San Francisco seeks a biodiesel future
As part of the effort to make San Francisco's city operations carbon-neutral by 2020, Mayor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order calling for the use of B20 (20% biodiesel, 80% petroleum diesel) in all of the city's diesel vehicles. In less than a year San Francisco had become the largest city in the world to use biodiesel in its entire diesel fleet, including emergency vehicles and the new hybrid electric buses that form a large percentage of Muni's fleet because they have been found to be the best solution for the city's steepest hills.
Around the same time the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission launched its SF Greasecycle program, which collects used cooking oil from city restaurants and converts it into biodiesel.
The city is also home to two biodiesel non-profits, the San Francisco Biofuels Cooperative and the Biofuel Recycling Cooperative, who work together under the umbrella of the Green Depot, an environmental-justice nonprofit. Along with Global Exchange, and funded in part by the city's Public Utilities Commission and Department of the Environment, they run a "green jobs" biodiesel intern program giving training in the grease-collection process and biodiesel production. Last December, Dogpatch Biofuels opened the city's first B100 biodiesel station. Three predecessors (Olympian Station, San Francisco Petroleum, and Rainbow Grocery) already were selling B20.
The city has had difficulty collecting enough grease for its entire diesel fleet. So there were some high hopes when in September of 2008, Darling International, the country's largest handler of animal-product grease and used cooking grease, announced plans to build a 10-million-gallon-per-year biodiesel plant at its rendering facility at Pier 92 in San Francisco's Bayview/Hunters Point. The plant could provide an alternative to current sources of biodiesel, which arrive by rail from the Midwest and are mostly made from virgin oils such as soy or canola. The new plant might also bring new green jobs to the neighborhood, according to Darling management.
Darling International, however, has long been considered one of Bayview's worst polluters, alongside the PG&E power plant and the Navy Shipyard at Hunters Point. Can the new project turn a perennial polluter into a more sustainable part of a community that desperately needs it? Initially the city decided to expedite the project by exempting it from proper environmental review. Reflecting the Bayview community's insistence on environmental justice, the Bayview Community Advocates Group and Golden Gate University's Environmental Law and Justice Clinic challenged that decision. The city Planning Department and the Port quickly relented and announced that they will bring together stakeholders in moving forward with a thorough review under the California Environmental Quality Act to ensure that the plant produces biodiesel safely, cleanly, and transparently and that the community's interest in local jobs is addressed.
U.S. oil production peaked over a year ago, and the global peak is estimated to come as early as 2050. Biodiesel can and must play an important role in replacing the petroleum diesel used by the transportation sector. Indeed, biodiesel is emerging as the cleaner-burning, low-carbon alternative to toxic diesel fuel and its devastating health and environmental effects. But for a city long seen as a global environmental pioneer, a high bar must be set for this Darling plant. Serious questions remain - about the feedstock, the operator's commitment to sustainability, and the plant's potential effect on local biodiesel businesses. Can Darling become a better, cleaner, less secretive neighbor in the face of its checkered past? Will this be a project that San Francisco can be proud of?