Tired of spending "an easy $150 a week" on fuel, Conway's H. Aaron Barraza plans to make his own biodiesel, with the help of a few friends.
"I have a huge thing in my head that I want to make possible," the 21 year-old self-employed plumber said early Friday afternoon. "If there's people in Conway who want to do this, then let's do it."
Barraza envisions a not-too-distant future in which a concerted effort at producing fuel from local sources for use by local consumers would create a sort of community biodiesel pool.
"We could work something together as a community to support ourselves," he said. "Our kids depend on this. We depend on this. In two years we are going to hit the middle margin where we have exhausted 50 percent of our planet's natural resources. At some point the only people who will have oil will be in the Middle East; we don't want to mess with them.
"Let our communities stick together and decide on something for 40, 80, 100 years down the road. That's my stance on the matter."
The owners of Ed's Custom Bakery have shown interest in letting Barraza take their used cooking oil off their hands, and Barraza is seeking arrangements with other local restaurants. He's also seeking an old diesel engine or diesel-powered "raggedy old car" to use as a test bed for his fuel formulas.
"If somebody can get an old junker for $200 or $300 and run it on fuel they make themselves, that's going to make a statement to Conway," he said.
Barraza is well on his way to collecting the materials necessary to make his first batch of biodiesel. He collected the first of three 150-gallon tanks he'll need Friday.
"One's going to be the wash, one's going to be the sediment and the last one's going to be the diesel," he said. "I went to the library, got a few books; I've been doing my homework."
The process of making biodiesel, he said, is simple:
"You collect it, filter it to remove whatever food and stuff is in it, add 100 milliliters of methanol per liter of oil and then add about 3.5 grams of lye per liter."
In a long-term plan, he said, locally-grown sunflowers could provide oil to augment the waste cooking oil.
Barraza has the help of Francis Dwyer, owner of Dwyer Plumbing in Little Rock, in making sure his fuel agrees with the test engine. Before his career as a plumber, Dwyer said, he learned the auto mechanic's trade from former Formula One mechanic Richard Sturzma. He said he plans to hook whatever test engine Barraza comes up with to a generator and voltmeter, effectively a homemade dynamometer, to test its power output using different blends of Barraza's fuel.
"I'm giving him the benefit of my knowledge and experience," Dwyer said.
"That's the best I can do for anybody; share what I've learned and save him some of the pitfalls I went through, but I guess you can't save somebody from their pitfalls.
"I'm giving the benefit of what I've learned and given that he's young and has so many ideas going around in his head it gives me a new outlook on a lot of stuff too." Dwyer said he covers about 500 miles per week in his work truck. Access to locally-produced, inexpensive fuel "would be like the biggest burden I could think of off both of us," he said.
"The cost of fuel is the difference between a company making money and not making money.
Josh Colvert, Barraza's roommate, will put his degree in digital filmmaking, earned at the University of Central Arkansas, to use by filming a documentary about Barraza's first batches of fuel.
Late Friday afternoon, Barraza met with two members of Faulkner County Supporters of Sustainable Communities, Jim Mosely and wife Pamela.
The two expressed interest in helping Barraza get his idea for local fuel off the ground.
""It was great to experience his enthusiasm and knowledge," Pamela Mosley said. "It seems to me that it's the exact kind of thing that we would want to help happen. When someone's got a spark of an idea and they've got the enthusiasm and it looks like it's going towards a sustainable future, that's the kind of thing we support.
"I'm optimistic about anybody that gets this spark of imagination and is ready to run with it and work with others to make something like this happen. That's where these sustainability ideas become sustainable practice." Jim Mosley agreed, adding that concentrating on the local level is "a fantastic idea."
"Leave the national debate to the people that are doing the national debating," he said.
"Let's look at what we can do in Faulkner County. With what we're talking about here you're eliminating a problem and getting a fuel, and the process between doesn't take very much. If you're talking about waste oil from a restaurant, bingo, you're there."
Buddy Rawls, owner of Little Rock's Go Green Biofuels fuel station, said he cut his teeth in the commercial, rather than "enthusiast" end of the biofuels spectrum, and said he hasn't heard of a successful community effort for locally produced and consumed biodiesel. He likes the idea, though.
"I have a really strong affinity to that sort of local self-reliance; the old adage of 'small is beautiful,' those kinds of thoughts, but there's no program like that that I'm familiar with. That reflects a certain level of innovation and forward thinking in the green world that I haven't found. I think that's a wonderful plan and I think Faulkner County would be an excellent location for that to take root."
Whether or not Barraza's idea for locally-produced community fuel takes root, he intends to have his 1996 Chevrolet Silverado dually running on fuel of his own making soon.
"Oh, yeah, I'm definitely going to do it," he said. "I'll work all day to do it."
(Staff writer Joe Lamb can be reached by e-mail at joe.lamb@thecabin.net or by phone at 505-1238. Send us your news at www.thecabin.net/submit)
