energy rant from abroad
When I read about how the whole rest of the world is developing their high-speed rail lines, I just get increasingly pissed off about America's failure to participate. We are needlessly turning ourselves into dinosaurs with our failure to develop a sustainable energy policy and a viable transportation system. There is NO GOOD REASON why we shouldn't have a connection already between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Of course the project was delayed by state fiscal problems and tabled by Schwarzenegger.
There's nothing to get me agitated about the state of transportation in the United States like being back in Europe. But it's nice to know that some, like Willie Nelson, for instance, are doing their part. BioWillie indeed.
(If you want to read the whole NY Times article on overseas rail development, it's here.)
December 30, 2005
Overseas, the Trains and the Market for Them Accelerate
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
KREFELD, Germany - Even more high-speed trains? Europe must be kidding.
In one vast hall, workers in blue overalls are putting the finishing touches on what would, on an old-fashioned train, be a locomotive, except that it houses a spacious conference room with a large table and seven comfortable armchairs.
In an adjacent hall, others are attaching what look like ordinary wheel trucks to a rail car, except that these contain electric motors that will essentially do the locomotive's job of pulling the train.
"We're now turning out a car every one or two days," said Michael Gessner, project manager at the Siemens rail car plant in Uerdingen, a suburb of this industrial city. "When we begin the Chinese order, it will be two a day."
Work at the Siemens factory illustrates a coming together of two developments in high-speed passenger train travel: technical breakthroughs in the way the bullet-shaped trains run, and the opening of vast new markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that are combining to give a steady boost to the business.
Unless they have traveled abroad, most Americans have had little first-hand experience with high-speed trains, and the problems with the Acela service on Amtrak have left its customers with a slightly bad taste. Hence, as countries including Italy and Spain - and emerging markets like China and Russia - open their pocketbooks for huge high-speed railway development, the United States remains on the sidelines, vulnerable to losing out on new technologies for propulsion and vehicle control.
For those who thought railroads were basically 19th-century technology, think again. Thanks to miniaturization, newer trains have motors built into the axles of every second rail car, rather than concentrating the pulling power in the locomotive, as was done in traditional pull-push trains.
The technology makes the trains lighter and enables them to go faster and to brake and accelerate more easily, while causing less wear on rails and wheels.
And the newer generation of very high-speed trains has other breakthrough features, including so-called eddy current brakes, which employ electromagnetic fields rather than brake disks for slowing and stopping.
"The carriages are stable and light and of very high speed," said Francois Lacôte , senior vice president in Alstom's transport division, which will install the new technology in the fourth generation of its TGV.
(The French manufacturer Alstom, like most of the industry, considers high-speed trains to be those with a top cruising speed of 150 miles per hour; trains with a top cruising speed 210 miles per hour are considered very high speed. The Acela's top cruising speed is about 125 miles per hour.)
In November, Siemens landed a $804 million contract to supply 60 sleek-nosed high-speed trains to the Chinese railways. The order is just one in a 15-year program to upgrade China's rail network, including the introduction of 180-mile-per-hour bullet trains. "Up to 2020 they want 12,000 kilometers of high-speed rail," or 7,200 miles, said Dietrich G. Möller, president of Siemens' trains division.
At about the same time, Siemens signed a preliminary contract for high-speed trains to connect Moscow and St. Petersburg. Like China, Russia, too, has gigantic railway ambitions. The line may one day continue beyond St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Finland, and past Moscow to Russian cities like Nizhny Novgorod.
In South Korea, Alstom, the inventor of the train à grande vitesse, or TGV, is supplying 185-mile-per-hour trains for a five-year $17 billion project that has connected Pusan and Seoul.
The growth in Asia is giving the small club of high-speed passenger train manufacturers a lift just as Western European governments are watching their budgets more closely. Europe's dense population and geographical features like the Alps make the construction of high-speed lines costly.
Moreover, environmental groups often resist the construction of new train lines, saying they bring noise and unwanted development and divert money from more urgent needs.
Nonetheless, Spain hopes to have a Madrid-Barcelona link open by 2008; France and Germany are upgrading the line from Paris through Strasbourg and on to the German cities of Stuttgart and Frankfurt for 210-mile trains.
