To most people, the barrels of old cooking oil sitting out near the dumpsters of their favorite restaurant are waste, filled to the brim with the disgusting remnant of hundreds of meals.
But to the folks at Standard Biofuel, those barrels are gold, or the beginning of it anyway.
“We make renewable diesel,” said Colin Clifford, Sales manager for the Kent-based company. “There is no waste product.”
Originally called Standard Biodiesel (and still seen on the trucks and containers), Standard Biofuel was started in Arlington in 2006 by John Wick and John Schofield. Today, the business is headquartered in Kent, at a facility that also serves as a hub of the business’s vegetable oil collections.
The company began producing biodiesel in 2007, but stopped last year, switching to make renewable diesel, which uses a different process that does away with the two gallons of glycerin left over from typical biodiesel refining. Glycerin is a substance that must be pressurized and it was this pressurization that is believed to have caused the explosion this month at a biodiesel refinery in Hoquiam.
“All we’re doing is running vegetable oil in and out,” Clifford said. “This is not Hoquiam.”
According to Clifford and company chemist Brent Siemssen, an additive that was patented by Telus, a company that spun off from Standard Biofuel, makes it so the company’s new plant in Burlington produces a “100 percent efficient” product that does not create the explosive and increasingly value-less glycerin.
Though most of the fuel the company creates is for use in boilers around the Pacific Northwest, the fuel can also be used in vehicles, such as the company’s own fleet, which uses the renewable mix.
“Our trucks have done quite well using this fuel,” Siemssen said.
But they need a base oil to refine into the fuel, which is where the restaurants come in; more than 5,000 of them in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, including more than 90 in Kent and more than 75 in Renton.
Every day, trucks head out from the nondescript building in Kent’s industrial valley to a list of restaurants where they actually pay the owners 10 cents a gallon to empty drums of used oil, something that cost restaurants a hauling fee in the past.
“This is a service industry,” said driver Tony Dalzell this past week.
Dalzell drives one of five trucks around the region, visiting an average of 25 restaurants each day somewhere in Western Washington.
On Wednesday, Dalzell was picking up oil from businesses in Kent and Renton, pulling up behind the building and dropping a vacuum pump into a vat of oil to suck up the grease.
Dalzell said he got involved with the company with a green bend.
“I’m such an environmentalist, I wanted to get behind a green cause,” he said, adding that after fuel prices spiked following Hurricane Katrina in 2004, he bought a diesel car and now runs biofuels in his personal vehicle as well. “I didn’t want to be subject to the petroleum industry.”
Siemssen said that Standard Biofuel’s decision to pay restaurants for their used oil was a game-changer that led the company’s expansion.
“We’ve turned the whole market on its ear,” he said.
Primarily, the company’s fuel is used in boilers as a more environmentally friendly source of energy that matches up with dirtier, petroleum-based fuels.
Clifford said in the next few years the company plans to expand into California and beyond.
“This company is going to expand nationally,” he said.
And that’s a lot of used cooking oil.
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