Local Non-Profit promotes cleaner heating fuel alternative
By Tom Szekely
      

      As the thermometers and leaves continue to fall in the city, Somerville residents are greeted with the familiar sounds of late fall: radiators pinging and furnaces grumbling. When furnaces spark to life this winter one local non-profit hopes some of Somerville’s homeowners choose to burn a cleaner heating fuel to stay warm – one that puts less pollution into the community’s air.

      “Any impact we can make to reduce the particulate matter that goes into the air the better it is for the community,” said Phil Lindsay of Mass Energy’s Consumer Alliance. Lindsay said the local non-profit group is currently recruiting homeowners in Somerville and Cambridge to switch from using regular heating oil to a product called “Bio-Heat.”
      Bio-Heat is a heating fuel comprised of 90 percent low-sulfur diesel and 10% bio diesel, a domestically produced fuel refined from soybean oil. Mass Energy needs 30 homeowners to sign onto a waiting list for this fuel to expand their Bio-Heat program into the Somerville/Cambridge area, Lindsay said. Reaching this quota assures local distributors of sufficient demand to begin delivering the cleaner fuel by November 1st, he said.
      Lindsay said the environmental benefits of Bio-Heat come from both the renewable bio diesel, which supports American farmers, and the low-sulfur diesel, which reduces the harmful particulate matter and nitrous oxides generated through combustion. Particulates generated by the burning of “high-sulfur” diesel fuel have been linked with many ailments and diseases.
      “The environmental impact of Bio-Heat is similar to natural gas,” Lindsay said.
      Lindsay, an oil program manager for Mass Energy, said that consumers can attain the cleaner emissions without the additional costs associated with switching over to natural gas: buying a new furnace and removing old oil tanks.  As an additional benefit, heating systems run cleaner on Bio-Heat and require less cleaning and maintenance, he said. This is due to both its lower sulfur content, as sulfur causes most of the maintenance related problems in heating systems, and the lubricating properties of bio diesel. Lindsay said Bio-Heat is currently cheaper than natural gas and additional savings will follow.
      “I anticipate that eventually maintenance costs will come down – it burns cleaner and doesn’t foul nozzles and filters as much,” Lindsay said. “Instead of every year consumers could go one and a half years or two years [between servicing their heating systems]. Vendors that have been using it and service techs – they all like working with it. It’s easier to clean because there’s not a lot to clean. It’s less work.”
      According to Lindsay cleaner burning fuels in the furnace also means better air quality in people’s homes.
      “I’m a consumer of the material,” Lindsay said. “My wife has an asthmatic condition usually set off during the winter. Last winter [she had] not one episode. Better air quality in the home.”
      Mass Energy was founded in 1982 when Mark Draison organized 200 households into a buyers group to gain leverage negotiating heating fuel prices with retailers.
      “Now we have 8,000 [members] and we’re growing each year,” Lindsay said. “Mass Energy is currently contracting with 20 full service heating oil providers in Eastern and Central Massachusetts.”
      Due to the size of the non-profits’s membership, retail heating fuel price margins are negotiated to save members an average of 10 to 30 cents per gallon, Lindsay said. Because of this marketplace leverage, Mass Energy’s Bio-Heat fuel can be sold at prices that are comparable to average state prices for heating fuel.
      “We feel that we are a market leader in the heating industry in this product,” Lindsay said.
      Recognizing that it is hard for people to make a change in their heating fuel and that people in the marketplace are often fearful of change, Lindsay said that it is important to offer the product and encourage people to try it.
      “You’ve got to start somewhere,” Lindsay said. “There’s 900,000 homes in Massachusetts. If we can get a couple of thousand to do this we’ll cut down on what’s being emitted into the air and prove there’s a viable market for Bio-Heat.”
      Lindsay cited the example that one typical duplex building burns 1600 gallons of fuel in a winter and by switching to Bio-Heat would save several hundred pounds of sulfur from being released into the air as particulate matter. Lindsay said he is amazed at how fast the air quality benefits “total up.”
      Building demand, proving Bio-Heat is a viable product, spurring local production and proving that consumers want to do the right thing are among the reasons MassEnergy is promoting Bio-Heat, Lindsay said.
      “We’re doing this because we think it’s the right thing to do.”