"What has happened is that cuts in travel time have stimulated demand" for trains, said Ernest Godward, an economist with Scott Wilson Railways, a British consultancy.
American industry is largely sitting this one out. While some American companies, like the electro-motive division of General Motors and the MotivePower Industries division of the Wabtec Corporation, are doing brisk business with Chinese rail operators, their business is mainly freight, while the market for high-speed passenger trains is limited to a small group that has shrunk in recent years through a wave of mergers and acquisitions.
In 2001, Bombardier, the Canadian transport company, acquired Adtranz, a German-based rail equipment maker; at about the same time, Alstom bought Fiat Ferroviaria, Fiat's rail equipment division and the original developer of technology that enables high-speed trains to tilt into curves, much the way a motorcycle can.
(Alstom and Bombardier installed the technology on the Acela in the United States, but faulty measurements of the train's right-of-way rendered it virtually useless.)
Within Europe, the three leaders are vying to grab market share with snazzier and ever faster models.
Siemens introduced distributed power, meaning that electric motors pulling the train are distributed through the train's cars; that technology was used in trains for a high-speed line from Frankfurt to Cologne and will be used in trains on the Barcelona-Madrid connection.
Alstom will introduce similar technology on the new Paris-to-Strasbourg TGV line.
Bombardier, fearful of being left out of the running, introduced in October a concept train called the Zefiro, which will include most of the technology employed by the market leaders. Neil Harvey, Bombardier's communications director for Europe, said the Zefiro would have all the latest traction and braking technology and would be loaded with features like electronic seat reservations, power outlets at every seat and free Wi-Fi.
In Europe, to be sure, the growth of the market is not without its obstacles. Some argue that the cost of high-speed rail is excessive, compared with the operation of no-frills airlines, and that it only indulges a European penchant to go first class whenever possible; others say the environmental damage is too great.
In northwest Italy, near the site of the next winter Olympics in February, environmental groups are opposing a new high-speed line and tunnel to connect Lyon in France and Turin in Italy, arguing they would drag even more industrial traffic into the Alps. The train will cross a valley that already has a conventional train line and a superhighway. "It's incredibly costly, they're talking 13 billion euros," almost $16 billion, said Marco Ponti, a transportation expert at Milan's Polytechnic Institute who backs the protesters.
Mr. Ponti likened the project to the English Channel rail tunnel, whose construction cost was almost double the original estimates. "The Channel tunnel went bankrupt not once, but twice," he said.
Mr. Ponti, a former World Bank consultant, acknowledged, however, that "there is a place for high-speed trains for medium distances and in very densely populated areas."
Still, the governments in Rome and Paris are throwing their full weight behind high-speed rail. West of Turin, engineers are blasting a tunnel through the craggy Alps, and this fall Italy took tenders on 30 very high-speed trains and says it wants to acquire 100 in all. Its master plan foresees building high-speed lines in the shape of a T, from Milan in the north to Naples in the south, and from Turin in the west to Venice in the east.
In Asia, too, the European train builders face challenges. For one, there is competition from the fabled Shinkansen of Japan, the first high-speed train to go into service. That design was chosen by Taiwan for a 210-mile-per-hour train inaugurated last year from Taipei to the southern port of Kaoshiung. And while Asian contracts are lucrative, most countries insist on technology transfers including the assembly of most of the trains in local factories. Such requirements put pressure on the Europeans to continuously upgrade their technology or risk being overtaken by their own customers.
"The key is new technology," said Mr. Lacôte of Alstom. "The Chinese market is very interesting," he said. "They have the culture; they want to acquire the technology."
Of course, not all of the Chinese acquisitions will be very high speed. Bombardier, which has a strong presence in China thanks to its Adtranz acquisition, does a brisk business in light rail and subway car construction. This year, Bombardier signed a long-range agreement to supply trains to China with cruising speeds of 120 miles per hour.
The Siemens contract for China calls for it to supply 60 trains with a cruising speed of 180 miles an hour to link Beijing to the coastal city of Tianjin.
