Chemical Engineer Explains Why Liquid Fuels Beat Batteries for Heavy Transport

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:00:00] European passenger vehicles are typically a lot smaller than those in the US because fuel economy. So for fuel economy reasons, they have been using diesels as passenger vehicles for decades. A diesel engine, you know, can get 50 miles per gallon, whereas a, a spark ignition is lucky to get 35 miles per gallon, so, or 40 maybe now. So that's why they use 'em in Europe. I'm Miriam Hoffman, a full-time college student living in Carbondale, Illinois and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:32] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here Today I interview a chemical engineer named Dave Slade. Dave is one of those green hippies that got into the energy world because he genuinely wanted to fight climate change. This is an interesting perspective for me and it's not that I don't think climate change is real, it's just not something I spend very much time thinking about. But Dave is a chemical engineer in the energy world, which is a fascinating field that most people don't think or know anything at all about. And so we sat down and we actually had a really robust conversation about energy comparing how biofuels compare with diesel fuel or solar or wind. This is a wide ranging conversation where we actually get to hear the thoughts of a person that has spent about 15 years working as hard as they can to add energy into the system that will have no impact on the environment or future generations. So this is an interesting guy and we're gonna get to that interview in just a moment. But before we do, I wanted to talk about virtual reality. And I have two things I wanted to bring up with you. First, if you have a virtual reality headset and you don't know what to do with it, then you should know that every day in the last couple of weeks I've been doing a coffee shop where I get into a coffee shop on VR and anybody that has a headset is welcome to join me. And I've had a few people and it's been pretty fun.

Vance Crowe [00:02:04] So if that's something you're interested in, you have a headset and you don't know what to do with it, why don't you send me a DM on Twitter at Vance Crow and we can line it up. I can let you know what the app is that we use and we can get connected. The other thing is that if your business has been thinking about vr, maybe you've been approached because one of the VR conferences that's just kicking off wants some sponsors or they want you to participate, then you may be asking yourself, what is the state of the technology? What, how much of an investment should I make? What does it cost to develop in this space? And so my business partner and I, Ben Anderson, have created a virtual reality workshop where for as many people as you would like, we will give a presentation on the state of play as far as virtual reality, what we think is going on and where it's headed and over what time period. But then after that, you and seven people that you get headsets for yourselves can then go on a field day with us where we'll guide you through various experiences on virtual reality to accelerate the speed with which you can get comfortable with the medium, and then start to begin to understand how this is going to be impacting your industry and business. So if this is something you're interested in, I would love it if you would reach out to me and you can always learn more by going to Articulate Ventures, which is our website. And if you're one of those people that is doing the cold shower every day this month, how's it going?

Vance Crowe [00:03:38] We have really had fun with this one inside of the Articulate Ventures network. People are talking about it. They're talking about the visions that they've seen. They're talking about how much harder it was at first to do and then how it's gotten better and what it's changed for them. So if you're one of those people that is interested and engaged and you're doing this cold shower, consider joining the Articular Ventures network, which will allow you to have a community of people that will talk about these various monthly experiences and help you work on becoming the best communicator that you can by exposing you to people from all different walks of life and view ways of viewing the world. So if you wanna learn more about the network, go to network, Articulate Ventures. And now without further ado, we're gonna head to my interview with Dave Slade. Dave Slade, welcome to the podcast.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:04:29] Thank you Vance. It's great to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:04:32] So you're an interesting character that I just met and yours is the first interview I've done where somebody reached out to me and said, you should interview this guest. Because normally I'm thinking, Hey, I've got questions I want to get answered, but I didn't even consider that there would be somebody out there with your expertise that we could sit down and talk about, which is energy, the thing that is all around us, everybody needs and uses every single day, but it is so ubiquitous that people don't even realize it's there. So what's your background? How do you know so much about energy Dave?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:05:04] Well, I'll give you a little bit of my personal story 'cause it kind of explains how I got where I am. I was a chemical engineering student back in the 1980s and went to graduate school in 1991, partly 'cause I didn't know what to do with myself. I'm from Kansas. I realized all my peers were getting jobs in the petroleum and petrochemical industries 'cause that's where the chemical engineering jobs were. And I just wasn't ideologically able to do that. I'm not even sure what I thought I was gonna do when I started being a chemical engineer in 1986. But I knew I was interested in environmental things and renewable things. So I went to graduate school, didn't find that opportunity in 1993, came back to my hometown in Lawrence, Kansas and kind of bounced around for about a decade. Worked in various jobs, some technical, some not. And I ended up teaching middle school and high school science and math at a private high school in my hometown. And while I was teaching science in particular to these students, you know, I, I started to finally get very intrigued with all those concepts that I hadn't really grabbed onto my first time around. And I realized that all along I'd really been interested in energy, which is, you know, what we're gonna talk about today. And for some reason I was just a little bit slow. It took me about 15 years to realize that chemical engineers were involved in all sorts of renewable energy opportunities from nuclear to solar to biofuels now, which is what I do for a living.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:06:38] And so I decided to go back to school. At that point I knew I loved teaching 'cause I'd been teaching for a couple years and the only degree available to me in chemical engineering was a PhD. So I went back to get my PhD in chemical engineering, tried to find a project or an advisor that that would be renewable. You know, try to find opportunities to start in on that field. And what I ended up doing was getting exposed to hydrogen production, which was a really interesting background and very useful for of course the modern energy infrastructure. People talk a lot about hydrogen as a, as a thing that started under George W. Bush.

Vance Crowe [00:07:16] I don't even know what you're talking about. What, what in the world, the hydrogen construct. Like what

