Fueling sustainability.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Jon Colligan had never even heard of biodiesel when he signed up for chemistry classes at Lane Community College. Now he's turning it out by the barrel.

With help from some fellow students and the LCC Green Chemistry Club, not to mention various and sundry others all across campus, Colligan is now the student manager of what is only the second college biodiesel plant in the state and one of the few on any campus in the country.

But he didn't just find a way to turn waste material into fuel; he also found a career. Unsure of what he wanted to do going into the class, he's now decided to pursue chemical engineering at Oregon State University, which just happens to have the state's only other campus biodiesel plant.

"It was just about as cool as it gets," Colligan said of his biodiesel revelation. "It really got me thinking about going into this field."

The mini-plant uses the fryer oil waste from LCC's food court. It is filtered and put through a chemical process that converts it to diesel, which for now is being used to help fire the boilers that produce heat and hot water for the main campus.

But as soon as chemistry instructor John

Thompson can run a few tests to ensure the fuel is pure enough, it also will be used in some of LCC's diesel trucks. The plant has cranked out two batches of about 20 gallons each so far and will be able to produce about 40 gallons every two weeks or so once the process is fine-tuned.

That could save the college as much as $10,000 a year, said Jennifer Hayward, LCC's sustainability coordinator.

That's just a drop in the $1.4 million bucket that makes up Lane's annual energy bill, but Thompson said that's not really the point. The real value is the lesson in sustainability, not to mention being a nifty exercise in practical chemistry.

"Once we took the lab, we were really stoked on it," said Colligan.

The plant itself is a testament to LCC's award-winning emphasis on sustainability.

It was cobbled together from castoff parts, including a main reaction tank that had been used in the dental hygiene lab for the unglamorous job of collecting the waste fluid from chairside spit bowls.

But it's that kind of thinking that helped LCC win a national leadership award this year from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

And that's just one of a long list of honors the campus has earned for its many green programs.

Colligan was joined by students Dustin Neiman and Jana Thrift in constructing the pilot plant, and members of the Green Chemistry Club have taken on the task of operating it.

The campus sustainability program is supporting the project and is seeking donations for upgrades to make it more reliable (contact the Lane Foundation, 463-5226).