Biodiesel Gets Even Harder To Find

July 26, 2009 — alternative fuel, biodiesel, green living

Want to break your addiction to driving on petro? Want to drive an affordable, readily available vehicle that runs carbon-neutral? Yeah.

I made the personal decision to transition to biodiesel four years ago and very quickly learned that in Southern California, that is unusually difficult to accomplish.

In all of Southern California (I’m talking from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border), there are less than 20 stations where a regular-Joe consumer can pump biodiesel into your tank.

Because of a new piece of legislation, now there are almost none. Consider this map:

Retail Biodiesel Stations

Notice that Southern California is extremely sparse. 20 stations for a population of 18 million. Look at the mid-west. (There are some good reasons for this, but even factoring those reasons into consideration, Southern California has a hugely disproportionate dearth of available retail biodiesel, no matter how you cut the data.)

A recent ruling by the California State Water Resources Control Board has eliminated underground storage of biodiesel. You can easily imagine, all typical retail gas stations store the fuel underground.

The result? Biodiesel is even harder to acquire, which leaves those of us with diesel vehicles and a desire to burn vegitable oil (biodiesel) no choice but to buy the regular, old petro-diesel, which redirects our fuel dollars from largely American farmers and small businesses to far-flung, oil-rich countries.

Check out this editorial from the LA Times on the subject here: