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Pardon Lyle Estill  for being a bit skeptical when he hears about America’s fervent desire for energy independence, whether the speaker is one of those talking heads on TV or some politico running for office.

The Chatham County maker of biodiesel fuel wonders why, if America is so serious about curing its addiction to foreign oil, he has to sell his Tar Heel-made product overseas rather than in his own backyard.

“I simply got to the point that I could no longer make biodiesel and sell it to the domestic market,” Estill said recently. “I could either hand the (biodiesel plant’s) keys over to the bank or hand them to the international market.”

Estill is one of the founders of Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative,  a national pioneer in manufacturing and distributing diesel fuel made of sources that have varied over the years from soybeans to discarded cooking oils and chicken fat.

In September 2006,  Piedmont Biofuel opened North Carolina’s first large-scale biodiesel plant to brew a million gallons  a year.
But nowadays, even as America imports untold volumes of foreign oil every day, Estill’s plant sends out truckload after truckload of its homemade alternative fuel for shipment to the Netherlands  aboard a super tanker.

Estill sees it as the unavoidable outgrowth of a national policy subsidizing petroleum fuel at every turn, in ways so subtle most people don’t even consider them subsidies.

For example, how much would motorists pay per gallon if the cost of fighting petroleum-related air pollution were folded into the price at the gas pump — instead of what taxpayers cough up on 1040s every April?

“Our society has decided that it’s better for me to ship my product to Europe, where it sells for $12 a gallon, than for me to just run it down the road to be used here,” Estill says.

In North Carolina, the price of pure biodiesel at the pump ranges up to $5.50 a gallon. The more popular blends of petroleum diesel with smaller amounts of the biofuel range from $3.69 to $3.79 a gallon.

The Pittsboro cooperative might be unique in North Carolina’s fledgling alternative-fuels industry for selling its product on foreign shores.

But the financial squeeze that made the overseas market so attractive to Piedmont Biofuels is no stranger to the state’s small community of biodiesel makers, said Anne Tazewell of the N.C. Solar Center,  which promotes the industry’s development.

“The prices they pay for their (raw material) feedstocks are just way outstripping the prices they can get for their fuel,” Tazewell said.

Biodiesel can be used readily in vehicles made to run on petroleum diesel. It mixes well with traditional diesel and is sold more widely as B20, a mix of 20 percent biodiesel.

The Triad does not have any commercial biodiesel outlets, but that could change soon as the local supply becomes more readily available by year’s end.

A large-scale distributor of biodiesel, World Energy  Alternatives, plans to open a huge storage tank for the alternative fuel at Greensboro’s tank farm, in partnership with Petroleum Fuel Terminal.

And a Piedmont Biofuels competitor — Patriot Biodiesel  — is readying a fuel-making plant that should open soon in the same part of town.

Patriot plans to sell its biodiesel only on the domestic market, said company president Gabe Neeriemer.

“I don’t see the logic in it,” Neeriemer said of foreign sales.

A big plus for biodiesel is that it’s a domestic product that fights pollution by burning cleaner at the same time it cuts American dependence on foreign oil, Neeriemer said.

If you take those benefits away, why should the federal government subsidize biodiesel as it does or give grants to some producers, Neeriemer wonders?

Estill points out that Piedmont Biofuels still sells biodiesel to individual members of its cooperative across the Triangle and to a variety of wholesale customers.

But it makes most of its fuel for export nowadays, one 2,000-gallon batch in the morning and one each afternoon. The effort starts with chicken fat, the waste product of several nearby poultry-processing plants.

The liquid fat is exposed to an alcohol mixture inside a heated tank. A reaction takes place that forms biofuel as glycerin, a byproduct, settles out.

The state government could help biodiesel get a firmer grip on the domestic market with incentives, suggests the Solar Center’s Tazewell.

One option would be to give both producers and sellers a break on their state taxes for every gallon sold, she said. Another would be to provide a guaranteed market by requiring all diesel fuel sold in North Carolina to include a small percentage of biodiesel.

Whatever happens, biodiesel’s day is coming, Estill believes. He sees it as essential in healing the economic and other damage the nation has suffered from decades of addiction to foreign oil.

“America can get this,” he said. “If we just face up to it, we can do this. We just need to wake up and smell the coffee.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com