Philadelphia Weekly

Tom Ferrero has been pumping grease traps for 20 years. As a third-generation septic pumper, it’s Ferrero’s job to go underneath restaurants and clear the congealed mass created by your half-eaten bacon cheeseburger and the dishwater used to clean the plate. Brown and with a jellyfish consistency, trap grease is scraped in chunks off the sides of grease vats under restaurant sinks and drains so that it doesn’t harden and clog city pipes. Ferrero admits it’s not the most fun way to make a living. But recently, he says, he hasn’t minded going down in the vats as much, ever since a Philadelphia company began turning this filth into fuel.

“It is exciting,” Ferrero says. “This slimy, stinky waste that even the treatment centers don’t want to deal with has been treated as just that—a waste. The idea of some resourceful recovery is a great thing.”

The company Ferrero’s talking about is Black Gold Biofuels, creator of a new technology to turn trap grease into a useable biofuel for trucking and home heating. In 2003, founding member and current CEO Emily Bockian-Landsburg was working with the Energy Cooperative to find a more sustainable form of heating oil. They found that restaurant fryer oil was a good place to start—that is, until everyone else thought of it also. Under the name Fry-O-Deisel, the company founders soon discovered there was already a market for fryer oil as a base for animal feed and for use in biodeisel. So they set out to find a material so degraded and disgusting that no other energy company would touch it. And they didn’t even have to leave the kitchen.

“This is a rancid substance. Right now, pumpers are paid to extract the material, driving it over long distances to a wastewater facility where they pay to have it either incinerated or put in a landfill,” says Landsburg. “It’s a nuisance waste and its going to waste.”

After five years of development and experimentation, Black Gold’s technology has proven effective. Their pilot plant in Kensington has fueled more than 20,000 miles of clean driving. So like any wide-eyed dreamer looking to make it big, Black Gold recently went West, hoping to license its technology in cities across the country.

On February 5, San Francisco became the first city in the country (other than Philly, of course) to install a brown-grease-to-biodiesel plant capable of converting this pesky glop into gold. The pilot plant is located inside a San Francisco wastewater treatment facility and will run for the next three years to determine its overall impact on city plumbing, and the efficiency and affordability of the fuel itself.

“It’s not enough to know that the technology is out there,” says San Francisco Public Utilities Commission Biofuels Coordinator Karri Ving. “We have to know that this can be made comparable in price to diesel fuel or no one is going to do the green thing. For us, the more brown grease we collect and turn into a commodity, the less ends up in our sewer system. That’s how we see it.”

Perhaps the most exciting part of this project comes in the form of a grant from the EPA. The government giant is providing more than $175,000 for the creation of an open-source toolkit— basically, a how-to manual—for cities across the country to implement this technology in order to reduce sewage pollution, flooding and poor disposal of trap grease.

“Basically, anything San Francisco had to plan for—from the size of the plant to the impact on city sewage systems to the amount of grease needed—has to be accounted for in every city,” says EPA Air Quality Program Analyst Niloufar Glosson. “What excites us about this technology is that it answers the question of food-based fuel by using waste, and therefore not driving up the cost of food.

For now, Black Gold is looking like the gold standard in renewing the repulsive. Now they just have to keep on selling, which could be a problem. Before San Francisco, Landsburg admits, sales were not good.

“Many of these municipalities have been doing the same thing for decades, and it really takes some internal championing to get anything done,” the 31-year-old says. “It’s tough being the first one.”

San Francisco will serve as a stage for Black Gold to show the world what they can do. With research studies and reports built into the grant framework, both the state of California and the EPA will be making sure everyone knows the complete impact of turning their discarded food scraps into clean-burning fuel.

Landsburg’s reaction: Bring it on.

“San Francisco is going to be that much more valuable to us once these cities see what we can do,” she says. “There are many interested licensees just watching and waiting.”