Restaurant French fries can clog more than arteries. All that deep-fried goodness comes from cooking oil, which, after its culinary use, is destined for the landfill—or as the EPA’s Patricia Norton pointed out last Friday, the drain, where it can block up sewers.  

Norton spoke at the opening of a new biodiesel plant last week in downtown Gonzales, where that fatty waste is now converted into fuel for the county’s trucks and  buses.  

The $1.3 million, 10,000-square-foot plant, run by Energy Alternative Solutions, Inc. (EAS, Inc.), is the first of its kind on the Central Coast, with a second scheduled to open in Watsonville in February 2007. The Gonzales plant will produce 2.5 million gallons of clean-burning biofuel each year from local, renewable resources, such as recycled cooking oil, virgin vegetable oil, and tallow.

Here’s how the process works. Renderers collect the cooking oil, or “yellow grease,” from restaurants to deposit in tanks at the Gonzales plant. Then EAS, Inc. refines the material into biodiesel by a chemical process called transesterification, whereby glycerin is separated from the oil to produce methyl esters, or biodiesel. (The glycerin is also sold.)

The company will sell the certified, 100 percent biodiesel, or BioEASI B100, to local clients and distributors, such as Coast Oil Company, which plans to blend 20 percent biodiesel with 80 percent petroleum diesel and market the resulting B20 to local retailers.  

Phil Foster Ranches of San Benito County, one of EAS, Inc.’s first clients, already utilizes roughly 15,000 gallons of biodiesel annually in its tractors and trucks. Its Pinnacle Organic Produce brand distributes produce throughout Monterey County.  

Ultimately, then, the waste left over from a tasty bite of fries can help deliver a tastier bite of organic lettuce, an example of the type of “community-based, closed-loop system” that EAS, Inc. strives to create.

RESTAURANTS AND FARMERS may contact EAS Inc. at 359-4499 or visit bioeasi.com.