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:07:21] Hydrogen energy. So hydrogen fuel cells. So you know, this is something that got promoted a lot back in the late nineties. And the idea, the idea is still is that hydrogen, when it burns or combusts or reacts to form energy, it makes water. 'cause anytime you burn a fuel, think of it as you're reacting that fuel with oxygen and you're making either carbon dioxide if the fuel is carbon based or you're making water, if the fuel is hydrogen based. And hydrocarbon fuels, liquid fuels have both carbon and hydrogen. So when we burn liquid fuels, we make CO2 and water. So the idea of the hydrogen economy was, hey, we don't want CO2 'cause it's a greenhouse gas. CO2 contributes to global warming or climate change. So let's just do the hydrogen part and we'll make water as our only product. So the only thing coming out your tailpipe, if it's a vehicle would be water. And so hydrogen got a big boost in interest in the late nineties. So mid mid to late nineties in particular, as I say, George W. Bush really was pushing the hydrogen economy, meaning let's replace all these, you know, fossil fuels with hydrogen. So my PhD project was on making hydrogen. There also was a, a guy at our, at University of Kansas where I was, who's a really prominent electrochemistry researcher, which it means batteries basically. So along the way I was able to take a course from him and learn things about batteries which apply now for electric vehicles or electric energy storage.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:08:58] It's all about the batteries, which also are chemical reactions by the way. We may get to that later. So just keep that in mind. When everyone talks about a battery and an electric vehicle, that's, there's still chemical reactions occurring inside that battery and that's what gives them some of their limitations. So I learned a little bit about batteries, I learned quite a bit about making hydrogen. I also learned about biodiesel, which at the time was the only renewable or sustainable diesel fuel option. There's some more now. And so I kind of, I realized that hydrogen had its limitations. I wasn't too excited about that as a, as a widespread solution. It's a very niche thing. Batteries were made a lot of sense, but you still have to have electricity. The electricity has to come from somewhere. At the time it was mostly coal and natural gas. So the electricity in your batteries isn't from a sustainable source. And so as soon as I finished my PhD, I tried to find a job in the renewable diesel space or biodiesel space. And I was lucky enough to get on board with my company. And so I've now been working in, in biodiesel and renewable fuels for 14 years. So now I know a lot about that. So I know I know a little bit about everything, but the only thing I really know a lot about is renewable fuels or biofuels now professionally. But the nice thing about that background in academics is that it teaches you how to analyze things. You know, it teaches how to think about the big picture. I did some lifecycle analysis, which is what people use now to, to estimate the impact on the environment of things. They talk about the lifecycle impact of using a certain option for energy and what does that do to the environment over the course of the lifetime of that product or that fuel.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:10:36] So there's all these little pieces kind of came together to make me sort of perfectly suited for doing what I do now, which is helping my company but also talking to people. And I, I do a lot of public presentations. This is my first podcast, so I'm, you know, really excited to break into the brave new world of, of internet interactions.

Vance Crowe [00:10:54] So you, there's a commentator that I like to watch and he has somewhat of a cynical view on the world and that's not necessarily why I like him, but it's 'cause it's kind of against my natural nature. His name's Peter Thiel and he talks about how most of the fields that people went into imagining that they could be inventive, take aerospace to, you know, any, any field that you can think of that eventually they become so regulated and so gummed up that you don't actually have people doing interesting, innovative on the edge work. Is that true in the energy world right now?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:11:34] That's a, yeah, that's an interesting way to put it. I think it's, it's, it's both the, call it corporatization I guess is maybe what he's pointing at. But there's also just the, the profit motive, right? Businesses only exist if they make money and businesses tend to wanna protect the way they're making money now. You know, it's always easier and cheaper to continue to make money the way you have been than to change to something new. And I think, I think that might be part of what he's touching on, you know, so this idea of allowing the petroleum companies who have provided an invaluable service, right? They've allowed the economy of, of today to be what it is. So there's no doubt that they have served humanity. But to allow them to be in charge of the transition to more sustainable forms of energy is kind of backwards because their natural tendency or their capitalist tendency will always be to continue to make money with their current setup. 'cause that's a lot easier and cheaper than to spend billions or hundreds of billions of dollars transitioning to something else. So I think that his sort of cynicism certainly would apply when you get into that level of corporate behavior, partly 'cause of that protective nature of, of capitalist endeavors. So startup companies, new companies typically have the ability to do new things without that resistance of having to continue to do the old thing. And so I feel like my experience so far as, as part of a company that's really only 15 years old is that in those early days, and we're still pretty much there, we are actually able to be entrepreneurial as long as there is a way to make money.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:13:07] And that's where things like, you know, federal support, state support policies come into play 'cause they allow new ideas to get off the ground. Solar is a great example of something that if it were purely left to the market would never have been installed. But there have been credits for solar for now, for 15, 20 years that have encouraged people to install solar. Now solar now that it got going by the last report I read, solar is now, if you had to build a new power plant from the ground up, solar would be the cheapest kilowatt hour you could build. That would not have happened without government support and it would not have happened if we'd left it in the hands of the utilities who are burning coal and natural gas.

Vance Crowe [00:13:47] Well, okay, I think, I think you could point, you could say it would not have happened this fast, but you, I mean like you, you could be saying that there were several generations of solar energy that was produced that was, you know, wasteful and, and not efficient and would've been a market failure had it not been for the government support. But I wanted to actually go back because you had a term in there that I think is an important one to define, which is the word sustainable. And I don't mean to be pedantic, like I'm not gonna sit here and be like, what are the three Rs of the blah blah, blah, all the garbage that people put into their sustainability reports. What I mean is like brass tacks, what does it mean to you to be sustainable and how do you make sure that your definition isn't just drawn around your company?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:14:36] Yeah, that's a really, that's a really good point. 'cause now that I'm involved in the capitalist endeavor, you know, we have to keep making money. But I, to me, sustainability is something that really, as I kind of implied earlier, got me into this field in the first place. It got me to go back to graduate school to work on my PhD. And to me, sustainability being something that can be done indefinitely. By that I mean as we interact as humans with the environment, whatever we're doing allows us to continue hopefully something similar to our current quality of life, right? Or better as indefinitely into the future. Anything that causes even small incremental damage that may accumulate to prevent us from living the way we live would not be sustainable. Things that either maintain or improve the environment and our interaction with the environment. And by that I mean the physical environment of the world would be sustainable to me.

Vance Crowe [00:15:29] That seems fair. How do you apply that then with the, I I mean, my concept is that human beings have an insatiable energy or demand, right? Like, and really what energy is, is the ability to do work to allow somebody else to move, you know, something that's heavy from one place to another or accelerate really quickly or whatever all these forms are to make it so we as humans don't have to physically lift these things up or move them around or heat them or, or cool them, any of those things, right? But I don't imagine that the future is going to be one in which our demand for that energy will go down. In fact, I think it will go up by orders of magnitude,

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:16:09] Right? Well, yeah. So yes, certainly it goes up. I think that's been proven, but efficiencies also have been going up steadily and people's ability to pay attention to waste. So when I was in, it was in 1993, I, I wrote a just a little paper for a class about, about how much could be saved just by being more careful with not wasting energy. Same applies to water. You know, if we're very careful about not wasting water energy, we could cut our consumption about about 50%. Now that was back then, I think there's a lot less waste now, but there's still a substantial amount of waste. So reducing waste actually can pre present prevent that incremental or exponential growth. Even the other one is just more efficient technologies. And this is where, you know, to be fair to electric vehicles, for example, electric motors are more efficient than combustion engines. So it's not to say that electric vehicles or electric transportation isn't going to happen and be an important part of it, but they actually do can, under the right circumstances get more work, as you say, out of the same amount of input energy. So between those efficiency gains better, better control of waste. And you know, even though the population's still growing, hopefully it's starting to flatten out a little bit. You know, we're not, we're not on, we're still probably heading towards 10 billion people or more, but the, the rate of growth is starting to slow down. So I actually feel like we can probably do as much as we do over time without a whole lot more energy input.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:17:41] That'd be my personal opinion if we're, if we're careful and if developing nations are also careful. And so, so that's one hopeful thing, I guess, right, is that we, if we set the target not as 10 times what we need now, but maybe two times what we need now, how can we, and then that can decline over time. You know, how can we achieve that in a sustainable way? And, and that involves of course minimizing things that are doing small but cumulative damage.

