Racing to a Non-Petroleum Future

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

Brian Doherty | October 24, 2008

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As we started off Monday morning for the last stretch from Lone Pine to Vegas, the “Green Team” was draining off some tarry-looking liquid byproduct from their gasification process out into the lot. As some of the crew kicked dry dirt over it, someone muttered about our brave experiment in carbon sequestration.

Heather and I trailed the eventual winners, Jack McCornack and Sharon Westcott. The grey-bearded McCornack was an old hand in the 1970s with the hippie-tech journal Mother Earth News. McCornack makes cars himself, and his creation was a sweet, low, windowless two-man tubular roadster, green with a yellow nose, meant to look like a vehicle Number Six used in The Prisoner. “Danger” is literally McCornack’s middle name. Really; he showed me the driver’s license. It’s an old French family name, but still. I made sure that they indeed were not buying the off-the-shelf vegetable oil that powered the Kabuto engine in the roadster. They didn’t even have a filter, so it had to be the pure stuff.

Five times that day, after tailing him zipping a solid 60 mph or better clip over the stunning, dizzying mountain ranges on the way to Nevada, I watched as they parked in front of small town grocery stores or diners or gas station minimarts, took off the hood, and waited for people to come ooh and ahh over the cute little roadster.

Then he and Sharon would give a spiel about how they needed other people to give them oil to win this weird little race, and every time, usually within the first or second try, either a customer or a store employee would joyfully give in. In one case they were handed the store’s entire stock of cooking oil. The stuff he got from a Lone Pine diner fryer was too thick and orange for them to dare use; the olive oil they got from the mayor of Death Valley Junction, retrieved from his crumbling abandoned warehouse of a home, didn’t mix well with the rest of the canola oil they mostly used.

But except for some problems with air in the fuel lines on the first day, and the pain of driving through very cold weather with no windows, they had it made, drove their time easily, and won the race and the $5,000. In the meeting to decide the winners of the various other prize categories, judge Michael Michael and I argued for splitting the prize between the two finishers. The varied technical and social challenges they faced made straight time measurements—to us—misleading. How to measure whose achievement was truly more impressive than the others? The organizers were adamant in a tense half hour meeting in a dark corner of the old-school Sahara casino that for the race to be taken seriously we needed one winner according to the announced rules.

The three teams that actually drove all the way to Vegas—the two official finishers and the Llaguno’s—made for a beautiful fable of community building, with old hippie fabricators, southern agricultural businessmen, and Christian homeschoolers all admiring and learning from each other in near-perfect harmony, under the guidance of Bay Area art-freaks.

Walking into the Shipyard—a showcase for many absurd excesses of California bohemianism—the elder Llaguno tells me that all his son and he could think of as they looked around at the clutter of lathes, grinders, forklifts, shipping containers, vehicles in random states of disrepair, and mutation, was…it’s just like home. Even in the heat of competition, this sociologically and culturally varied crew saw in each other nothing but brothers in the quest to make auto-locomotion more interesting, more challenging, more personal, more—despite or because of all the unexpected setbacks and frustrations—fun.

The race was not about building a new system for everyone to fall in line with, or for changing our car fueling systems from the top down. While McCornack’s winner worked off a straight kit conversion from the company Plant Drive that anyone slightly handy could imitate, and not some exotic home-made hack, the veggie oil they begged for was always more than three times the already very high price of petroleum. Undoubtedly, an entire national system of veggie oil distribution could probably cut costs—and greatly increase the cost of food as more and more land and edible vegetable matter goes into our engines and not our stomachs. National economies are complicated things; as are car engines. But the latter are at least under our control, beneath our hands, mutable to our creative desires or our damn-it-all truculent whims.

In the 10 days since the race ended, the price of a barrel of oil fell to a 16-month low. But that’s not going to deter the quest of those who tried to Escape from Berkeley into a more personal and potentially less polluting energy future.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty is author of This is Burning Man and Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

Comments

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.