Atul Deshmane 

CEO/President, Whole Energy Fuels Corporation

Atul Deshmane first heard about biodiesel around 1997 while working at Ford Motor Company with a team that was building vehicles to run on electricity, natural gas, and hydrogen, but he wasn't at all sure that this young fuel would actually take off. Several years later, Atul was working for Clean Energy, a natural gas company, when he participated on a panel with Joe Jobe, CEO of the National Biodiesel Board, at a Clean Cities conference in Oklahoma City. Atul was impressed that Joe presented the benefits of biodiesel without claiming that it was a silver bullet or criticizing natural gas. This very sensible approach to biodiesel, plus the illuminating information that the fuel had in fact taken off, tapped the dormant entrepreneur in Atul. In 2005, he co-founded the Bellingham, Washington-based Whole Energy Fuels Corporation with Orion Polinsky.

The original dream was to become another New Leaf Biofuel or a SeQuential Biodiesel, but without the ability to raise the money needed to build a proper plant, the partners focused on leveraging what they knew and set out to create value with an Intelligent, informed approach to fuel distribution. Though initially it seemed like it wouldn't work because there wasn't a need for a middleman, the company began to create mutually beneficial relationships with regional biodiesel producers. They decided to tie their success to the success of those companies and to strive for the most sustainable approaches to biofuel production and distribution. Employing this unique regional strategy, Whole Energy now has operations in British Columbia, Washington,  

Oregon, and California; works in partnership with both local governments and businesses; and provides biodiesel to users including the Washington State Ferries, the largest public consumer of biodiesel in the country, and the Army Corp of Engineers.

Whole Energy helped get two British Columbia biodiesel plants up and running by assisting with plant and lab design, securing feedstock, and getting the bugs out of the production process. This allowed the plant to speed up production and provided a supply of fuel for Whole Energy. In 2010, Whole Energy began working with Oregon-based Biomass Renewable Technologies (BRT) to manage everything from production to sales and marketing of BRT's proprietary biodiesel production processes and equipment, including their add-on modules for free fatty acid reduction. This year Whole Energy is working on a project with oil recycler Oregon Oils and fuel producer Beaver Biodiesel to get co-located operations online toward the goal of lowering costs and efficiently supplying Portland's discretionary blending market.

With a desire to be involved in production without competing with its suppliers, Whole Energy is excited about expanding into glycerin production in Washington, which will allow them to help increase the value of glycerin co-products for their suppliers and create new markets for technical grade glycerin. In terms of California production, right now Whole Energy is looking mainly to add value to suppliers by promoting best practices for glycerin, not necessarily creating their own profit centers.

Whole Energy's biodiesel distribution system includes terminals in Anacortes and Tahoma, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and a terminal in Richmond, California, which has been providing fuel since 2008. Recently the company received $125,274 in grant funding from the California Energy Commission to enhance their blending at this facility by adding microfiltration and in-line additization capability. Whole Energy also has distribution infrastructure in the Los Angeles area as well.

With a track record of creating successful regional business-to-business partnerships, Whole Energy is still learning how to do public private partnerships right, according to Atul. "It's a challenge because you have to compromise from a business perspective, and it boils down to learning what's realistic," Atul said. Their joint venture with the City of Pacfica, California, a project designed to collect used cooking oil from the waste water stream and process it into biodiesel for both power generation and vehicles use, failed after the original advocates left their city jobs. Atul was happy that state funding for this project was reallocated to another California producer, but Whole Energy was dealt a near fatal blow and has yet to staff back up to the levels it had at that time.

Wolfkill Whole Energy, a joint venture between Wolfkill Feed and Fertilizer and Snohomish County, Washington, is another public private partnership with an innovative vision for the county's drying and crushing facility, which is located at a landfill site. The idea is that methane gas recovered from the landfill will be used to dry the seeds, and the crusher will produce oil to be made into biodiesel for the county's vehicles. The process would also provide the local dairy industry with high quality feed and high-value meal. To meet some infrastructure challenges there, Whole Energy went back to the drawing board and is now installing a degumming system. Atul is hopeful that this unique operation will achieve commercial levels of production in the next few years.

Committed to a long view of alternative fuels, Atul believes that the time and large sums of money needed to turn garbage into diesel fuels at commercial levels of production will be well worth the wait. Toward that end, he works part-time supporting the cellulosic diesel project of Mercurius Biofuels, which Whole Energy helped form, sometimes returning to the country of his birth, India, for related business meetings. This pilot, based on the patented Renewable Acid-hydrolysis Condensation Hydrotreating (REACH) technology has partnered to apply for DOE funding with Purdue University, and Mercurius has been awarded matching funds from the Australian national lab, CSIRO. The technology is expected to be commercially available in 4 or 5 years.

When asked about how Whole Energy has survived tough economic times, Atul says that by raising more money from investors and using his personal retirement savings, the company has stayed in the black for the last few years, including this year, which has been difficult. He believes that being small is a significant benefit in that it is easy to adapt, but that being multi-regional is a godsend, because the risks can be spread out over several states. He points out that, happily, economic conditions have never been "horrible in all locations at the same time."

Atul attended CBA's first conference in San Francisco in January of 2012 and appreciated that there were many attendees from neighboring states. In February of 2013, Atul will return to CBA's annual conference as a speaker. At the helm of a company that has successfully banked on a regional strategy and built a network from Canada to Southern California (including two states with biodiesel mandates), Atul is uniquely qualified to speak about creating synergy for biodiesel through regional collaboration. We look forward to the opportunity to learn from the considerable knowledge that he has gained over many years of working on the cutting edge of alternative fuels.

Thank you for your time and efforts on behalf of biodiesel. I look forward to working with you in 2013.  Also, I want to personally thank Eric Bowen for his leadership and for the considerable depth and breadth of very important work he has done as CBA's Chairman since its inception.