Vance Crowe [00:18:12] As I hear your like enthusiasm or your passion for sustainability or your concern about carbon going into the air. I know this is like something that you're not supposed to say out loud because there is such a push around climate change and the danger it presents, but it is not on my radar as something that I spend any time at all thinking about. And I think in large part that's because if you have a stoic mentality of I am going to try and control the things that I can control, it appears to me that I have about as much control over climate change as I do over the presidential elections. Which is like, I can have an opinion, I can, I can feel informed enough to have an opinion, but not my opinion actually amounts to virtually zero.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:19:00] And I guess I would say, but did you vote? Because voting is that act of hope, if you wanna call it that. Or optimism, you know, if everyone votes then it makes a difference. If everyone is pays attention to this, it makes a difference. But the place where it really happens, this change you're talking about where you're right, you or I individually can't do a whole lot, right? But what we can do is support policies. 'cause at this point, governments or in the case of large corporations, pressure from their customers right to do things can make a huge difference. You know, companies have the ability to be more energy efficient, to use more renewable energy sources. It just as expensive has been at least. And so therefore they need that pressure to do it. They're, they need to make money. The government can create policies that do cause our carbon intensity or our carbon output to go down at, at a scale that does matter, right? The US economy is, is whatever a third of the world. So we, we can make a difference that way. So you're correct, your individual actions are probably going that up to a tiny bit. But I would still be optimistic and say if everyone did those things, it would make a big difference. But also from a policy standpoint or a consumer standpoint, you know, encouraging the people who make a big difference to do things that help has a huge impact

Vance Crowe [00:20:20] On this podcast. We talk a lot about the kind of animating spirit, the thing that causes you to, to be excited or go towards something, your Damon, that inner voice that says, Hey, you should go work on this. Why does your Damon say sustainability is important?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:20:39] So going back to when you first asked me, you know, what I, how I define sustainability, I, I just get a little, I'm an engineer, so I get a little bit of obsessive about finding the details that that could cause a problem in the future. And it seemed to me all along that our use of fossil energy, and by that I mean pulling carbon based fuel sources out of the ground where they were sequestered, burning them and releasing them in the atmosphere was something that was going to be a big deal. And I, I personally believe the data I've seen from all the climate scientists and everybody showing the accumulation and how it trends almost perfectly with global mean temperature, surface temperature rise, the impacts on the ocean, these tipping points where you start to lose your, your fish supplies, your coral eyes, the pH, the acidity of the ocean changes. There's all these things that are, are really terrifying when you think about 'em. And so as an engineer, I felt like, well those are big potential negative consequences, we better get in there and do what we can now. And that's kind of what got me into renewable energy in the first place and got me back into chemical engineering after my, my hiatus. But I, I feel like that is the thing where if, if you feel like you have some, you know, you're doing a podcast because you can reach people, you can generate these conversations that might impact how people think I'm doing renewable energy and biofuels because I feel like that's a place I can make a difference. My background allows me to contribute. So I'd say that's the, the inner motivator is having the opportunity to make a difference and trying my best to take advantage of it.

Vance Crowe [00:22:10] It, it's interesting, my motivating factor for doing the podcast is not as much for me to share what I know with other people, but that I can then get people like you to come on and answer any question that I have. Right? And if you think about the, I don't know, 200 or so interviews I've done, I've gotten to have 200 hours of other people's time to be like, well you know, what motivates you on the deepest level? But I see that the end result ends up being that the knock on effect of the work that you do, it does impact people, right? People say, Hey, I listened to that thing and I changed my point of view. When you think about the state of the point of view of the people you're trying to, that that are essentially gonna provide you your raw materials, which are farmers is my understanding, what do you think the state of their acceptance of global warming as, as, as dire as you think that it is?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:23:07] That's a yeah, that's a very interesting question for me because I'm on the production technology side. I think the people, so when we make, just to, just to get into the technology that I, I work for. So we make biodiesel that's made from any oil or fat and you convert it to a diesel, a different molecule that's used in a diesel engine. So we need oils and fats, which as you say, as farmers, we also can use waste oils and fats. So cooking oil from restaurants and things like that. So we, we have a, a wide pool of things, but they basically have to be lipids or oils and fats. So farmers really in the US don't grow anything for the oil or fat canola being a bit of an exception. But soybean oil for example, is the most common veg oil, oil in the US. Farmers grow soybeans for the protein for the meal to feed to animals. So we're getting their byproduct. People grow pigs, chickens, and cows for the meat, not for the fat. So we're getting their byproduct, right? The used cooking oil coming from the restaurants. So we're always using the byproducts. So I think farmers appreciate the added value by creating this market for biodiesel and making biodiesel. Just to use another example, use 10 years ago or 15 years ago, used cooking oil restaurants, had to pay someone to come pick it up because it, it was a waste. It had no value to them. It was could, you couldn't put it down the drain. And so they had to pay someone to come pick it up. Now because of biodiesel, they have to lock it up because people will steal it from behind the restaurant.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:24:41] There are all sorts of stories of people driving up with a truck and, and pumping out someone's waste oil tank 'cause it's now worth real money because there's, we can make a product out of it. So that's an example to say where we have this value that we put into the economy that does make it back to the farmer. But I don't know that they see us as directly as they see like corn prices, right? Because corn prices are their direct product. They see that we're sort of behind the scenes. So I, I say that as a long way of kind of leading up to the idea that I think farmers generally are very supportive of the biodiesel industry of where I work. But, but they don't quite tie it toge They're not as supportive of biodiesel as a product as they, it could be because they use a lot of diesel, you know, in their, in their farm equipment for example. So I've always thought that they're, they're supportive but they're not passionate advocates for our product, which is I think has to do with this, remove these levels of distance. Which kinda gets back to your point about what, you know, what's somebody's selfish interest. Well if they can do something that'll add a dollar a bushel, they'll do that. If we're only adding that dollar a bushel through a very convoluted, convoluted economic system where it's a byproduct of a byproduct and it finally makes its way back to them, it's, we're not quite as visible. Which is one reason I like to do a lot of, you know, speaking opportunities. 'cause people aren't really even aware that, that our product exists a lot of the time. 'cause the other thing in the US we don't drive diesel engines very often as passenger vehicles.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:26:15] I mean there are lots of pickup trucks out there. Europe, 40 to 50% of the passenger vehicles are diesel in the us. It's a tiny single digit

