FATFREE BIOFUEL Refinery and Roadside Attraction
We have created the design specifications and obtained planning approvals for the building of a prototype Green Transportation Hub that recycles cooking oil waste from the community to fuel the trucks that are critical to local commerce but contribute to major health and environmental damage from diesel particulates.
Community-based, decentralized, and all about alternative energy the first prototype Hub is being built at 280 Bayshore Boulevard, San Francisco, California. It is at the intersection of five major truck routes, three blocks from the Wholesale Produce Market, adjacent to other auto services, zoned for industrial use as a gas station, and highly visible.
The Hub bio-refinery is scaled for a gas station-like footprint with easy access to trucking routes that often are in disadvantaged communities targeted for redevelopment and green jobs. The first bio refinery and blending facility in San Francisco, Hub capacity is 40,000 gallon/ month of B100 or 200,000 gallon/month of B20 blend.
It’s called a Green Transportation Hub because in addition to refining, blending, and selling bio diesel for trucks, the Hub will be a charging station for electric trucks, cars, buses and batteries.
The design and installation of a prototype is intended to position the Green Transportation Hub as a franchise opportunity with Free Biofuel providing planning, installation, and commissioning services. Larger facilities catering to inter and intra state trucking are in the pipeline for five to ten years, while our smaller footprint, decentralized approach shortens time to market to under 12 months.
How did I come to the idea of a Green Transportation Hub and the building of a prototype here in San Francisco?
My education started at Arizona State University where I received a Bachelor of Architecture. At the University I studied under John Yelliott considered the father of passive solar design. He was a inspiration to me and predicted that by 2010 we would be transitioning from a the petroleum energy era to new fuel sources, now called “clean energy.” My postgraduate studies were at the Architectural Association In London where I also worked for John Brown Construction Ltd. specializing in piping isometrics. After London I moved to San Francisco and worked for PMB Bechtel designing offshore drilling rigs again specializing in pipe design before launching my own design firm, Devinedraft, and raising my family.
This experience of designing for compact machinery on off shore platforms led me to look at the issue of clean energy in a different way, as an architectural expression of the community, and as a sustainability advocate in the field of alternative energy. This focused specialization I was not able to turn and realize until three years ago with the founding of Fat Free BioFuel when the last of my six children left for college.
