Rudi Wiedemann's customers are the very definition of early adopters folks who will fiddle with a backyard unit to convert used cooking oil into a replacement for diesel fuel.
The challenge for his company, Biodiesel Solutions, is to continue to widen the market with increasingly automated versions of its home-brew biodiesel system.
The company, which just relocated to Sparks from Fremont, Calif.,manufactures simple equipment that allows its customers to combine 40 gallons of used cooking oil the oil used in a French fryer is ideal along with eight gallons of methane to create 42 gallons of diesel fuel.
Six employees working in a 10,000- square-foot plant in Sparks assemble the units a couple of large plastic tanks, a rack, some fittings and ship them to customers around the world.
Launched in mid-2003, Biodiesel Solutions has shipped about 200 units worldwide this year.
The price ranges from $3,000 for a basic unit that produces a 42-gallon batch of diesel in 48 hours to $4,000 for a system that produces the same amount in half the time.
The fuel can be produced for about 70 cents a gallon about a third of the price in most parts of the nation.
Biodiesel Solutions' gear isn't high-tech.
Rather,Wiedemann calls his product "appropriate technology" that can find a home anywhere from the yards of small vehicle fleets to the outskirts of tropical villages.
Wiedemann, a retired Silicon Valley chip entrepreneur, is a fervent missionary for biodiesel.
"I can't find a catch," he says."Biodiesel is biodegradable.
It's not toxic.You can drink it.
It smells like light vegetable oil going in and like French fries in the exhaust."
Customers can replace their use of No.
2 diesel gallon-for-gallon with the output of Biodiesel Solutions' system, or they can mix biodiesel with conventional fuels.
And what happens if demand from buyers of Biodiesel Solutions' Fuelmeister equipment outstrips the supply of used cooking oil estimated at some 3 billion gallons a year in the United States? The units run just as well on feedstocks ranging from crude palm oil to algae.
That opens the possibility that tropical villages far from civilization could create diesel for their own use and have some available for cash sales with a simple technology.
But Wiedemann says his current products require more skill than many American consumers are willing to devote to making their own diesel fuel.
If Biodiesel Solutions is to reach its goal of $10 million in sales in five years, the company needs to develop a more automated system.
Wiedemann has plenty of staying power.
The company is entirely self-funded, has no debt, no outside investors and has been profitable since its inception.
Sales currently run about $1 million a year.
And his desire to stay profitable and growing led Wiedemann to leave California.
"I just got tired of the taxes, the regulations, the B.S., the politics.
It just gets tiresome," he says.
Then, too, he found the manufacturing infrastructure he needed in Sparks.
"Half of my vendors are within a one-mile radius of here," he says.