Vance Crowe [00:26:24] Fraction that's shocking to an American. And I think from my perspective, I always think man, diesel's so dirty, like when I was around farm trucks and all of that stuff, like it smells and it burns. Why is Europe so heavily leaning towards diesel?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:26:38] So they have been all along for years, I mean since World War ii it, diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines. And that's just kind of one of these thermodynamic fundamental facts about the way the engines work. The most efficient engine you could make on a combustion side would be a what's called a compression ignition engine. And that's what diesel engines are. There's no spark plug. It compresses the fuel until it ignites. So thermodynamically, that's the most efficient way to do it. And not just thermodynamically, it has to do with how the flame flame propagates through the cylinder as it burns. So just know that, and therefore, because just like European passenger vehicles are typically a lot smaller than those in the US because fuel economy. So for fuel economy reasons, they have been using diesels as passenger vehicles for decades. A diesel engine, you know, can get 50 miles per gallon. Whereas a, a spark ignition is lucky to get 35 miles per gallon, so, or 40 maybe now. So that's why they use 'em in Europe. The US has always had relatively cheap fuel prices other than a few spikes here and there. So the fuel economy push hasn't been nearly as prominent. And so therefore we used gasoline because of that perception. It's cleaner, burns cleaner, it's easier to use. You don't have wintertime issues for diesel fuel can gel up, whereas gasoline flows year round. So for a variety of reasons, the US dominantly gasoline Europe about 50 50. And because of that, most people like you or me, before I worked in this industry, I, I didn't know anything about diesel fuel.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:28:16] All I knew was like you saw the black soot coming outta the buses as I was riding my bike behind them when I was going up to my, my office and when I was in graduate school. So back to your point then, I guess diesel definitely has a reputation of being dirty. And historically there was a lot of visible soot, you know, visible pollution coming out of diesel engines. DPA created rules for diesel engines that started 15 years ago and have been ramping up where diesel engines now the, we call 'em tier four or new technology diesel engines are, have so many emissions controls on them that the exhaust coming out of them is cleaner in many cases than the air coming in the front. So the air that goes in to burn often has more stuff in it than what's coming out the tailpipe. So new diesel engines are actually extremely clean. They're, they're as clean as gasoline engines, if not cleaner in some ways 'cause they have more stuff cleaning up the exhaust. But

Vance Crowe [00:29:16] I ride around with know all the time that hate the, the, the cattle, like the, is it a catalytic conversion? Is that what it is? Is that

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:29:23] There's, right, yeah, so catalytic, there's what we think of as a catalytic converter and a gas car is basically just burning up the excess hydrocarbon so you don't smell, you know, the gasoline smell and that doesn't get emitted in the atmosphere. There are a coup, there are two, if not three different catalytic converters on a diesel engine. One that reduces NOx nitrogen oxides, one that reduces the hydrocarbons, and then one that does kind of a cleanup of the stuff that comes out of the NOx conversion. So, and then they have a, what's called a diesel particulate filter, which is a big monolithic honeycomb thing that all the exhaust has to flow through and all the particles get trapped in the d diesel particulate filter. So, so those newer in, if you are still s smelling or seeing anything coming out of an exhaust of a diesel, it's probably an older technology diesel engine. So,

Vance Crowe [00:30:13] So when your company produces a biodiesel, then who do they sell it to? Can some, can anybody just pull up and start putting that in their tank? Well

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:30:23] That would be nice because I have a diesel Jetta that I bought when I first started working here that I, I don't have a good place to fill it up. It depends on the state you're in, but for the most part we are, we would be considered a big company in the biodiesel space, you know, so renewable energy group is, is the big one in the us We historically sold it to oil comp petroleum companies who had a, had an obligation to acquire a certain amount of renewable energy credits or called RINs renewable identification numbers, which they can get from ethanol, they can get from biodiesel, they can get from other renewable fuels. So sold a lot to them. We would sell to truck stops, the big major truck stop companies that you see along the highway. They would blend it, they would get those credits and they could sell those credits. Then we wait

Vance Crowe [00:31:12] Who are they selling the credits to? Is this a, is this, yeah, let's talk about this.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:31:17] Right. So this is a federal program, once again it was started by George W. Bush. It's a, so it actually came out of Republican administration. It's the renewable fuel standard, the EPAs Renewable Fuel Standard Program. And they created requirements for refiners and importers of petroleum. So if you either refine the petroleum in the US or you import petroleum into the us, you get an obligation that you have to meet a certain, it's called your renewable volume obligation. You have to acquire so many of these credits, these RINs to satisfy that based on the size of your production or your importing. So basically proportional how much petroleum you're bringing into the marketplace. And these volume obligations have ramped up fairly slowly, but they've ramped up over time. And that's the renewable fuel standard RFS. So rents are these credits that get attached to the renewable fuel, whether it's ethanol or biodiesel or something called renewable diesel, which we also make now. But those credits have to end up in the hands or the pockets of the petroleum companies. So they can either buy the fuel from us directly and get the credit with the fuel, or if we sell it to someone else who blends the fuel with petroleum to, to go out into the world like a truck stop, they then have those credits which they can sell back to the petroleum companies. And so there's a trading market for these RINs for these credits.

Vance Crowe [00:32:42] What is the power differential between a like a gallon of of diesel and a gallon of your biodiesel?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:32:50] Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question. So the absolute, if you just took a gallon of each and burned them, right, you would get about 6% less energy out of the biodiesel roughly. So when you blend, most biodiesel is used at blends of B 20, so 20% or less. So at B 20 or less it's, it's about 1% less, which is probably gonna be tough to detect. Although biodiesel does have two mitigating factors. One is that it, it actually burns much more cleanly. So if you had an, those old engines we were talking about that put the black smoke out, still, if those engines would use bio straight biodiesel, the black smoke goes away. So that's it. A lot less particulate matter, a lot less hydrocarbon smell. So, so you get more efficient combustion because biodiesel has oxygen in the molecule, it's an oxygenated fuel, so burns better. And the other one is biodiesel is very lubricating and it, I didn't know this till I worked in the industry, but diesel engines, the cylinders are partly lubricated by the fuel. So the fuel itself has to be lubricating and, and petroleum diesel has a lubricity additive added to it so that the, you don't get more friction in the cylinder cause, cause energy loss, right? To generate heat. So the combination of being more lubricating and better burning in, in practice, many studies have shown that at that 20% level there's no detectable fuel economy difference. And sometimes biodiesel blends even do better. Depends on the drive cycle, you know, how you're driving start stop for example does better with biodiesel and petroleum diesel long haul, long haul trucking or railroads kind of burn at a real steady rate.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:34:29] So you start to approach that theoretical number better. But so the short answer is a little less per gallon. The long answer is when blended and in practice it comes out to no detectable difference and most people use 20% or less bio. So,

Vance Crowe [00:34:46] You know, I'm kind of chuckling to myself because if you've been kind of an environmentalist, you know, chemical engineering hippie for 13 years, then you are actually enduring the first ag, you know, thing that people really hated about ag before it was GMOs. A lot of people don't realize that it was a lot about were making all this corn to sell it to gas companies, that it, it actually doesn't produce as much as it costs to make it. Right. That was the complaint that people made all the time.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:35:17] Right.

