BrevardBioDiesel Blog

Neil Young and Willie Nelson were only the beginning of biodiesel powered musical tours - add to the list:
David Wilcox
Jack Johnson
String Cheese Incident
Bonnie Raitt
Indigo Girls
Concrete Blonde
Perry Farrell/Lollapalooza

Brevard BioDiesel will be present at Volkstoberfest VII, the annual gathering of VW enthusiasts in Central Florida. Info:

Sunday, October 2, 2005 - Starts at 8am
Held at:
Brevard Community College
3865 N. Wickham Road
Melbourne, FL
Proceeds to Benefit Hospice of Health First

Much more information including a pre-registration form for entrants/vendors
at the German Accents Volkswagen Club web site.

We'll have several stock Volkswagens running biodiesel and be glad to
see and chat with others interested in biodiesel - stop by and say
"Hi" while you ogle all the Volkswagens.

The main feature "The Breaking Point" by Peter Maass investigates the "Peak Oil" concept , specifically Saudi oil reserves. The message Maass gets from the retired head of Aramco exploration is "... the world is heading for an oil shortage. His warning is quite different from the calming speeches that Naimi and other Saudis, along with senior American officials, deliver on an almost daily basis."

A more domestic, in the kitchen sense, article is also included, "Kitchen Voyeur: Sunny Side Up" by Jonathan Reynolds that takes a look at solar powered cookers. (We mentioned solar cookers here 3-4 months ago.) These items can provide a sustainable solution for third world families looking to cook their dinners.

Last week a set of Brevardians (and one adopted Orlandoian) took another delivery of biodiesel - about 400 gallons total. In this case the delivery was of B95 (95% biodiesel, 5% petrodiesel) care of Jim from BioFuels America from Ft. Lauderdale. Users run vehicles such as an '85 Mercedes 300TD Sedan, a VW Golf TDI, and various VW Jettas. Said one of the customers:
"I feel like I am floating on air driving on what is
basically Solar power. At $2.90 a gallon delivered,
biodiesel is competitively priced. It makes my Jetta a
no guilt sports car. Our delivery man, Jim, makes it
easy. He arrives on time and has been very flexible."

I got the itch to program up a custom Google Maps display showing all the U.S. retail biodiesel locations. Using the location list from biodiesel.org and after few days of figuring out how to parse the HTML down into an XML data file, it looks to be a useable map for seeing the locations.

see the Map

Each location is plotted with a marker corresponding to the location. The marker also indicates the highest blend (B100, B99, B50, B20, B2/B5) available at that site. Currently there are 489 locations in the data file. There are a few locations that are only accurate to the zipcode for plotting as their address did not resolve via the Tiger census data. 4 locations didn't even resolve via a zipcode and were hand corrected. Have fun looking

We've placed our homebrew presentation slides from tonight online here. Email us if you have any questions or comments. It was great to see the turn out at both the presentation and the table for the SCPA summer social. Thanks to Larry from Orlando for inspiring us to have a meeting and coming over to check it out.