And the United States? Despite the debacle of the Acela, European rail executives say that heavy population concentrations on the East and West Coasts and in the Midwest around Chicago make high-speed trains a natural. Mr. Moller of Siemens said, "When the skies and the roads are full, they will turn to trains."
Mr. Lacôte of Alstom said three conditions had to be fulfilled for a country to turn to high-speed rail: the political will, large population concentrations, and a level of economic prosperity adequate to pay for a rail system.
"In the United States you have the second two," he said. "I am not sure that you have the first."
. . . and the Willie Nelson article, here.
December 30, 2005
Beyond Gasoline
His Car Smelling Like French Fries, Willie Nelson Sells Biodiesel
By DANNY HAKIM
Willie Nelson drives a Mercedes.
But do not lose faith, true believers. The exhaust from Mr. Nelson's diesel-powered Mercedes smells like peanuts, or French fries, or whatever alternative fuel happens to be in his tank.
While Bono tries to change the world by hobnobbing with politicians and Sir Bob Geldof plays host to his mega-benefit concerts, Willie Nelson has birthed his own brand of alternative fuel. It is called, fittingly enough, BioWillie. And in BioWillie, Mr. Nelson, 72, has blended two of his biggest concerns: his love of family farmers and disdain for the Iraq war.
BioWillie is a type of biodiesel, a fuel that can be made from any number of crops and run in a normal diesel engine. If it sounds like a joke, a number of businesses, as well as city and state and county governments, have been switching their transportation fleets to biodiesel blends over the last year. The rationale is that it is a domestic fuel that can provide profit to farmers and that it will help the environment, though environmentalists are not universally enthusiastic about it.
"I knew we needed to have something that would keep us from being so dependent on foreign oil, and when I heard about biodiesel, a light come on, and I said, 'Hey, here's the future for the farmers, the future for the environment, the future for the truckers," Mr. Nelson said in an interview this month. "It seems like that's good for the whole world if we can start growing our own fuel instead of starting wars over it."
In some ways, it is a return to the origins of the diesel engine; some of Rudolf Diesel's first engines ran on peanut oil more than a century ago.
Last week, a cargo-loading company that operates in the Port of Seattle said that to fuel its equipment next year it would purchase 800,000 gallons of biodiesel, most of it a blend known as B20 that is 80 percent conventional diesel. As of late September, Minnesota requires almost all diesel fuel sold in the state to be 2 percent biodiesel, and Cincinnati started using a 30 percent biodiesel blend, B30, in its city buses because of concerns about fuel shortages after Hurricane Katrina.
Biodiesel can cost as much as a $1 a gallon more than regular diesel when pure, though it is typically sold as B20. Prices vary depending on volume and region, and new tax incentives are aimed at closing the cost gap. BioWillie was selling for $2.37 a gallon yesterday in Carl's Corner, Mr. Nelson's own truck stop in Texas that serves as headquarters of his year-old company, Willie Nelson BioDiesel. That was just 4 cents more than the conventional diesel selling at another station nearby.
Mr. Nelson's BioWillie is aimed mostly at truckers and is usually sold as B20 (pure biodiesel can congeal in colder climates). BioWillie is currently sold at 13 gas stations and truck stops in four states (with Texas having the most), and it fuels the buses and trucks for Mr. Nelson's tours.
If BioWillie demonstrates anything, it is that the combination of Middle East wars, global warming and rising prices at the pump has led many people to offer solutions to the world's energy's squeeze. Depending on whom you ask, cars will someday run on hydrogen, electricity, natural gas or ethanol.
Mr. Nelson is making his bet on biodiesel.
"I don't like the war," he said in the interview. "In fact, I don't know if you ever remember a couple years ago, it was Christmas day, and my son Lukas was born on Christmas Day, he's like 16 years old, and we were watching TV and there was just all kind of hell breaking loose and people getting killed and I was talking to my wife, Annie, and I said, You know, all the mothers crying and the babies dying and she said, 'Well, you ought to go write that.' "So I wrote a song called 'Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?' "
He began to recite the first verse:
So many things going on in the world,
Babies dying, mothers crying.
Just how much oil is human life worth?
And whatever happened to peace on earth?