Vance Crowe [00:35:18] How true was that? And is that still true? Is it, is it require more energy to create biodiesel than you get out of it?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:35:26] Yeah, so there's, I'll make a quick distinction. There's ethanol, which is corn starch, right? You grow the corn, the starch gets converted to sugar, you make ethanol. That's the one that I think has been under the most scrutiny or criticism about maybe not being a net gain. So as I mentioned for bio, so we make, we use the waste oils, we do use corn oil, there's some corn oil you can recover from the back end of an ethanol process. It's pretty, pretty gross. You don't want to eat it as a human, but it could be fed to certain animals, but for the most part you don't want to eat it. So we do use that. But the starch is the one that kinda gets the big scrutiny. So my personal belief is, you know, ethanol is definitely lower carbon intensity across the value chain than petroleum gasoline and biodiesel, because we're making ours from these byproducts or waste products is easily more sustainable or lower carbon intensity than petroleum diesel. The big, this is where we get into the policy and the, so I yes, I'll, I'll take the hippie label. That's fine. That's fair enough. There are pictures floating around of me back in the day with long hair. So

Vance Crowe [00:36:36] I figured, yeah,

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:36:37] I figured. But the, the, the part that kind of, which I feel is unfair as a mid-westerner I suppose, but also just as a science person is, is that a lot of the carbon intensity that is assigned to corn or soybeans is, is not based on the direct production. 'cause the direct production, you know, you know your inputs, you're burning fuel, you're putting on fertilizer, you're, you got labor, you're hauling the products around. Those are all easily quantifiable and based on those ethanol and biodiesel are way lower carbon than petroleum. But what a lot of environmentalists and environmental science folks have done is they've said, well wait a minute, if you're growing more crops somewhere in the world, somebody's chopping down the rainforest and they've assigned something that's called indirect land use change. So not direct land use change, which would be measuring how much rainforest is being cut down. But indirect land use change or I luck is this penalty I guess that gets assigned to biofuel or bio cropp production based on the assumption that any incremental bushels came from somebody deforesting the rainforest eventually. Right? Eventually. 'cause you added more value to that. So

Vance Crowe [00:37:53] There's no way out of it. Like you, no matter what, if you're gonna, if you're gonna count this fuel, you're gonna get like, well then we had to burn down some rainforest for it.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:38:02] That's kind of how they're, so, so that, that's where you get into this interesting situation where it depends on the jurisdiction, right? So Europe is very concerned about rainforest deforestation. So they've assigned these very steep eye luck, indirect land use change or imaginary land use change as I like to call it. But this, these steep eye luck penalties.

Vance Crowe [00:38:23] I love the hippies getting mad.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:38:26] Oh yeah, I'll get there, you'll get me there. But the, so they've, they've got very steep penalties so therefore crop based fuels over in Europe are not seen as sustainable. Whereas in the US it's a little more modest. California's kinda somewhere else. 'cause anybody who writes their own rules gets to assign the IUC value. Canada interestingly has been in the provinces, has been pretty minimal on their IUC penalties and partly because they're growing canola up there. Mostly there's nobody growing canola in the rainforest, right? Canola's a cool weather crop. So they're, they've allowed it, but they've also taken a much more fair approach in my opinion to soy, right soybeans because soybeans sure you can grow 'em in the rainforest. But the, the National biodiesel board, which is our trade organizations and plenty of academics have shown that we've gotten all these extra bushels on the same amount of land just by better genetics crop, you know, seed genetics and better farming techniques. So there's a lot of proof that this land use change stuff is actually, is imaginary. But once an idea gets root, you know, it's really hard to uproot it and especially, you know, at the policymaker level. So a lot of what you will hear are people saying, oh yeah, ethanol's worse than, than gasoline or biodiesel is not as good as they say it is. But that is actually almost entirely because of this eye luck assignment. Whoever does the modeling picks their number and, and the majority of the carbon intensity that's assigned to us is biofuels being us is from this land use change.

Vance Crowe [00:40:01] Well man, I would love to see what the, I luck charges are when you put up a wind farm and you are literally displacing, you know, hundreds of acres of, of actual crop land, right? Because well

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:40:14] They don't get they don't get those Yeah, that,

Vance Crowe [00:40:16] Yeah that's weird because you're literally getting rid of the farmland that's, it's not like, hey, this year we decided to grow beans and those beans are gonna go over there, you've made a permanent or, or at least 30

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:40:27] Year

Vance Crowe [00:40:27] Commitment on that land. Yeah,

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:40:29] That's right. I, you know, I never thought of that, but that's a good point. So they'll have to assign some kind of land change penalty to wind and, and big solar installation someday. But I mean that actually

Vance Crowe [00:40:40] Kind of reveals my like hidden, like, I don't know enough about energy to have a strong, you know, I have strong opinions loosely held, but my sense is we're looking at a lot of technologies like wind and solar that are nowhere near as bountiful as nuclear. And that the, the thing that we're offsetting because we're afraid of nuclear power is that we're literally taking the most valuable asset that we have in the United States, which is farmland and we're putting giant metal robots on on it that are only getting, you know, a fraction of the energy that you could get out of nuclear. How does that sit with the, the chemical engineer in you?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:41:23] Yeah, I, I so you know, as part of engineering you always get into safety, right? Part of our and, and nuclear is, is scary in that regard, right? There are a lot of, of issues around the waste that's generated the fuel that goes in the potential for a, an accident. So I personally think nuclear is a valuable part of the energy spectrum. You know, we, we, it's a good, it's low carbon, there's no doubt about it, but it is limited in the sense that locations for plants and how you deal with the waste in particular waste is, is kinda limited. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't wanna wholesale switch to a whole lot more nuclear, but I do think that the nuclear we have already built, we've already paid for, you know, already has all this stuff out in place should be continued. So I'm, I'm a fan of keeping the nuclear we have, I don't, I, I'd have to think more about it to give you an opinion on adding a lot more, but I also think that wind and solar wind is a little dicey, right? I mean we're in Iowa and we get a lot, I think it's, we're up to like 40% of our electricity in Iowa is now from wind. 'cause we're a good state for wind, a lot of wind, a lot of exposed places for turbines. So I think wind can really work well in the right places. So I'm a fan of wind in that regard. But once again, you don't wanna just start sticking turbines everywhere. 'cause your point about displacing farmland is good. Also, they need to be efficient to justify the, their location. Solar's another one though. Solar's one of these that's kind of become more and more efficient over the years. I mean the amount of energy, electricity you can get from a panel a square foot is, has gone up by 10 times.

