Crops fuel pumps that could save Colorado farms.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Commentary - Blue Sun Biodiesel opens gas station - Editorial

IT'S ALWAYS FASCINATING TO BE IN ON THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING BIG.

It felt like that one Friday morning last month outside the Shoco Oil plant on 74th Avenue in Commerce City.

Truck traffic roared past on busy U.S. 85/U.S. 6. The sun was bright and a brisk breeze blew the edges of the cut ribbon that Shoco co-owner Scott Hohnstein had just sliced from around the first Denver-area retail pump for Blue Sun Biodiesel fuel. A Boulder pump had been opened just a couple weeks earlier.

But Jeff Probst, CEO of Fort Collins-based Blue Sun, said the Shoco station was by far the biggest retail center in the nation now distributing biodiesel fuel--at $1.76 per gallon. Mike Granstaff, a former elementary-school principal who has just become the COO of the Adams 14 School District in Commerce City, said his school-bus drivers will give biodiesel a test to see whether its cleanliness and performance would be worth converting the district's 20-bus fleet to its use.

"School districts are all about safety for kids," Granstaff said. If biodiesel is more environmentally healthy and performs well enough to warrant the extra cost, his district will seriously consider a conversion, he said.

Littleton Public Schools have been using it for two years, without problems, said Jerry Ryan, fleet manager for LPS.

Probst, who is naturally an evangelist for the fuel, also talks about reviving the drought-devastated eastern Colorado farm economy with a mustard-like plant that could provide an oil-seed resource for the fuel. It can also be made from soybean oil, and even recycled waste vegetable oil. But the mustard plant would be more conducive to Colorado conditions, said Probst, so Blue Sun is already organizing co-ops of farmers willing...