Green Car Congress: Terminal Operator at Port of Seattle Moves to B20 Biodiesel

For alternative fuels like biodiesel to succeed, they don't have to first approach the mainstream car drivers. Yes, mainstream car drivers could buy a diesel car and pretty easily run it on biodiesel. But a mainstream car driver doing this would face an infrastructure problem, when they run out of fuel in the middle of the desert where do they find another biodiesel station?

This problem would make it hard(er) for biodiesel makers to sell their fuel, that is if they limited themselves to the mainstream car drivers. However there are a lot of diesel vehicles operated outside the mainstream car drivers.

This is an example: Terminal Operator at Port of Seattle Moves to B20 Biodiesel (Green Car Congress, 27 December 2005) The story concerns the Port of Seattle, which has a lot of heavy equipment (cranes etc) that run on diesel. It's in a fixed location, making it easy for the fuel vendor to simply deliver more fuel every so often.

This shows a useful game plan for the biodiesel vendors to follow. Industrial users like this are generally in a fixed location or in other ways you can make arrangements for fuel delivery. They operate a lot of diesel equipment, and there's a growing concern over the known health problems caused by burning fossil-diesel fuel. Those health problems don't exist when burning bio-diesel instead.

You may think "oh, they're not selling to regular drivers, so what good is that?" It does a lot of good, because it gets an alternate fuel into more vehicles. If the U.S. is going to wean itself off fossil fuel, those industrial users have to be converted sometime. If it's easier to convert them now, then why not do so?