Vance Crowe [00:43:00] Oh it shocked me. I was getting some survival stuff with like little panels that you just set outside.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:43:05] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:43:06] And I was stunned on a, on a direct but winter day where you don't have that much sunlight, you can power, you could at least charge a laptop with the one of those things that you set outside. So that is pulling down some serious wattage.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:43:21] So I think, I think solar's one of those examples, as I mentioned, I think just this year they crossed over, if you had to build a new power facility from the ground up, solar would be the cheapest per kilowatt. Now that depends on where you are, you know, versus the equator and everything. You couldn't do that in Alaska, but in the US especi especially the lower two thirds. So, so I, so I, I guess what I'm getting at is I, I actually do believe solar and wind should be exploited as much as reasonable. Your point is good. You don't wanna take productive, too much productive crop land out of business. But if the farmer gets paid a reasonable fee for the land and still farming efficiencies, get us more crops per acre, I, I think we can kind of manage that one. Solar's a great option. The problem with nuclear, nuclear is good because it runs all the time. And by that I mean your nuclear reactor can run 24 7. The problem with solar and wind is not that they're not great sources, it's just that they are good for what I'd call the base load. And solar of course doesn't shine overnight. So you need something else to make up. What, what we would, I would call peak demand, meaning those transient demands, you know, everyone comes home from work, turns on their air conditioner all at once, all of a sudden the demand goes way up. You know, you can't turn up the sun. You can't turn up the wind. So what we really need is as much base load from our renewable sources and then figuring out what's the smartest way to add that incremental load. Either when the renewable sources are lower output than expected or we just have a peak demand.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:44:54] So nuclears turns up pretty well historically, the best way to turn up the, the current is coal or, or natural gas. 'cause you just crank up that power generating station. So most of the peak power generating stations that are being built in the last five years have been natural gas. It's cleaner burning than coal. We have a lot of it. It's cheap. So getting that peak demand is the big question for me. And you know, biofuels can be burned to make electricity too. So there, there is a, someday a potential opportunity for renewable fuel to be used to run turbines and, and make electricity. Right now it's just more expensive than natural gas. Natural gas is so cheap in the US that it's hard to, hard to get anybody to consider anything else.

Vance Crowe [00:45:40] In the beginning of the, you know, the podcast we were talking about how demand will increase. And when I think about demand, I think of a place like Kenya where at least when I was living there about 15 years ago, most houses did not have electricity. If you were outside of the city, you didn't have electricity running to your house and you're still using charcoal stoves inside of your home to cook your food or to heat your water, to heat your bath water, right? They don't, they don't have any of these as possibilities like that they can just turn on an appliance. So as you think about bringing up and matching the demand that is all over the earth, how do you think that plays out over the next 10 to 15 years?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:46:28] Yeah, that's another great question. You know, I think one of the nice things about a lot of the third world is they do have typically a lot of sunlight. You know, they're not living in Antarctica or northern Canada, it's it's equatorial type stuff. So I think we mentioned solar as a great way to bring electricity, at least that device scale, you know, phone, laptop lights to, to those areas. But the other one is, is how do you handle applications where electricity isn't necessarily the best answer? And so I feel like, you know, this is my bias, but this is why I work for the company I do is, you know, biofuels actually offer that, that fill in the gap option for liquid fuels. Because one of the things I was thinking about the other day when I was, I was talking to people at my company is, you know, when you look back at developments over the centuries, you could make an argument that liquid fuels change the world as much as anything. You know, it's easy to say, oh, electricity changed the world or this. But liquid fuels contain an amazing amount of energy in a

Vance Crowe [00:47:31] Very

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:47:32] Small, portable, transportable package.

Vance Crowe [00:47:36] And the only, it only takes you realizing that people used to build ships and go out into the coldest North Atlantic water, get on little tiny boats and harpoon the largest mammal, you know, on, on earth, drag them on board in order to rip them open and have that sweet, sweet whale oil to turn into, to lamp to

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:47:58] Run their lamp. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [00:47:59] Exactly. And so you think about that then, then you start realizing like, oh wait, once we got gasoline, that's a total game changer.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:48:07] And I feel like that's what as a society, we, we overlook the most common people have no sense of how energy dense and amazing and revolutionary liquid fuels are because they allow that truck to drive across the country or the railroad to drive across the country without 'em to stop every 50 miles and put more wood or coal or water on, you know, air. You couldn't have air travel. There would be no aircraft without liquid fuels ever. There

Vance Crowe [00:48:34] Would never be, yeah, it'd be hard to keep them up in a chart with

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:48:37] Chars. I mean, you'd have dibles, right? You'd have, you'd have the Zeppelin or whatever, but, but it, so, so when you think about that, that that's just sort of that sense of wonder, wow, what did liquid fuels do? But it also means they do things that are almost impossible to replace. So electricity can replace a passenger vehicle pretty easily because think about the way we drive. I need to drive back and forth to work the store and then I can put it in my garage and charge it overnight. I don't have to run it 24 7 and I don't really use that much. It's not energy dense. I'm not, I'm not having to haul, you know, 40,000 pounds of something, 400 miles. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:49:15] My, the roads have like no further of a grade than, you know, 30% or whatever on the, on the steepest hill you can get to.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:49:23] Right. So I think liquid, I think finding, you know, renewable electricity, which solar is a great example for the third world, but also having more sustainable or, you know, cleaner for the environment, liquid fuels is part of the key. And then thinking about what is a good choice to replace with electricity and what is a bad choice to replace with electricity. A good example is, you know, a heavy duty engine needs all that power. If you had a battery electric, you would, you know, you spend roughly two to three times as much time charging it as running it. So you'd, you'd have to have multiple vehicles or you'd have to have multiple battery sets. And these batteries are big and heavy, much heavier. You know, it's about 15 times heavier per unit energy than liquid fuels. So it, it's just, it, it doesn't make sense to do electricity, everything. And I think a lot of our policy makers get hung up on, I need a one size fits all solution and they think it's electricity. So I think electricity will cover a lot of those things, should cover a lot of things that are good for electricity. That makes sense. But heavy duty work, long haul, trucking, rail ships, aircraft, you know, that's going to have to be, if we're gonna go to a lower or eventually zero petroleum world, that's gonna have to be liquid renewable fuels. And those work well in the third world as well because you can transport them easily, you can store them safely by, you know, bio. So one of the things I love about it, it's, it's essentially like vegetable oil from a safety standpoint there. It's not flammable, it doesn't have any odor to speak of. You can store it in your wherever and it's not a hazard.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:50:56] If you have to clean it up, you can clean it up yourself. You don't have to call in, you know, the hazmat soup folks. So I think it's a great option for the third world and that electricity hopefully can be more and more distributed. You can have these solar stations that don't need to be connected to a nationwide grid anymore. And you know, that's one of the beauties of distributed electricity generation.

