I find it hard to believe that we are already in the midst of summer. It has already been a tremendously eventful year at Promethean, and it seems that we need to pick up the pace.There have been so many changes in such a brief period of time. Some of the changes were made by choice; there was at least one occasion where the choice was made for us.
At any rate, change is essential for progress and progress is exactly what we are making.
Repetitive and, one can easily argue, often tedious data collection requirements resonate through the core of our fuel-making process; the legacy of instituting a quality management system. But the system is phenomenal. We are working on ensuring that process redundancies are curbed, that the data we are collecting can be easily interpreted and will ultimately yield meaningful and utilitarian production intelligence.
We are preparing for a multitude of visitors at this year’s Collective Biofuels Conference (https://collectivebiofuels.org) in Temecula, CA this year. It is being held August 17th – 19th, 2012. I will have more to say about this stupendous event in an upcoming entry, but the current confirmed speaker list includes Dr. Jon Van Gerpen (amongst other things the author of the Biodiesel Handbook), Dr. Virginia Gordon (Bonanza Labs’ President and Founder), Don Scott (Sustainability Director for the NBB), Graydon Blair (Utah Biodiesel Supply), Jason Burroughs (Diesel Green Fuels), Dr. Jonathan Meuser,… Well, we’re very excited!
We are also in the midst of making some minor adjustments to our process lines based on the changing nature of the feedstock we have available to us for conversion. We are on a very tight schedule to implement these changes, since the fire earlier this year, among other things in the key of life, resulted in a less than average production start for this year.
As a final ramble for this entry, Joe Spatafore of Extreme Biofuels in Corona, CA stopped by to see us today. Joe has had a standing invitation to come by since we broke ground in early 2008. He lives relatively close to the plant, but never had the time to come by. I was glad he did. We spent some time talking about surviving in this industry. If anyone knows about surviving in the biodiesel business it’s Joe. I wish him the best of luck.
Make it a better place!
Todd