"That upset a lot of people, as you can imagine," he continued. "I've been upset about this war from the beginning and I've known it's all about oil."
Every alternative to oil, however, has its drawbacks. Biodiesel would reduce most emissions of smog-forming pollutants and global warming gases, and it could be used instead of foreign oil. But some studies show that it increases emissions of one harmful pollutant, nitrogen oxide, and it could not be produced in vast enough quantities to supplant oil-based fuel, or come close to it, unless the nation starts turning the suburbs over to farmland. And as with ethanol, producing great quantities of biodiesel from corn or soybeans could drive up food prices.
Bill Reinert, Toyota's national manager for advanced technologies, said in an interview this year: "I frankly don't see biodiesel being an early alt-fuel player across a wide swath of geography. It's a boutique fuel. There's not enough payoff and not enough people into it."
Peter J. Bell, the chief executive of Distribution Drive, a distributor of biodiesel that is working with Mr. Nelson, said of the nation's nearly 200,000 gas stations, "650 carry biodiesel, so we have a job in front of us." Mr. Nelson sits on the board of Distribution Drive's parent, Earth Biofuels, a publicly traded company.
Daniel Becker, the Sierra Club's top global warming expert, said he would prefer to see wider use of a cleaner alternative fuel, like natural gas.
Referring to biodiesel, he said, "In order to grow soybeans, you need multiple passes over the field with diesel tractors, you need a lot of fertilizer that's energy intensive to produce and, at the end of the day, you have a product that is no boon for the environment."
He went on: "If you're going to go to the trouble of using an alternative fuel, use a good alternative fuel. If you really want to listen to Willie Nelson, go buy one of his records and play it in a hybrid."
Mr. Nelson first heard about biodiesel two years ago from his wife while they were staying in Hawaii. He recounted the story.
"My wife came to me and said 'I want to buy this car that runs on biodiesel, and I said, 'What's that?' And so she told me, and I thought it was a scam or joke or something. So I said, 'Go ahead, it's your money.' "
She bought a Volkswagen Jetta with a diesel engine and started filling it with fuel made from restaurant grease. This is not uncommon. Home hobbyists make their own biodiesel by collecting used grease from restaurants and chemically treating it to turn it into usable fuel, or by outfitting their car or truck with equipment to re-form the grease.
"I drove the car, loved the way it drove," Mr. Nelson said. "The tailpipe smells like French fries. I bought me a Mercedes, and the Mercedes people were a little nervous when I took a brand new Mercedes over and filled it up with 100 percent vegetable oil coming from the grease traps of Maui. I figured I'd be getting notices about the warranty and that stuff. However, nobody said anything."
"I get better gas mileage, it runs better, the motor runs cleaner, so I swear by it," he added.
How far does he think biodiesel can go?
"It could get as big as we can grow fuel or find different things to make fuel from, such as chicken fat, beef fat, add that along to soybeans, vegetable oils, peanuts, safflower, sunflower," Mr. Nelson said.
O.K.. What about hemp?
"Hemp is a very good one," he replied, not missing a beat. "In fact, several years ago, a friend of mine named Gatewood Galbraith was running for governor of Kentucky and we campaigned all over the state of Kentucky in a Cadillac operating on hemp oil. He was trying to get it legalized in the state of Kentucky and, of course, he lost, but the cannabis thing in fuel is a very real thing."
Mr. Nelson said he did not expect to make much money on his venture. As he put it when asked about his Mercedes, "I didn't get it selling BioWillie, I'll tell you."
"I hope somebody makes money out of it; I'm sure they will. And probably what'll happen is that the oil industry will wait until everybody else builds all the infrastructure and then they'll come in and take over," he said. "But that's O.K. I don't worry about that. As along as the idea progresses because all I'm caring about is getting it out there and maybe helping the country, the farmer, the environment."
Asked if he intended to become a fat cat C.E.O. with a big cigar in his mouth, he replied: "I'll give you my part of it. I'll just sign over all my earnings and belongings to you right now and I'll sing 'Whiskey River.' "
One thing is certain: if Mr. Nelson's venture makes any money, none of it will go to pay a $16 million tax bill to the Internal Revenue Service. That debt, which arose from Mr. Nelson's participation in illegal tax shelters, was erased in 1993 with surrender of some property and the profit from his album "The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories?"
