About three years ago, Tim Kelly was gassing up his vehicle for a trip back home to Ashland, Maine, from Montreal, Quebec. The price tag on the Kelly Lumber vice president's full tank was $175. Frustrated by the exorbitant price of fossil fuel, Kelly tuned into public radio and found himself listening to a story about people who had retrofitted their diesel-burning vehicles to burn used vegetable oil instead. Then it flickered-he thought, why not use vegetable oil to power his company's kiln boilers? "I started thinking about it, started doing some research, and I found it was a viable alternative," Kelly says. Back in Ashland, his family-owned company made a significant investment in retrofitting its boiler engines with new equipment to handle the higher acidity of vegetable oil. The company set up centrifuges to clean the vegetable oil, which it gets from a local french fry manufacturer, and it brought in holding tanks to store the oil until it's burned. Fossil fuel prices have somewhat softened, so Kelly now pays about as much for vegetable oil as he would for diesel fuel (or No. 2 heating oil), but now his company is recycling even more industrial waste, and its input costs are less volatile due to a long-term agreement with the vegetable oil supplier. What's more, the vegetable oil burns cleaner, producing less soot and fewer emissions. All in all, the operation's upgrade was a step in the green direction.
