Promoting the biodiesel and vegoil community in Alaska.
Join REAP for the 8th annual Alaska Renewable Energy Fair on Saturday, August 11th from 11:00 am to 9:00 pm on the Anchorage downtown parkstrip between I & E Street. Admission is FREE, and it’s guaranteed to be fun for the whole family! Enjoy the live music, a beer garden, great food, kids activities, informational booths, and renewable energy workshops. Includes a 4pm Biodiesel workshop, SVO converted Volkswagen Westfalia, SVO converted school bus and more veggie goodness!
Yep, it’s time for Alaska’s 2011 Renewable Energy Fair! We’re offering a FREE biodiesel and SVO seminar at noon, and will be there all afternoon with veg-converted vehicles at our booth. Hope to see you there!
Yes, we’ve had a bit of a brain freeze this past winter. But, never fear! Biodiesel and SVO is alive and well in the Arctic!
Fuel prices dropped this past year, and with it the biodiesel and SVO tirekickers dwindled to a mere trickle. A few guys were once again trying to make a fortune brewing and selling biodiesel. One in particular, Denali Biodiesel, got up and running with a few mid-scale plants, but as of this spring they’re relocating out-of-state. Best of luck to them!
We at Arctic Vegwerks had ZERO conversions for 2010. But, with Alaska’s Home Energy Rebate program we kept busy making our humble abode less dependent of fossil fuels, and took advantage of that nice $10k grant the state was offering.
Alaska Waste is plowing ahead with their biodiesel and composting efforts, and we applaud them. We estimate they’re using about half of the grease in Anchorage in their private fleet of trash haulers.
This still leaves a quarter of a million gallons of grease out there. With our remote market, obtaining enough SVO for personal vehicles is still a viable option. We had it pretty cush when Alaska Mill and Feed was the grease processor: no contracts, and cheap grease for sale in bulk. With Alaska Waste’s new 3-year contracts, many of the larger restaurant and institutions are taken, but there are plenty of little restaurants looking for someone to pick up grease for free.
Which leads to another dilemma: GREASE DISPOSAL. Yep, SVO folks with too much grease on their hands are left to the Alaska Biodiesel Yahoogroup or Craigslist to cheaply dispose of oil. Anchorage’s hazardous waste collection center at the landfill and transfer stations will take up to 40lbs of residential waste a day for free (one cubie), but charges $.25/lb for more ($4.00 a cube). Businesses must to pay for all oil disposed. Emerald Alaska is the city’s hazardous waste contractor, and their commercial rates are similar, but they do accept drums of oil. Last time I checked, Alaska Waste was charging $2.50 a cube ($.50 a gallon) for oil disposal during business hours (call ahead), but will only take good clean oil – no sludge.
Bottom line: don’t stockpile more than you need.
Of course, we’ve got some friends heating their shop in Wasilla off SVO, with a modified Turk Burner setup. Yellow Heat from Massachusetts has a neat Babington Ball heater. Anyone else in Alaska doing SVO heat? We’d love to hear from you.
Veg On!
Yep, after a year’s reprieve from our lowest-in-the-nation $0.08 per gallon state motor fuel tax, we’re back to our monthly payments.
Alaskans who burn homebrew fuel in an internal combustion powered vehicle are supposed to submit form 04-530. I sent my $1.60 in today.
Check with the Alaska Department of Revenue for details.
Yesterday’s fifth annual Alaska Renewable Energy Fair had beautiful skies, free local coffee, good food, solid music, nice organic beers and booths from pretty much everyone who’s involved in renewable energy in the state.
We were lucky to be the featured interview on KTUU channel 2 last night!
Veg On!
The 5th annual Alaska Renewable Energy Fair will be held Saturday August 1st from 11am-9pm at the Memorial Block on the Delaney Park Strip, downtown Anchorage.
This FREE Fair features food and craft vendors, business and non-profit exhibitors, live music, and workshops on renewable energy. Keynote speaker at 5pm, Melissa Mitchell sings in the afternoon and the Whipsaws will rock the evening.
We’ll have a number of veg-converted vehicles to show off and will be offering a backyard biodiesel basics demonstration, time TBA.
Check out http://alaskarenewableenergy.org/events/renewable-energy-fair/ for more details.
Veg On!
