Whoa, the Seattle Times reports that Washington state is talking about low-interest loans for “biodiesel factories”. Just the fact that they call them factories instead of refineries means they probably are actually hoping that this will take off on a distributed level:

Gov. Christine Gregoire recently proposed low-interest loans for biodiesel factories, and a requirement that diesel sold in the state contain at least some biodiesel. State lawmakers from both parties are vowing to promote similar plans when the Legislature convenes next month. And Congress last summer included a tax credit for biodiesel in its energy bill.

Frankly, this seems very lopsided compared to the information technology revolution that led to the Personal Computer. Companies like Microsoft that kludged together some flimsy DOS system, sold it to a couple big customers and…the rest is history. But the energy age seems to be struggling with generating a reliable source of energy to be converted, rather than the efficiency of doing the conversion itself.

I think growing greens for oils (or processing fish, meat, etc.) might not be the best approach, since you could actually get another use out of the oil first and then process the remaining waste. We still find that each small restaurant produces 20 gallons of waste oil a week, with larger productions reaching 50-100 gallons a week. I will verify that this Friday, but what if you can tap into the waste issues of resort-towns with their close concentration of hotels and affiliated restaurants, or strip malls, or even large malls? It seems best for municipalities and counties to promote that for every 1,000 gallons/week of waste oils they will subsidize establishment of a bio-diesel station. Thus you are not only focusing production of the bio-diesel around a ready supply, but you are also reducing waste/land-fill issues.

I’m not suggesting that farmers shouldn’t grow their own fuel, but it seems to me that it would be better to convert to plain oil and retain flexibility by diversifying output options — they might be able to do a minor conversion to sell to restaurants, manufacturing, energy, etc.

One thing is for certain, beware the opportunists who pose as engineers:

“You have seen a lot of snake-oil salesmen come through with the next best thing,” acknowledged Conklin, the Palouse Biodiesel president.

Both examples in the story (straw-board and beets) illustrate what happens when a concept is marketed and sold as ready for production before it even has been properly tested (quality problems and equipment failures). And because that brings me back to the issues of security in a system development lifecycle (SDLC), I think I’ll categorize this post as security too.