There's nothing to get me agitated about the state of transportation in the United States like being back in Europe. But it's nice to know that some, like Willie Nelson, for instance, are doing their part. BioWillie indeed.
(If you want to read the whole NY Times article on overseas rail development, it's here.)
December 30, 2005
Overseas, the Trains and the Market for Them Accelerate
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
KREFELD, Germany - Even more high-speed trains? Europe must be kidding.
In one vast hall, workers in blue overalls are putting the finishing touches on what would, on an old-fashioned train, be a locomotive, except that it houses a spacious conference room with a large table and seven comfortable armchairs.
In an adjacent hall, others are attaching what look like ordinary wheel trucks to a rail car, except that these contain electric motors that will essentially do the locomotive's job of pulling the train.
"We're now turning out a car every one or two days," said Michael Gessner, project manager at the Siemens rail car plant in Uerdingen, a suburb of this industrial city. "When we begin the Chinese order, it will be two a day."
Work at the Siemens factory illustrates a coming together of two developments in high-speed passenger train travel: technical breakthroughs in the way the bullet-shaped trains run, and the opening of vast new markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that are combining to give a steady boost to the business.
Unless they have traveled abroad, most Americans have had little first-hand experience with high-speed trains, and the problems with the Acela service on Amtrak have left its customers with a slightly bad taste. Hence, as countries including Italy and Spain - and emerging markets like China and Russia - open their pocketbooks for huge high-speed railway development, the United States remains on the sidelines, vulnerable to losing out on new technologies for propulsion and vehicle control.
For those who thought railroads were basically 19th-century technology, think again. Thanks to miniaturization, newer trains have motors built into the axles of every second rail car, rather than concentrating the pulling power in the locomotive, as was done in traditional pull-push trains.
The technology makes the trains lighter and enables them to go faster and to brake and accelerate more easily, while causing less wear on rails and wheels.
And the newer generation of very high-speed trains has other breakthrough features, including so-called eddy current brakes, which employ electromagnetic fields rather than brake disks for slowing and stopping.
"The carriages are stable and light and of very high speed," said Francois Lacôte , senior vice president in Alstom's transport division, which will install the new technology in the fourth generation of its TGV.
(The French manufacturer Alstom, like most of the industry, considers high-speed trains to be those with a top cruising speed of 150 miles per hour; trains with a top cruising speed 210 miles per hour are considered very high speed. The Acela's top cruising speed is about 125 miles per hour.)
In November, Siemens landed a $804 million contract to supply 60 sleek-nosed high-speed trains to the Chinese railways. The order is just one in a 15-year program to upgrade China's rail network, including the introduction of 180-mile-per-hour bullet trains. "Up to 2020 they want 12,000 kilometers of high-speed rail," or 7,200 miles, said Dietrich G. Möller, president of Siemens' trains division.
At about the same time, Siemens signed a preliminary contract for high-speed trains to connect Moscow and St. Petersburg. Like China, Russia, too, has gigantic railway ambitions. The line may one day continue beyond St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Finland, and past Moscow to Russian cities like Nizhny Novgorod.
In South Korea, Alstom, the inventor of the train à grande vitesse, or TGV, is supplying 185-mile-per-hour trains for a five-year $17 billion project that has connected Pusan and Seoul.
The growth in Asia is giving the small club of high-speed passenger train manufacturers a lift just as Western European governments are watching their budgets more closely. Europe's dense population and geographical features like the Alps make the construction of high-speed lines costly.
Moreover, environmental groups often resist the construction of new train lines, saying they bring noise and unwanted development and divert money from more urgent needs.
Nonetheless, Spain hopes to have a Madrid-Barcelona link open by 2008; France and Germany are upgrading the line from Paris through Strasbourg and on to the German cities of Stuttgart and Frankfurt for 210-mile trains.
"What has happened is that cuts in travel time have stimulated demand" for trains, said Ernest Godward, an economist with Scott Wilson Railways, a British consultancy.
