COLUMN ONE - Fuel that's off the grid - A former rock band member is riding a new wave of sustainable, cleaner energy as Atlanta's first retailer of locally made biodiesel.
ATLANTA — For years in this car-clogged city, the easiest way to score a tank of biodiesel -- that much-hyped fuel of the future -- involved seeking out a guy named Rob Del Bueno.
Del Bueno is not an engineer or a gas station owner, but a former member of a sci-fi surf rock band called Man or Astro-man? He played bass, and spent most of the 1990s telling people he was from outer space.
Del Bueno also built the group's kitschy stage props: the high-voltage circuit known as a Tesla coil, which threw off mad-scientist bolts of electricity; the homemade theremin, the electronic instrument that lent a spooky vibe to countless B-movie soundtracks.
A few years ago, with the band on hiatus, Del Bueno developed another passion: brewing up pure biodiesel from used kitchen oil. He couldn't believe that fuel -- the source of so much war and worry -- could be so easily produced from an ingredient available in the back of a fast-food restaurant.
Drivers, he learned, could pump pure biodiesel into unmodified diesel engines and enjoy low greenhouse gas emissions. So Del Bueno began making it -- lots of it -- in an old water heater in his yard. He put his number on the Web. When customers called, he would meet them for a fill-up in his driveway.
"It was sort of like a drug deal," he says now, laughing.
Like a number of small biodiesel producers around the country, however, Del Bueno is now pushing his product a little closer to the mainstream. Last month, he and a nonprofit, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, unveiled the first biodiesel retail station within Atlanta city limits. The contraption, which Del Bueno built himself, is simple enough: It's a 1,100-gallon tank in a shipping container outfitted with a credit-card reader and a pump. Del Bueno stocks the tank with fuel he makes at a tiny plant he built south of town.
Buying pure biodiesel, or something very close to it, has suddenly become a lot less weird here, as it has in a number of other American cities, including Berkeley, Portland, Austin and Los Angeles, where a local biodiesel advocacy group persuaded three gas stations to carry a 99% biodiesel blend. Yet pure biodiesel remains outsider stuff: Most car makers suggest biodiesel only be used in blends of up to 20% with regular diesel fuel.
