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I just had the interesting experience of spending a few days at the the Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC) Annual Meeting and Expo in Orlando, FL, then running across town to attend the National Biodiesel Congress. Both events were in Orlando the very same week, and although the two gatherings were held only 10 miles apart, they felt as though they were taking place on different planets. Or, I should say, they felt as though they were taking place in two different centuries: TMC in the 20th, Biodiesel Congress in the 21st.

I met with a lot of intelligent, knowledgeable people at both events, but at the TMC event there was a whole lot of bad intelligence about the Biodiesel Congress. The fleet maintenance managers of TMC, it turns out, have some pretty wrongheaded ideas about biodiesel... in fact, some of the things I heard brought to mind Mark Twain’s famous quote: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Well, here’s what some of the fleet maintenance managers at TMC “know for sure”: They know for sure that biodiesel is causing aluminum fuel tanks on their big rigs to rust out from the inside out. They know for sure that there are absolutely NO quality standards for biodiesel. And they know for sure that, from the moment it’s produced to the moment you pump it into your fuel tank, biodiesel does not pass through a single filter.

After hearing these claims being made by worried fleet maintenance managers at TMC, I had a chance to ask some biodiesel experts at the Biodiesel Congress to respond. One expert did admit that, if you made your own biodiesel at home from questionable feedstock and with absolutely no quality control, you could rot out your fuel tank from the inside out. But then, you could also fill your tank with regular diesel fuel that happens to have water contamination, and you’d have the same result.

In response to the other claims being made about biodiesel at the TMC meeting, the biodiesel experts I talked to simply shook their heads in disbelief and said “We have a lot of work to do.” Now, in all fairness, there were a few fleet maintenance managers at TMC who spoke up in defense of biodiesel, but they were few and far between.

The sad fact is that many fleets will not go near biodiesel, because they have bad information. Will they be willing to consider the other side of the story? Maybe, but as one TMC fleet guy told me, “Maybe the biodiesel folks should come and talk to us and hear what’s really going on out there.”