The 2009 Earth Day celebration for the Upper Susitna Valley will be held on Saturday, April 18th, at the Sheldon Community Arts Hanger in downtown Talkeetna from 11:00am – 3:00pm.
The festivities will include presentations, food, coffee, kid crafts, entertainment and informational
booths.
We’ll be there with biodiesel demonstrations, straight veg information and class flyers. Anyone want to come out and help table?
Directions:
Take the George Parks to Talkeetna Spur Road (mile 98). Turn onto Talkeetna Spur and take it all the way into town to the stop sign. Go through the stop sign (stay on Main Street) and take your first left (just after Nagley’s). It’s directly ahead on the left in a renovated airplane hanger
Veg On!
BiodieselSMARTER, my favorite biodiesel magazine, has a series of Alaska-centric features for their Spring ’09 issue.
Although it’s called biodieselSMARTER, there’s a fair bit of info for you SVO fans out there (and even some pieces on those people that blend unheated vegoil).
About half of the articles have been posted on their website, so check it out and subscribe – at $15 a year “it’s like a printed version of the infopop forum, but without all the fluff.”
(and yeah, that’s my truck.)
Veg On!
State Gas Tax Chart
SVO and biodiesel are both considered diesel fuel for tax purposes, and although there are some tax-free uses of diesel, off-road driving is not one of them.
But hey, off-road vehicles, heavy equipment, portable generators, and the like get a 6 cent refund on the intial 8 cent Alaska state tax, so you’re only looking at paying two cents a gallon!
Now biodiesel or vegoil as heating fuel (bioheat) is tax free as far as the state is concerned. Heating fuel includes other “domestic purposes” like cooking, etc.
Basically, if fuel is used in an internal combustion engine, you pay Alaska tax on it. A small-scale exception is a permanently installed generator that “adds to the value of the property.”
In other words, if you’re off the grid and have a generator shed with a big old lister bolted to a concrete pad, you can generate electricity for personal use with your homebrewed biodiesel/vegoil state-tax free.
The emergency generator you pull out of the garage is not a part of the property’s value, and fuel used in that is taxed at the off-road rate.
It’s ridiculous that the state even collects tax on personal use biodiesel and vegoil, but it’s written into law, so only the legislature can change it. That means you all need to call your state representative and ask for a personal use exemption for biodiesel/vegoil!
Remember: You’ve still got the Federal Tax to deal with, and if you want to sell or distribute biodiesel you’ve got a whole lot of paperwork ahead of you.
Disclamer: Read the statutes or call Jamie Taylor 907-269-6948 at the Motor Fuels Tax Office if you need real tax advice.
Veg On!
Well, the Oil and Water Project SVO-Kayak road trip fellas have released their DVD and I must say I chuckled out loud a few times while watching their journey.
It’s a popular theme: Driving from the top of the world to the tropics (and to the bottom of the world in their case).
There’s a number of folks up here who just finished veg-fueled drives up the Alaska highway, and a more are converting their rigs for lower-48 and beyond journeys. These guys may be the first, however, to film a veg-trip all the way from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.
I ran into the Oil and Water rig while they were up at the Girdwood Forest Fair in 2006, and we compared biodiesel and salmon oil information. They had a really cool Toyota mini-firetruck that they converted not only to run on vegoil, but to serve as a camper/party truck, and even press seeds into oil on the fly.
As far as the film goes, I was impressed how they showed some intense kayaking, a lot of camraderie with their rotating travelling crew and a ton of connections with school groups and local governments along their route – all the while promoting sustainable local biofuels.
It’s a fun, lighthearted journey. There’s no talking head interviews like so many of the SVO-flicks out there, no preaching. Just a couple of guys and their friends out to have fun and teach about renewable fuels as they travel the world – burning used chicarrone pig fat and raw palm oil along the way.
Maybe I liked it because I could identify with them.
The Alaska scenes go by quickly in the first ten minutes or so, but they do see a bunch of wildlife, run their rig on salmon oil, and take some runs on the Susitna River. In addition, Seth’s brother Damien is a local Alaska boy, and he makes a cameo appearance close to the equator.
Looking for a easygoing and wanderlust inspiring veg-trip flick? Try this one. It’s $30 (with shipping) from the Oil and Water Project.
Veg On!