Vance Crowe [00:51:20] So as you're spending time thinking about the future of energy, not just with the biofuels that you're in, but, but all energy futures, what do you think is the unexpected thing that seems obvious to you, but people that aren't in this space have no idea is going to, to come about with regards to energy, how they use it, how it's available,

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:51:44] Man. Well, so I I, I don't want to repeat what I said, but you know, the one thing that people I don't think appreciate is how much energy is and liquid fuels from when they start to talk about removing them. But I think the other thing maybe that, you know, call it hybrid approach, like there's hybrid electric vehicles now that can kind of maintain the advantages of some liquid fuels, right? But also have the battery that can get that extra energy when you're braking or, or whatever. I think there are a lot more applications like that that will come about, right? Where we, where we have a base of renewable electricity and then finding unique engineering ways to utilize those unexpected peak demands in power generation of liquid fuels or even in like heating your home. There's been a big push in the northeast, I know we're both Midwesterners, but the Northeast uses 4 billion gallons a year of diesel fuel, heating oil to warm heat people's homes. They just don't have the natural gas distribution infrastructure we have. So the, there's been a big push in policy makers and of course funded by the electric utilities to replace all those heating oil systems with electric heat pumps. Electric heat pump is like a air conditioner that's running in reverse. So it's, it's dump, it's bringing in heat from the outside to the house. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:53:02] Geothermal system. I have one

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:53:04] Well, geothermal makes, yeah, geothermal, you're bringing in heat from the ground. That makes perfect sense. So good for you. These electric heat pumps are air driven heat pumps. So they bring in whatever amount of heat they can gather from the air. I won't get into the, the how it works from an engineering standpoint, but those work really well in like North Carolina where a cold day is 40 degrees. If you're in Maine and a cold day is 15 degrees, they don't work at all. So you actually have to have supplemental heat. Electric resistance. Heating is a terrible idea like your stove, you know your range. So oftentimes you have to have fuel anyway, but you can have a thermal heat pump now this is in the future. We're talking, you know, these are 10 years out, but a thermal heat pump where you have a very small burner that burns some fuel and I'd say it should be a renewable fuel burn. Some fuel could be natural gas it, and it does that, it, it causes the air conditioner, that's the supply of heat to make the, the air conditioner run in reverse. And because that air conditioner is run by compression and evaporation of the refrigerant, it's actually a whole lot more efficient than trying to just burn the fuel for heat. So you get that engineering advantage of using the refrigerant compression and evaporation, which multiplies your, your energy output massively. And you just provide a very small amount of heat by, by burning a liquid fuel or a natural gas fuel. So there's those kind of, I'll call that another hybrid, right? That's another hybrid option where if people are flexible and they try to just take the advantages of a given system without shoehorning it in to a situation where all the disadvantages are really important.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:54:43] You know, like the idea of, of long haul trucks being battery electric where a 30 year cargo space is batteries. You know, I, how does that, I just don't understand why anyone thinks that's a good idea. But

Vance Crowe [00:54:54] As people, as I think when people think about the future with energy, most of it is like a Disney kind of thought about it in, in terms of they've not really thought about the details, but they imagine within the next 20 years or 30 years or probably they would think five or 10, that there'll be some giant leap forward, some innovation. So you've made a lot of predictions today about like liquid fuel and how all this will work. When do you think, how long are your predictions good for? Would you say these predictions are good for a hundred years? Are they good for 50 20?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:55:31] No, definitely not. I'm not that good and I could be wrong with all this anyway, so, you know, maybe they're not good at all. But I feel really comfortable for the 10 year window saying it's, it's nice to think these things are gonna happen, but really everything takes time. You know, as an engineer that's one thing you realize right outta the gate when you leave school is, wow, it takes a long time to get any of this stuff to happen. You know, it takes five to 10 years for, you know, our, our company's been around for 15 years and we're finally getting some real traction. Ethanol spent, you know, 30 years before anybody really started paying attention to it. So, so I think for 10 years, you know, we're, we're definitely in a situation where we need to not rely on the magic. I like your Disney example, you know, the magic of all of a sudden electricity will be available everywhere for us and it will all be sustainable and renewable, you know, 'cause it's gonna take, it's gonna take decades to get the electric grid to where it's majority, you know, overwhelming, majority renewable. You know, 'cause hydroelectric is used where it can, but that's only where it can. Nuclear power plants are built. You mentioned nuclear building more nuclear makes me a little nervous, but I also know it'll take 20 years to build a new nuclear plant because of all the permitting and safety things. So even if we decided now to build more nuclear, we wouldn't have it for 15 to 20 years. So for the next 10 years, I think we're gonna be in this interesting situation where people think everything's going electric. Hopefully they get educated to realize that hey, that electricity isn't always as green as you think it is because you're in a state that still uses a lot of coal fired power plants.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:57:07] You know, or you're using natural gas fired power plants, which are still fossil fuels. So I think it's, we're looking at about 40 years probably to get the grid really kind of converted with more solar wind, maybe some more nuclear, maybe some more hydro, a lot more efficiency, a lot more insulation in your house. You know, whatever pick, pick your way of making things more efficient. And along the way then we're gonna need liquid, liquid fuels in particular diesel fuel because of those high energy demand applications or jet fuel, you know, it's another one where you can't replace it with electricity. So I think by that point, I can't say what'll happen 'cause there's very likely to be some breakthrough in battery technology or you know, something that I just can't imagine, you know, people getting plants that directly photosynthesize electricity or something. You know, I, I don't know. There'll be the algae pond that's pumping out electric current, you know, it,

Vance Crowe [00:58:02] I dunno if that'll happen. The algae pond. That's a great one. That's, that's one that I think there was a lot of hype. I remember five years ago people being like, and I was definitely on that camp, like imagine you could put little clear tubes of algae in Africa and extract all that solar energy and turn it into some kind of biodiesel. But it does seem like that is a lot further off than, than where it was when I first heard of synthetic biology. Yeah.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:58:28] Yeah. My joke, my joke for a while has been, you know, algae's been five years out the whole time I've been in the 15 years I've been in the industry. So it's all, but, but I will say one thing, your point about the pond in Africa, you know, that's where these breakthroughs in solar technology, I think really they have made that the most efficient way to use the sun. But there are still lots of opportunities to grow algae for the biomass or the oil to make BioSil out of or whatever. We, we have, my company's used a little bit of algae oil. The, the thing that we ran into is that because these algae can be kind of cultivated, you can make high value fats and oils like Omega-3 fatty acids, you know, that are really popular for dietary supplements. You can, you can breed your algae to make omega threes and they get paid a whole lot more for that oil than we can pay. You know, we're, we're, we're buying stuff that's 30 cents a pound and the, the soybean oil is 45 cents a pound and then there's, and then there's the omega threes that are $2 a pound. So,

Vance Crowe [00:59:33] You know, you just made an entire section of my life. Makes sense. I I I never understood Monsanto when I was working there was always in pursuit of this thing called Vistage Vistage gold or Vista Gold.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [00:59:49] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:59:49] And I, it like, I knew a lot of people working on that project and nobody could ever help me make sense of like, why are we after this pursuit of omega threes? 'cause I don't care about that oil. But I didn't realize how much more valuable it was than the rest of the fats.

