3/23/07, 5:29 pm EST

Assignment Ten Finalist: Andrew Halberstadt on Flying F Biofuels

Note: This is not an official Rolling Stone article. What follows is a submission to the “I’m From Rolling Stone” writing competition.

Flying F Biofuels

by Andrew Halberstadt
Age: 33

“If you can bake a cake, you can make biodiesel,” says Angie Mason of Flying F Biofuels on the ease-of-use of their featured product, the “Ester.” A haphazard tangle of tubes, pumps, and brass valves grafted to two steel drums, the Ester is Flying F’s do-it-yourself green machine that easily converts renewable vegetable oil to fuel. “It looks homemade, but it gets the job done.”

Amid the pastoral farmhouses of Mayberry-esque Tiffin, Iowa stands Flying F’s headquarters, a tawny colored steel building that could easily be mistaken for a typical midwestern machine shop. A peek inside reveals what Flying F founder and owner Steve Fugate sees as part of “local, creative solutions” to global warming and the attendant energy problem. “We really think the answer won’t come from Washington, and it won’t come from Exxon.”

Fugate has been brewing his own eco-friendly biodisel for three years, using UFO (used fryer oil) from local restaurants as an oil source. He says the U.S. produces about three billion gallons of UFO each year, only a fraction of which now gets converted to fuel.

“I love the smell of french fries in the morning!” says Randy Yeuling of the emissions from his pickup truck. “That’s the smell of money in my pocket.” Yeuling, from nearby Riverside, has been cooking up his own biodiesel for a year at a cost of about 70¢ per gallon and says he’s firmly hitched to “the green bandwagon.”

Despite a parochial heritage, agrarian states like Iowa are leading the charge toward a greener future by connecting to the past: in 1892 Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine with the intention that it run on renewable biofuels, a resurgent concept that is making Flying F a small part of the alt-fuel bioeconomy blossoming across Iowa and the country.