Granite Geek: Neither sunlight nor used cooking oil have to go through the Strait of Hormuz

We all know that the chaotic war in Iran is driving up prices for everything petroleum-related, from gasoline to heating oil to fertilizer, but less obvious is its effect on what you might call petroleum-adjacent products. For example, the glop left behind after cooking fatty foods.

“The big change we’ve seen since the activities over in the Persian Gulf is pricing. There’s been roughly a 20% increase in pricing since the start of activities,” said Bill Mello, co-owner of Independence Bio-Energy Collection Services in Barrington. It is one of several companies in New Hampshire, including Amenico in Pittsfield, that collect used cooking oil and grease from commercial kitchens, filter it and process it, then deliver the result to refineries where it is turned into liquids that can be used alongside or in place of diesel and aviation fuel.

The biodiesel industry has been around for decades and was thriving even before the Iran debacle jacked up their prices. The U.S. market alone is projected to reach $50 billion in sales within a few years.

“What has changed is renewable diesel didn’t use to exist in any sort of marketable quantities. … Newer technologies have made this more usable, the chemistry of dealing with the biological oils … has changed to the point where they can use it interchangeably,” said Mello.

Note that this business, which uses a waste product that would otherwise end up in one of those landfills we don’t want to build, is very different from ethanol currently mixed into gasoline. The ethanol program uses corn grown specifically to be turned into biodiesel. This is wildly inefficient since it requires a ton of diesel and fertilizer to make the corn, and it raises the cost of food by convincing some farmers not to grow crops we can eat. We should have ended that program years ago.

Biodiesel from food waste is a much better idea. But to a certain extent, it’s missing the point.

What we really need to do is not find more efficient ways to create liquid fuels but end our centuries-old habit of setting fire to stuff in order to thrive.

That’s the idea of an “electrostate,” the term for a national economy that substitutes domestic electricity for imported fuels wherever practical, taking advantage of technological improvements in wind power and especially solar power. China is making the transition deliberately, installing solar panels at a furious rate, while troubled places like Pakistan and Cuba are doing it out of desperation. It’s a transition that New Hampshire and the U.S. should be making, too.

Creating electricity by nuclear power is part of the idea, although it’s a slow and expensive process compared to the speed and increasingly cheap use of renewables.

An electrostate is better not just because electric motors are more efficient — doing the same work with them rather than combustion motors reduces the energy input by at least a third and often more — but because it’s a buffer in a world where the global energy network can be overturned by a few angry men starting a fight.

This works at the individual level, too.

If the last three weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the time has come to ramp up our vague thoughts of getting solar panels and maybe a battery too, as well as an electric vehicle, home heat pump, electric yard equipment or an induction stove. The more electricity we produce ourselves — what’s a better example of local control than home solar panels — and the more our tools run on electrons rather than molecules, the less we are subject to the unstable nature of geopolitics.

Nonetheless, we’re going to continue burning a lot of fuel for a while, and the more of it that’s biodiesel, the better.

I plan to do my part and order a bucket of fried chicken for dinner. I’m helping create energy independence!

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