American industry is largely sitting this one out. While some American companies, like the electro-motive division of General Motors and the MotivePower Industries division of the Wabtec Corporation, are doing brisk business with Chinese rail operators, their business is mainly freight, while the market for high-speed passenger trains is limited to a small group that has shrunk in recent years through a wave of mergers and acquisitions.
In 2001, Bombardier, the Canadian transport company, acquired Adtranz, a German-based rail equipment maker; at about the same time, Alstom bought Fiat Ferroviaria, Fiat's rail equipment division and the original developer of technology that enables high-speed trains to tilt into curves, much the way a motorcycle can.
(Alstom and Bombardier installed the technology on the Acela in the United States, but faulty measurements of the train's right-of-way rendered it virtually useless.)
Within Europe, the three leaders are vying to grab market share with snazzier and ever faster models.
Siemens introduced distributed power, meaning that electric motors pulling the train are distributed through the train's cars; that technology was used in trains for a high-speed line from Frankfurt to Cologne and will be used in trains on the Barcelona-Madrid connection.
Alstom will introduce similar technology on the new Paris-to-Strasbourg TGV line.
Bombardier, fearful of being left out of the running, introduced in October a concept train called the Zefiro, which will include most of the technology employed by the market leaders. Neil Harvey, Bombardier's communications director for Europe, said the Zefiro would have all the latest traction and braking technology and would be loaded with features like electronic seat reservations, power outlets at every seat and free Wi-Fi.
In Europe, to be sure, the growth of the market is not without its obstacles. Some argue that the cost of high-speed rail is excessive, compared with the operation of no-frills airlines, and that it only indulges a European penchant to go first class whenever possible; others say the environmental damage is too great.
In northwest Italy, near the site of the next winter Olympics in February, environmental groups are opposing a new high-speed line and tunnel to connect Lyon in France and Turin in Italy, arguing they would drag even more industrial traffic into the Alps. The train will cross a valley that already has a conventional train line and a superhighway. "It's incredibly costly, they're talking 13 billion euros," almost $16 billion, said Marco Ponti, a transportation expert at Milan's Polytechnic Institute who backs the protesters.
Mr. Ponti likened the project to the English Channel rail tunnel, whose construction cost was almost double the original estimates. "The Channel tunnel went bankrupt not once, but twice," he said.
Mr. Ponti, a former World Bank consultant, acknowledged, however, that "there is a place for high-speed trains for medium distances and in very densely populated areas."
Still, the governments in Rome and Paris are throwing their full weight behind high-speed rail. West of Turin, engineers are blasting a tunnel through the craggy Alps, and this fall Italy took tenders on 30 very high-speed trains and says it wants to acquire 100 in all. Its master plan foresees building high-speed lines in the shape of a T, from Milan in the north to Naples in the south, and from Turin in the west to Venice in the east.
In Asia, too, the European train builders face challenges. For one, there is competition from the fabled Shinkansen of Japan, the first high-speed train to go into service. That design was chosen by Taiwan for a 210-mile-per-hour train inaugurated last year from Taipei to the southern port of Kaoshiung. And while Asian contracts are lucrative, most countries insist on technology transfers including the assembly of most of the trains in local factories. Such requirements put pressure on the Europeans to continuously upgrade their technology or risk being overtaken by their own customers.
"The key is new technology," said Mr. Lacôte of Alstom. "The Chinese market is very interesting," he said. "They have the culture; they want to acquire the technology."
Of course, not all of the Chinese acquisitions will be very high speed. Bombardier, which has a strong presence in China thanks to its Adtranz acquisition, does a brisk business in light rail and subway car construction. This year, Bombardier signed a long-range agreement to supply trains to China with cruising speeds of 120 miles per hour.
The Siemens contract for China calls for it to supply 60 trains with a cruising speed of 180 miles an hour to link Beijing to the coastal city of Tianjin.
And the United States? Despite the debacle of the Acela, European rail executives say that heavy population concentrations on the East and West Coasts and in the Midwest around Chicago make high-speed trains a natural. Mr. Moller of Siemens said, "When the skies and the roads are full, they will turn to trains."
