Palin in 2012" T-shirts with a confession that they weren´t really supposed to be available until Wednesday, so "please don´t show them off until then, okay?"

Love and warm wishes,

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

Learn all about making biodiesel yourself

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(p.s. if the McAfee warning comes up on the PSYRK.COM domain, please be aware that is a "left over" message from the site being hacked by "phishing" two weeks ago, and it is now on a new and more secure server.)