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [01:00:04] Right. If you can ex, if you can kind of concentrate it up or purify it, you can sell those Omega-3 concentrates for a lot more money than the what we call regular veg oil. Yeah. And I remember Vista and the high high oleic acid, soybean oil, which, you know, I still think, I think someday that will find a, a big application because though that particular fatty acid, the oleic acid is, is a really good one for making fuel and other things lubricants and things out of. So it all that work will probably come around. That's the other thing I've seen now is that eventually those good ideas do find a, a way to be used, but it's often not on the timescale that people think. So back to your

Vance Crowe [01:00:46] Point about, yeah, you wanna tell the the poor bastard grad student, like, hang on buddy, it's gonna be a little while. If it's a

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [01:00:52] Good idea, eventually it'll get used. But that's back to your point about the predictions. You know, I think we're kind of in that, in that period where people thought that the electrification of everything was gonna happen and save the world. And now that it's getting closer and, and it's been a few years, people are realizing, wait a minute, first of all it's not gonna happen as fast as we thought. And second of all, the world actually has to support the electrification. Like we still have a ton of coal fired power plants. We still have a ton of natural gas fired electricity generation. So that's what you're using now. Electric motors are more efficient, which is nice. And so you can get a benefit. But once again that now you gotta have a battery, now you have to have a grid, you have to have all these things where with liquid fuel all you need is a tank. And if the grid goes down, power goes out. I still got my tank of fuel, right? I can, I can heat my house, I can drive my vehicle. I'm, I'm bulletproof. So there's, there's a certain amount of value that people ignore when they want to tie everything to the grid of, of being self-sufficient.

Vance Crowe [01:01:56] So last two questions. First one, pretty simple, but pretty much yes or no. Would you recommend a future generations to go into chemical engineering? Is there enough innovation to support the, a great mind going into that field?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [01:02:10] That's a, that's a excellent question because I went in as an idealistic young person in the eighties, right, the mid eighties having kind of seen the Carter years and the oil embargo and then, and then Reagan coming in and being a little less interested in sustainability and fuel economy and, and I thought, well there's a lot of stuff chemical engineers do and I wanna be one of the green ones. But I was 20 years too early. Like those opportunities did not actually exist when I graduated. They do now. And I think what what I've learned is, as I said, I went back to school to get my PhD. Chemical engineers are now involved in biotech, solar, doing materials development, you know, nuclear obviously fuel, combustion chemicals, bio mechanics and making parts for prosthetic stuff and implants and things you put in the body. So anything involving molecules and engineering is chemical engineering. So the field has, has blown up in terms of the opportunities that are available. And I definitely would recommend if someone wants to have a lot of options, chemical engineering is now a really intriguing major. Whereas when I did it, I didn't realize it was pretty much everybody went into the petrochemical world and that's what you did and that's what your opportunities were. So the world has come around. So yeah, so I think it's a great major. It's challenging, it's a hard major 'cause you're, you're learning all the engineering and you have to learn all the chemistry and so it takes kind of a unique, unique person. But yeah, if you, if you think you can do it, it's a great place to, to learn how to do a lot of things.

Vance Crowe [01:03:45] And I'm gonna ask you for your favorite book about energy for lay people. And while you think about that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give my book recommendation. So I read a book called The Bottomless Well, why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. And I read it, it must have been 15 years ago. And the reason that I liked it so much is as a lay person, I did not understand how the orders of magnitude of energy worked. Like how much more energy do you get out of a gallon of gas versus an hour of, of wind blowing or nuclear energy. And so for me, that fundamental understanding opened my eyes right before I went to Kenya of like, oh, now I'm watching people that have no access to these bundles of energy. And I think even if I hadn't gone to Africa, that was a very good book for me. So what, what about you? What's your recommendation?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [01:04:39] Well, I I'm a little ashamed to say I haven't read a lot of books on energy. I've, I've just been working mostly, but there's a really interesting book called The Prize that my boss actually gave to me long ago. It's still, I've, I've only scanned through it, but it's very intriguing. But it's about oil, money, power, the politics of global politics and how all these different policy things have happened over the decades. And it's really eye-opening, I think, into the behind the scenes stuff that led to our current energy economy. So the prize I think would be a really interesting read for someone who's interested in the policy side, how, how countries interact, you know, how corporations interact with their governments.

Vance Crowe [01:05:21] Well Dave Slade from Renewable Energy Group. What if people wanted to learn more about your company or can connect with you, how would they do that?

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [01:05:30] Yeah, so our, our company website is ww dot R-E-G-I-R-E-G i.com. We have a lot of interesting things there. I can, I can be reached my time's a little bit limited, but if someone wants to reach me directly, they definitely could reach out through our communications folks. So it'd be Katie Stanley, so www or not www,

Vance Crowe [01:05:54] I'll just leave it in the show notes. You can send it to

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [01:05:56] Me. Yeah, you can leave it in the notes. I'd be happy to, to answer more questions or if somebody wants someone to come talk to a large enough group, I'd definitely do it. Nowadays with Zoom we can interact a lot more readily than we can when I used to have to get on an airplane and fly someplace. So yeah, we'd love to help people understand how all these things work together. And, and kind of our big thing, I'll leave you with this Vance, is what's available today, you know, what is available now versus what can you maybe do in 10 years? 'cause back to your point about how long my predictions are good, what I can say is right now we are not utilizing our biofuels to their full extent. We are utilizing all the electric vehicles we make, we're utilizing everything else, but we can make more biofuels. You're a mid-westerner, there's farmers with materials, products ready to go to market. And right now we're limited by demand, not by supply. So if people want to consider that as what can I do today versus what, what might I do in 10 years? That's the main message we like, like to get out to folks. And I appreciate the chance to talk with you today.

Vance Crowe [01:06:58] Well great to talk with you Dave, and when I have some chemical questions I'll have you back on the podcast. Don't

Dave Slade Chemical Engineer [01:07:03] Hesitate. Yeah, I'd love to talk again.