About Us
In 2005, an ad on Craigslist for a diesel vehicle led to an informal gathering to talk about vegetable oil and biodiesel. The non-profit Austin Biodiesel Cooperative soon formed to gather oil and make biodiesel on a small community scale. Resources became tight as some members faded, and the land we had access to became unavailable.
DieselGreen Fuels was created by Jason Burroughs, Elizabeth Patrick, and Michael Mullins in the summer of 2006. After several months of discussion and resource gathering, we moved into our first home at East Central Storage. 1200 square feet seemed enormous at first, but we quickly filled it with oil storage tanks, pumps, and LOTS of odds and ends. We soon ran out of room and rented extra space around us to store our growing collection of greasy plumbing parts. By this time, we had become licensed "renderers", able to legally collect used oil for processing into the raw material to make biodiesel, and to be used as fuel for specially converted vehicles. Our biodiesel distribution business slowly grew from a few individual and fleet customers to include Austin's premier Eco-store as a retail outlet, along with a rapidly growing base of SVO customers. Word spread fast, and we found ourselves filling up Willie Nelson's tour bus, brokering large biodiesel orders for the military, meeting people from all over the country on road trips, and building a loyal customer base.
Eventually, our tanks and trailers ovewhelmed even that space, and we found a new home just a few blocks away on Cesar Chavez. Our new facility is 1600 sqft of warehouse space, complete with a very large graded area for a tank farm, and more than enough office space. Elizabeth has moved on to other adventures, and Jason and Michael continue to grow the core parts of the business: vegetable oil collection and processing; biodiesel distribution and retail sales; home and fleet refueling stations; and SVO vehicle conversions.
For 2008, we plan to grow our restaurant base tenfold, producing enough oil to provide B100 for our Austin customers, with enough oil left over for vehicle conversions and homebrewers.
