Racing to a Non-Petroleum Future

With the "Escape from Berkeley" alt-fuel road rally

Brian Doherty | October 24, 2008

Northern California's early October cold can be bracing, up there in the mountain passes. Long before it gets seriously uncomfortable for a human, though, the cold is already treacherous for vegetable oil, transmuting it from something pleasingly viscous to a clumpy, still, gooey mess.

Most of us don’t have to think about frigid vegetable oil as we drive from, say, Berkeley, California, to Las Vegas, Nevada.

However, this reality cost an extended family of very nice, very earnest, very hardworking homeschooling machinists a chance at a $5,000 prize in a unique road rally in early October, as the mountain cold caused their home-altered Mercedes-Benz to choke and die in remote Lee Vining, California, before they could beat the competition to Vegas.

I was a judge in this road rally (not “race,” if you please, which is illegal on public roads) for alternative fuel vehicles called “Escape From Berkeley (By Any Non-Petroleum Means Necessary).” The race’s organizers, spearheaded by builder and conceptualizer Jim Mason, had a chip on their shoulders about Berkeley, the home of their experimental art and energy complex known as “The Shipyard.” (I chronicled the Shipyard’s legal fights with Berkeley and technical fights with self-generated power in the May issue of reason.) Beyond their animus toward Berkeley was their love for home-hacked automotive solutions, especially ones that offered possible ways around the greenhouse-gas-producing petroleum economy.

The rally’s rules were demanding, though not complicated: participating vehicles had to be powered by something other than petroleum; you had to begin the race with only a gallon (or gallon equivalent) of it, and you could not exchange money for fuel along the way. Fuel had to be begged, bartered, or scavenged. Why? Not from hatred of markets or commerce. For one thing, the rules emulate the post-automobile “statist dystopia” fantasy world in which the race was imagined to be taking place. Also, it made it more challenging in an interesting way.

When I was invited to be a judge—along with futurist Paul Saffo, Burning Man organizer Michael Michael, and Internet archivist Brewster Kahle—the idea sounded exactly like one of the amusing and excessively imagined larks that these people, whom I knew through my participation in and coverage of the Burning Man Festival, regularly engaged in. But the rest of the world seemed fascinated. Some of the obvious suckers for politically engaged tech-hacks, such as Wired, weighed in. But so did local alt-weekly the East Bay Express, resulting in a massive cover story. Even the august and serious New York Times gave detailed and respectful coverage, both pre- and post-race. (The rally even got mocked with little mercy, and only a smidgen of accuracy, by the Colbert Report.)

The rally began Saturday morning at the Shipyard roughly near the planned 10 a.m. start time, with six vehicles (of the 18 or so whose creators had expressed interest in participating—attrition was hard and fast, and wasn’t over yet) crossing the start line. Due to public transportation snafus, I missed the actual start, but as Mason gave me a lift to the airport (I had to give a speech in Los Angeles that evening) we saw one crew, known as the “Green Team,” who had already driven their gasifier-powered Dodge truck from Alabama to Berkeley, chopping up portions of the Shipyard’s old fence for fuel. The fence was made of pressure-treated redwood—a choice the team would later regret.

I planned to rendezvous with the organizers, support vehicles, and racers at the Sunday end checkpoint in Lone Pine, California, an agglomeration of quaintness, cafes, gift shops, and real estate offices at the eastern foot of the Sierra Nevadas surrounding state road 395. I drove in to Lone Pine Sunday afternoon with my sidekick, Heathervescent, an L.A. tech promoter and consultant.

Heather’s and my L.A. bones rebelled against the deepening chill that accompanied the thin clear mountain air as it went from blue to black. We hid out in Jake’s Saloon until the other judges and organizers crawled in way behind schedule. Six alt-fuel vehicles had left the Shipyard; only two arrived in Lone Pine that evening. The route shifted on the fly as the intended Tioga Pass was snowed out. Much had gone wrong—which is the most interesting part of adventures like this. We learned what we missed over many rounds of beer.

The casualties? Steampunk craftsmen Shannon O’Hare, Kimric Smythe, and crew knew that "Kristie's Flyer"—their complicated, vegetable-oil-burning steam-powered fantasia—could never cross the mountains, so after ceremonially starting they just hauled it on a trailer to Vegas. The tandem-bike vehicle, with an ethanol engine augmented by the pedal power of the two drivers, developed engine trouble and gave up at Concord, California. The gasifier Vanagon contribution of Mike Thielvoldt, whose gasifier parts were inside the vehicle, became filled with dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide before he escaped Berkeley.

