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Last night I had dinner with Lyle Estill of Piedmont Biofuels. He was passing through town as part of a monumental yearly family vacation, and realized he would be remiss in his duties if he didn’t scope out the St. Louis biodiesel scene while he was in town. Plus, like many of our ilk, Lyle is incapable of going more than a few days without discussing things like cents per kilowatt hour, 600kW diesel generators, and being up to one’s arms in grease. I provided what seemed to be a well appreciated opportunity to geek out about biodiesel.

We ate at the Tap Room which offers some delicious beers on cask, and high quality pub-eats. I must say that portabella mushrooms and oatmeal stout are a match made in heaven.

Lyle and I discussed the state of things in St. Louis, both good and bad. St. Louis has a lot of opportunity in terms of industrial space just waiting to be utilized, but it is also a market unfamiliar with the concept of renewable energy. Hopefully that is something we can work to change.

One thing that struck me, through all of our conversation, is the differences between areas that are trying to make transitions into renewable energy, and how that shapes the organizations that form. It hit me how things in Pittsboro, NC are much different than they are in St. Louis, MO when we were getting into my ‘82 Mercedes wagon. I activated the door locks, which are vacuum actuated and automatically unlock all the doors. When he got in, he said, “Wow, does this car have power locks??” The question struck me as strange, because Lyle owns an early ‘80s Mercedes that is very similar to mine, and identically equipped. “Huh, I guess I’ve just never locked the doors…” he mused. Things must be very different out in rural North Carolina…

We also discussed the problem of having vast stores of raw building materials. I joked about having to bring home 55 gallon drums and scoot the couch a few feet over in order to have a place to put them, and he mentioned his “Summer Shop”, which is an expansive building stretching out into the woods that consists of huge piles of scrap metal, pipes, giant chess sets, steel drums, and apparently nearly anything else that you could imagine. If you need another 100 feet, he said, you just extend the makeshift structure farther into the woods. This is in stark contrast to St. Louis, where if you want to build anything at all, something else has to be demolished, and there is no way of hiding anything you do. In rural country you can put unsightly things off into the woods for the moment, but in the city, everything you do is open for all to see. A certain amount of ugliness is acceptable in the city, but go to far, and people will begin to notice. Here in the city, we don’t have the freedom of expansion. We are crammed into tiny basements and garages, and that restricts our choices on many levels.

We talked a lot about ‘grassroots’ biodiesel, and what it means to work on the small holistic community level. I’m beginning to think that in highly urban environments like ours, the grassroots movement is going to look very different.

Lyle is a great guy, due in part to his boundless enthusiasm and optimism about the future of biodiesel. He has taken a lot of risks in his community, and always seems to come out a little bit ahead of where he was before. There is a lot of caution in the world of biodiesel right now, and everyone seems to have a story about a coop that failed, but I’m glad there are people showing that it can be done. I had a good time eating with him, and look forward to what fruits the seeds we plant will bear.

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