Pike County, Alabama school district improves mileage up to 28 percent with conversion to biodiesel

In Alabama, the Pike County School System said that it has achieved a 1.5 to 2.0 miles per gallon improvement with biodiesel, based on a fleet traveling 8,500 miles per week. Mike Johnson, chief of maintenance and transportation for the schools, said that the improvement has been three miles per gallon on trucks, up to two miles per gallon on older buses to as much as 9 mpg, and roughly the same mileage on newer buses.

The Iowa Soybean Association recently completed year one of a multi-year study on the performance of B20 in trucks compared to regular diesel. Results from the first 1.5 million miles tested show no statistically significant change in mileage and no performance effects.
In Canada, Climate Change Central, an Alberta not-for-profit organization, will test 60 trucks in a $2.6 million cold weather biodiesel research project. The Canadian and Alberta governments, Shell Canada, the Canola Council of Canada, the Canadian Petroleum Products Institute, Canadian Bioenergy, Neste Oil and Milligan BioTech are the project sponsors.

The experiment will explore the extent to which diesel and biodiesel fuel experience gelling at low temperatures. In Washington state, C-Tran, the Clark County transit service, switched to B5 from B20 due to gelling issues experienced with B20 when temperatures fell into the 30s. C-Tran’s fleet was unable to fully burn the fuel as a result and experienced power losses.

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