"Ya can't expect to buy the truth for a nickel," said one of my favorite 19th century journalists, who, despite being a favorite, his name escapes me more often than not. Mind you, I'm no journalist, I am a story teller, and the reason he is one of my favorite journalists is that he also said, "You can't expect me to spoil a good story by sticking strictly to the facts." These days, that seems to be the result of the information age more and more. On television news broadcast will tell you truthfully that "today" such-and-such a world leader died in Tokyo. Minutes later, the next network's news division will be telling me that, factually, the person died yesterday. Both are strictly "sticking to the facts" but the world view is such that "yesterday", when the (fictional, just in case you were worried you'd missed some real news) person died at 10 PM California time, it was already well into the morning of today's date in Tokyo.

Okay, that part of discrepancy in the news of the day has to be forgiven, but the problem is that number rounding, and so-called "estimates" start getting treated as if they were bragging about Drunken Aunt Sally's martini totals for the day. "Fourteen died in the streets of Baghdad today," turns into "Fifty-seven were hit by bomb fragments, a dozen dying instantly and more deaths were reported as the injured arrived at local hospitals." Fact inflation to "sell" the sensational, or often tragic but therefore important nature of the "news" has turned much of news coverage into a kind of liars' poker.

Numbers drift upward (usually) as time passes. One network has 7 dead, the next 9, the next emphasizes the larger number, "injured", and so the inflation goes.

Governments tend to play the opposite statistical game. I saw a chart today that showed 1950 gasoline prices at "1.91/gal" AFTER ADJUSTMENTS FOR INFLATION. Well that may be "true" (or not) but I also read the statistics on wholesale heating fuel prices in the USA over the last 20 years, and found that just within the last 5 years, our heating fuel costs have been as low as $0.53878 per gallon (avg. countrywide) back in January of 2002 and stayed below $0.69/gallon all that winter. Since today's wholesale heating oil prices were $1.83/gallon, let's see that would be ... just a little over 25.8% annual inflation rate. But of course, Consumer Price Index, the CPI, for the same period would be, what? Maybe 3.5% annually?

Let's not panic the folks, say our government officials. After all, those petroleum based prices tend to be volatile. That is true. (Though so has everything else been in this column so far today been factually accurate, as far as I know, and not much of it is consistent, just the same.) In fact, though, home heating oil average prices from just 2 years ago, December 2004 were about $1.43, and that means ... WOW, it's worse than I thought. That still gives us an average of 20% annual inflation rate in heating oil prices. Does that make sense?

Why, when there were such horrendous spikes in crude oil prices due to Iraq uncertainty, and hurricane devastations in 2005 and 2006 was the actual cost of heating oil over the last 2 years, increasing at a slower rate than over the last 5 years overall? Does it really make sense to take the "volatile" energy prices out of inflation rates to arrive at "core" inflation rates if those are the facts?

Did your home increase in value at 20 to 25% per year for the last 5 years?

Did your salary? Did your IQ? I know mine did not.

Another rather interesting breakdown on costs of petroleum distillates (although diesel and home heating oil are different products, they are very similar and come from very close to the same point in the petroleum refinement process), is that taxes account for 21% of the cost of a gallon of diesel, and the actual refining costs account for ... you guessed it, 21% of the costs.

My example, above, of a dying world leader was not fictional last week, however, the leader of Turkmenistan died. The news appeared on the CNN homepage briefly then disappeared. It was difficult to find another reference to it in any of the search engines I tried. The press quickly lost interest. People in the energy field did not. Indeed when I did find a reference to the demise of this important figure in petroleum politics, it turned out to be the number 1 most popular article from that web site to be emailed to others that day. President Saparmurat Niyazov's death was also "unexpected", and without wishing to fan the flames of the conspiracy theorists, it comes fast on the heels of the former Soviet spy poisoning in London, which has often been compared to the apparent poisoning attempt on Ukrainian political candidate, Viktor Yushchenko.