Mr. Lacôte of Alstom said three conditions had to be fulfilled for a country to turn to high-speed rail: the political will, large population concentrations, and a level of economic prosperity adequate to pay for a rail system.
"In the United States you have the second two," he said. "I am not sure that you have the first."
. . . and the Willie Nelson article, here.
December 30, 2005
Beyond Gasoline
His Car Smelling Like French Fries, Willie Nelson Sells Biodiesel
By DANNY HAKIM
Willie Nelson drives a Mercedes.
But do not lose faith, true believers. The exhaust from Mr. Nelson's diesel-powered Mercedes smells like peanuts, or French fries, or whatever alternative fuel happens to be in his tank.
While Bono tries to change the world by hobnobbing with politicians and Sir Bob Geldof plays host to his mega-benefit concerts, Willie Nelson has birthed his own brand of alternative fuel. It is called, fittingly enough, BioWillie. And in BioWillie, Mr. Nelson, 72, has blended two of his biggest concerns: his love of family farmers and disdain for the Iraq war.
BioWillie is a type of biodiesel, a fuel that can be made from any number of crops and run in a normal diesel engine. If it sounds like a joke, a number of businesses, as well as city and state and county governments, have been switching their transportation fleets to biodiesel blends over the last year. The rationale is that it is a domestic fuel that can provide profit to farmers and that it will help the environment, though environmentalists are not universally enthusiastic about it.
"I knew we needed to have something that would keep us from being so dependent on foreign oil, and when I heard about biodiesel, a light come on, and I said, 'Hey, here's the future for the farmers, the future for the environment, the future for the truckers," Mr. Nelson said in an interview this month. "It seems like that's good for the whole world if we can start growing our own fuel instead of starting wars over it."
In some ways, it is a return to the origins of the diesel engine; some of Rudolf Diesel's first engines ran on peanut oil more than a century ago.
Last week, a cargo-loading company that operates in the Port of Seattle said that to fuel its equipment next year it would purchase 800,000 gallons of biodiesel, most of it a blend known as B20 that is 80 percent conventional diesel. As of late September, Minnesota requires almost all diesel fuel sold in the state to be 2 percent biodiesel, and Cincinnati started using a 30 percent biodiesel blend, B30, in its city buses because of concerns about fuel shortages after Hurricane Katrina.
Biodiesel can cost as much as a $1 a gallon more than regular diesel when pure, though it is typically sold as B20. Prices vary depending on volume and region, and new tax incentives are aimed at closing the cost gap. BioWillie was selling for $2.37 a gallon yesterday in Carl's Corner, Mr. Nelson's own truck stop in Texas that serves as headquarters of his year-old company, Willie Nelson BioDiesel. That was just 4 cents more than the conventional diesel selling at another station nearby.
Mr. Nelson's BioWillie is aimed mostly at truckers and is usually sold as B20 (pure biodiesel can congeal in colder climates). BioWillie is currently sold at 13 gas stations and truck stops in four states (with Texas having the most), and it fuels the buses and trucks for Mr. Nelson's tours.
If BioWillie demonstrates anything, it is that the combination of Middle East wars, global warming and rising prices at the pump has led many people to offer solutions to the world's energy's squeeze. Depending on whom you ask, cars will someday run on hydrogen, electricity, natural gas or ethanol.
Mr. Nelson is making his bet on biodiesel.
"I don't like the war," he said in the interview. "In fact, I don't know if you ever remember a couple years ago, it was Christmas day, and my son Lukas was born on Christmas Day, he's like 16 years old, and we were watching TV and there was just all kind of hell breaking loose and people getting killed and I was talking to my wife, Annie, and I said, You know, all the mothers crying and the babies dying and she said, 'Well, you ought to go write that.' "So I wrote a song called 'Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?' "
He began to recite the first verse:
So many things going on in the world,
Babies dying, mothers crying.
Just how much oil is human life worth?
And whatever happened to peace on earth?
"That upset a lot of people, as you can imagine," he continued. "I've been upset about this war from the beginning and I've known it's all about oil."
