As vacationers head to the beach this summer, some of the Eastern Shore soybean fields they pass will be producing fuel for state transit buses and trucks.
Gov. Robert Ehrlich signed a bill Tuesday that requires at least half the state?s fleet of 2,500 diesel-fueled vehicles to use biodiesel fuel, generally a mixture fuel of fats and oilseeds like soybeans with petroleum-based diesel fuels. The state expects to buy almost 5 million gallons of biodiesel in the coming year, most of it going into the buses of the Mass Transit Administration.
A Berlin, Md., plant run by Maryland Biodiesel will start producing the fuel in about three weeks, according to Virginia Warren, vice president of the family-owned business.
Biodiesel reduces harmful pollutants such as carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide, but at the moment it is also cheaper. B20, a 20 percent blend of biodiesel, which already is being sold by the family?s Cropper Oil Co., is priced at $2.829 per gallon, 5 cents cheaper than regular diesel, Warren said.
A similar bill introduced last year died a swift death in a Senate committee after fiscal analysts determined “its cost would be exorbitant,” said its sponsor, Sen. John Giannetti, D-Prince George?s-Anne Arundel. “No one understood it.”
“This year, we didn?t have anybody opposing it,” Giannetti said. It passed both the House and Senate unanimously.
Among the advantages of biodiesel is that it can be used in any diesel vehicle. “You don?t have to do any retrofit,” Warren said. It can also be used in oil heaters and generating equipment. “It helps clean your furnace or boiler,” she said, and it helps lubricate engines more than standard diesel.
The U.S. Beltsville Agricultural Research Center has been using biodiesel in its 160 diesel vehicles for seven years and its heating plants, said BARC Director Phyllis Johnson. “We just converted overnight. You don?t need to make any special modifications to the equipment.”
Johnson called the decision to use it a “no-brainer.”
“You get an immediate reduction on air pollution” in a region in which “we get Fs for air quality,” she said, and “you get a reduction in dependence on foreign petroleum.”