The real heartbreaker, however, was the veggie oil 1984 Mercedes Benz 300SD driven by 16-year-old Calund Llaguno and his dad Lundy, with other family members following along as support. They got stuck in Lee Vining, though they had arranged through their network of churches to have veggie oil ready for them along the route.

They started off strong. But not everyone in their church network understood that the vegetable oil should be at least somewhat clean. Lundy told me bemusedly of being proudly handed used goop with chicken bones floating in it. Their filter system was quickly clogged with white coagulated lard balls.

Their oil, moreover, which flowed in from outside the engine compartment over the firewall, got unusably cold in the mountains. They finally made it to the end of the race in Vegas Monday night—hours after the award ceremony was over—using what they called “the Newman tank.” This was a Paul Newman juice bottle ziptied in the engine compartment to keep warm, so small they needed to pull over to the side of the road every 10 miles or so to refill.

The “Green Team” I had seen chopping the Shipyard fence at the race’s start were one of the only two ralliers who made it to the deserted, amenity-less dirt lot in Lone Pine that the local chamber of commerce had rented to Mason as a "campground." They were early favorites, with big university backing. Team leader Wayne King has his own biofuel business and a partnership with Auburn University to practice and spread the gospel of gasification, which can turn any carbon-containing material into gas that can be burned to run a car engine (or generator).

The Green Team beat the time for both the first and third day of the race, but the second day they were stymied from poorly cut chunks of the Shipyard fence, which wasn’t burning well to begin with, causing them to have to stop too often and for too long to shake out the giant enclosed wood-burning kettles in the truck’s bed that fed the wood gases to the engine. As I heard it, with smoke billowing to the sky when they pulled over, a state trooper warned them he had just about called in a fire engine.

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Paul|10.24.08 @ 6:31PM|#

I hesitate to call a wood burning vehicle 'green fuel'. There was a time when the world ran on wood.

From a retro 'hey, this is kinda neat' standpoint it's ok... I guess.

I believe the Germans had a few of these in WWII when they were having trouble getting diesel for their vehicles.

Brian Doherty|10.24.08 @ 6:39PM|#

Paul---Yup. Gasification has a long history. None of this stuff is brand new--just growing to have extra relevance to people. If you read the long piece I wrote back in May (linked in the story) about gasification experimenters, the promise most of them see is that it doesn't HAVE to be wood---it can be any carbonaceous waste, and that, combined with returning the char to the soil, has, to some people, promise for an overall somewhat carbon footprint negative way of powering cars and generators.

Syd Henderson|10.24.08 @ 8:44PM|#

The winning car is pretty cool-looking.

|10.24.08 @ 10:07PM|#

The way I read the rules, an unmodified bicycle could have qualified and maybe finished. Just load up a van with cyclists and switch riders every ten miles. Not in the spirit of the game, but to the letter as I read it.

If I were escaping from anyplace (except an island), I'd use a bike. Cheap, quiet, will go almost anywhere you can go on foot. Get a bike.

chuck goolsbee|10.24.08 @ 10:40PM|#

WASTE veggie oil makes a great feedstock for making fuel, as it is a RE-use of a food product. No need to trade food for fuel, as your average American fast food place outputs enough waste oil to drive a small fleet of cars.

Unfortunately waste oil does require processing (either chemically, or filtering/heating) before use in an I.C.E. As such it is hard to pick up on the side of the road and just go.

But I'll tell you I've bought less than $50 worth of petroleum-based fuel in 2008, precisely because I have developed the capability of making my own fuel at home.

The problem that needs to be solved in this country is the Anti-Diesel bias of government regulators, specifically the California Air Resources Board. They have done everything possible to kill Diesel cars in the USA.

--chuck

Brandybuck|10.25.08 @ 12:29AM|#

Chuck, the problem with using waste veggie oil, is that in order to fuel my subcompact, I would have to eat several tons of french fries to produce the needed waste.

Jesse|10.25.08 @ 1:27AM|#

Thank you for writing. I am glad that innovation is alive. I live in Irvine.

What about the "anything into oil machines"

are those rumors or facts?

Travis|10.25.08 @ 1:13PM|#

My car runs on Soylient Green.

|10.27.08 @ 11:07AM|#

I hesitate to call a wood burning vehicle 'green fuel'.

Same here. Anything that incentivizes massive deforestation can't be green in my book.

max|10.28.08 @ 2:30AM|#

Well, at least something into oil exists. You can generate oil out of food rests and everything made of carbon. However, you need a lot of energy to do it, which makes it quite expensive (5-10x higher than oil market rates).

There is also an experiment going on that tries to use a biological method.

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