Every alternative to oil, however, has its drawbacks. Biodiesel would reduce most emissions of smog-forming pollutants and global warming gases, and it could be used instead of foreign oil. But some studies show that it increases emissions of one harmful pollutant, nitrogen oxide, and it could not be produced in vast enough quantities to supplant oil-based fuel, or come close to it, unless the nation starts turning the suburbs over to farmland. And as with ethanol, producing great quantities of biodiesel from corn or soybeans could drive up food prices.
Bill Reinert, Toyota's national manager for advanced technologies, said in an interview this year: "I frankly don't see biodiesel being an early alt-fuel player across a wide swath of geography. It's a boutique fuel. There's not enough payoff and not enough people into it."
Peter J. Bell, the chief executive of Distribution Drive, a distributor of biodiesel that is working with Mr. Nelson, said of the nation's nearly 200,000 gas stations, "650 carry biodiesel, so we have a job in front of us." Mr. Nelson sits on the board of Distribution Drive's parent, Earth Biofuels, a publicly traded company.
Daniel Becker, the Sierra Club's top global warming expert, said he would prefer to see wider use of a cleaner alternative fuel, like natural gas.
Referring to biodiesel, he said, "In order to grow soybeans, you need multiple passes over the field with diesel tractors, you need a lot of fertilizer that's energy intensive to produce and, at the end of the day, you have a product that is no boon for the environment."
He went on: "If you're going to go to the trouble of using an alternative fuel, use a good alternative fuel. If you really want to listen to Willie Nelson, go buy one of his records and play it in a hybrid."
Mr. Nelson first heard about biodiesel two years ago from his wife while they were staying in Hawaii. He recounted the story.
"My wife came to me and said 'I want to buy this car that runs on biodiesel, and I said, 'What's that?' And so she told me, and I thought it was a scam or joke or something. So I said, 'Go ahead, it's your money.' "
She bought a Volkswagen Jetta with a diesel engine and started filling it with fuel made from restaurant grease. This is not uncommon. Home hobbyists make their own biodiesel by collecting used grease from restaurants and chemically treating it to turn it into usable fuel, or by outfitting their car or truck with equipment to re-form the grease.
"I drove the car, loved the way it drove," Mr. Nelson said. "The tailpipe smells like French fries. I bought me a Mercedes, and the Mercedes people were a little nervous when I took a brand new Mercedes over and filled it up with 100 percent vegetable oil coming from the grease traps of Maui. I figured I'd be getting notices about the warranty and that stuff. However, nobody said anything."
"I get better gas mileage, it runs better, the motor runs cleaner, so I swear by it," he added.
How far does he think biodiesel can go?
"It could get as big as we can grow fuel or find different things to make fuel from, such as chicken fat, beef fat, add that along to soybeans, vegetable oils, peanuts, safflower, sunflower," Mr. Nelson said.
O.K.. What about hemp?
"Hemp is a very good one," he replied, not missing a beat. "In fact, several years ago, a friend of mine named Gatewood Galbraith was running for governor of Kentucky and we campaigned all over the state of Kentucky in a Cadillac operating on hemp oil. He was trying to get it legalized in the state of Kentucky and, of course, he lost, but the cannabis thing in fuel is a very real thing."
Mr. Nelson said he did not expect to make much money on his venture. As he put it when asked about his Mercedes, "I didn't get it selling BioWillie, I'll tell you."
"I hope somebody makes money out of it; I'm sure they will. And probably what'll happen is that the oil industry will wait until everybody else builds all the infrastructure and then they'll come in and take over," he said. "But that's O.K. I don't worry about that. As along as the idea progresses because all I'm caring about is getting it out there and maybe helping the country, the farmer, the environment."
Asked if he intended to become a fat cat C.E.O. with a big cigar in his mouth, he replied: "I'll give you my part of it. I'll just sign over all my earnings and belongings to you right now and I'll sing 'Whiskey River.' "
One thing is certain: if Mr. Nelson's venture makes any money, none of it will go to pay a $16 million tax bill to the Internal Revenue Service. That debt, which arose from Mr. Nelson's participation in illegal tax shelters, was erased in 1993 with surrender of some property and the profit from his album "The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories?"