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“A lot of people want to embrace biodiesel, but they just don’t know the ins and outs of it,” says Dr. Donald Heck, coordinator, biotechnology and biofuels programs at Iowa Central Community College.

And the sad truth underlying Dr. Heck’s observation is that the reasons so many fleet managers haven’t yet embraced biodiesel are not always based in fact. “What we see occur is, whenever anything goes wrong with an engine, everyone automatically blames biodiesel,” says Jon Scharingson, director of marketing for biodiesel supplier Renewable Energy Group (REG). “In many cases there’s not even any biodiesel in the engine in the first place!”

To battle those perceptions, Iowa Central Community College and REG have joined a consortium of Midwest-based biodiesel advocates in “The Two Million Mile Haul.” The results of this massive test of B20, a 20 percent blend of biodiesel, through two years and eight seasons of long-haul trucking, could put the myths and misinformation about biodiesel to rest once and for all.

As Tom Verry, director of outreach and development for the National Biodiesel Board (NBB) put it, “B20 in operational use is very well documented, and very well understood. It’s been used in thousands of fleets around the country, in different conditions and different applications, but this was the first fully-documented, over-the-road biodiesel demonstration in Class-8 trucks, and we think that’s very valuable.”

The Big Test

“The purpose of the study was two-fold,” says Scharingson. “First of all, when we started this over a year ago—and even in the industry today—there was still a general lack of awareness of biodiesel out there, so we were certainly interested in awareness-building. Then I think there were probably some negative perceptions, some myths about the performance of biodiesel compared to diesel fuel. So, rather than just have anecdotal evidence, we wanted to have a long-term, quantitative study proving what we’ve seen in labs and in anecdotal findings of some of the benefits of biodiesel performance versus diesel performance in the real world over a long period of time.”

Those are some big goals, but this is a big test. Decker Truck Line of Fort Dodge, IA, has dedicated 20 trucks—identical 2007 Peterbilts with Cat C-13s—to the test, running routes between Fort Dodge and Chicago & Fort Dodge and Minneapolis. The 10 control trucks are running on straight ULSD, and the 10 test trucks are running on B20 biodiesel from REG. The 20 drivers are dedicated to individual trucks (although the two groups of 10 drivers were flip-flopped after the first year).

Risk-Averse

Surprisingly, Decker Truck Line is not a typical “early adopter,” and certainly not a fleet that takes risks. “We are probably a bit more conservative,” admits Steve Lursen, Decker’s special projects director. “We’re a little bit slow to change; we’ve taken a very cautious approach with new technologies.