Okay, I know that most American's can barely find France on a world map, let alone Iraq or Iran, but Iran's neighbor, Turkmenistan, controls much of the shoreline and the recently discovered (and tapped) petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin (surrounding the Caspian Sea). The sudden and unexpected death of the president of Turkmenistan doesn't seem to have caused so much as a ripple in the media, yet, who, and under whose influence, subsequent leadership of that country may come is potentially very significant to the viability of the commercial exploitation of those petroleum resources by many of the world's largest mutli-national oil companies. As a former member of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Turkmenistan, and its new-found petroleum reserves would be a welcome addition to the Russian sphere of influence. The nascent democracy there could disappear overnight. Elections must be scheduled for a replacement within 2 months (maybe just announced, but in any case, presumably proceeding apace), and while the Russian news organization REGNUM (regnum.ru) reports that no single successor candidate has emerged, an "opposition in emigration" has designated its preferred candidate from a conference in Kiev (Ukraine).

On the more positive side, I have stumbled (my usual mode of travel on the internet) across a commercially available version of the maker of a "homebrew" biodiesel maker. Now this is not a recommendation, as such, but it is certainly interesting to see the very simple mechanisms and relatively low cost of biodiesel producing machines that can be installed in your garage at home (or in the machine shed, if you happen to be fortunate enough to own a farm or ranch). This simple setup with turn organic oil, plus alcohol and some additives into diesel fuel overnight, quite literally. Processing time seems to be about 12 hours, and the makers claim that you only have to put in about 45 minutes of active "work" to operate a cycle of the machinery. Available in 20, 40, 80 and 2000 gallon versions, "The BIOMPU-20 makes 20 gallons per 12 hours and is only $1775 plus actual shipping within the continental U.S.A.," says the BIOMPU website. As to how low cost the biodiesel you can produce might actually be would depend upon your source of oil. As the makers point out, attaining actual ASTM standards for diesel fuel depends on the "skill" of the operator. They also emphasize that a titration kit MUST be used with every batch if using previously used vegetable oils. If you are a fan of the biodiesel homebrew set, you probably already know that you can't have biodiesel "settling" for a few weeks before you put it to use, so keeping your production scaled to your actual usage is a good idea. And then there's all that glycerin to be disposed of. Not to mention that putting pure "200 proof" industrial strength ethanol into your car by way of your biodiesel fuel maker seems like a waste of good dry martini to some folks.

Also on the "good news" side today, according to announcements being made in Texas, the first all biodiesel powered electrical generating station is due to come on line in Oak Ridge North, just a little ways outside of Houston. Houston's Advanced Research Center Southwest Biofuels Initiative has partnered with Texoga Technologies and Safe Renewables Corp. to provide a 5 Megawatt generating facility using biodiesel exclusively. The project also received $3.5 million in funding from the Chicago Board of Trade and Safe-Fuels, who will reportedly produce the fuel. As Oak Ridge North's mayor, Fred O'Connor, who himself has had experience with biodiesel projects in Costa Rica, Colombia and Nicaragua,points out, one of the great advantages is that it provides cleaner air, since the biodiesel fuel exhausts produce no sulfur dioxide pollution.

So congratulations to Oak Ridge North, in the state of Texas, and a Happy New Year to everyone everywhere.

love

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

p.s. A quick chuckle: The web site announcing Oak Ridge North's biodiesel powered power plant, spelled the name of the country Colombia incorrectly, but to be sure I looked it up on Google, which led me to the CIA Factbook site at CIA.gov, but the funny thing was that when I clicked the link from Google to the CIA site, Internet Explorer complained: "There is a problem with the security certificate of this site," and asked if I still wished to proceed?

p.p.s. I wanted to talk about "biosolids" and sewage sludge, but it just didn't work out that way this week. If you want to read all that "dirty" stuff, you may have to wait until next week.

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