Entrepreneur Grows Green Jobs With Biodiesel

We’re often told that Connecticut’s future is in green jobs. And there are many entrepreneurs out there who are developing innovative businesses based around new technologies or alternative energy. For the latest of our small business profiles, WNPR’s Harriet Jones visited a tiny biodiesel plant in Groton.

When entrepreneur Douglas Dickey invited me to visit his business, Constitution Biofuels, he warned me that I shouldn’t dress up.

“I took you at my word, I wore my big boots…”
“You can see we’ve got chunks of meat and… “
“Yes, what the heck is this?
“That’s what people will put into the fryolators. It has some occasional pieces of meat in there and parts from fried chicken wings and stuff like that. So we have to screen all that out, and then we’ll put it through a finer screen over here.”

Dickey’s plant collects waste fryer oil from local restaurants and puts it through a chemical process that turns it into a fuel that can run trucks or home furnaces. In fact, home heating was the genesis of this business. Dickey was working as a chemist at Pfizer’s old Groton manufacturing plant, and paying to heat both his own house and a rental home. When the price of heating oil went north, he looked into the possibility of biodiesel.

“The chemistry is pretty simple and it wasn’t complex to make. And I’m working in a pharmaceutical production plant where the most complex stuff goes on—I can handle this. So I started making it in our garage, and I heated both our houses for a couple of winters.”

When Dickey learned he would be laid off from Pfizer, he wrote a plan to turn that domestic money-saver into a business, and the adventure of building his own plant began.

“Almost all my equipment here is used. So these tanks are from a battery factory in Georgia, this is a military fuel filter. Those two big white tanks from a concrete place here in Connecticut—they were selling them on Craigslist.”
“Is that how you went about getting stuff?”
“Craigslist, I got it from government liquidation auctions, I got it from a couple of industrial auction websites. I got the mezzanine here off of eBay.”

The benefit to that sort of recycling of course, is cost.

“They put a similar-sized capacity plant up in Alaska, maybe a little bigger than ours. Everything’s a little more expensive in Alaska, but it cost them $3 million. And we did it all less than one-tenth of that.”

But in case you think he now has a license to print money - his raw material may be restaurant waste, but it’s definitely not free.

“You’d be surprised the value of the oil coming out of there. It doesn’t look like much there but I saw an article they were paying over a dollar a gallon for the used oil in the New York City area.”

Dickey says he pays less than that, although he won’t reveal how much. He’s been working on getting the plant up and running for more than a year now, and expects to be in full production soon. He says he already has a lot of interest from potential customers, including Connecticut College, whose cafeterias supply some of his waste oil.

“We have local people calling us all the time. Selling the product’s not the issue. Honestly there’s so many people calling for it.”

“Just show you what it looks like. This is the magnasol that’s the white powder here, and these are the wood fibers that are used to absorb the impurities. And this is what the final biodiesel looks like.”
“Looks like maple syrup.”
“You can smell it, it’s non-toxic.”
“Oh yes, really no smell to it.”
“It’s got a little sweet smell to it, a little solvent smell. It’s so non-toxic they were using it in the Gulf oil spill to clean up the crude because it’s a very good solvent.”

Dickey says founding a green business wasn’t the primary motivation behind Constitution Biofuels, but he does believe it’s an idea whose time has come.

“Just even today in the paper they were talking about $4 gas prices by spring. If the government wants to keep dollars in America, this is definitely something to encourage. Any green job in the United States, the money’s going to stay here, it’s not being shipped overseas.”

The federal government apparently agrees—a provision in the tax bill signed late last year by President Obama extends the dollar-a-gallon tax incentives for biodiesel through the end of 2011, a move that’s widely expected to boost production throughout the US.

For WNPR, I'm Harriet Jones.