How To Make Biodiesel

Apr. 1–At 87, Wilson Greatbatch’s vision is failing and his hearing isn’t so good, but the man whose batteries power millions of pacemakers still loves a challenge. “Fortunately, I can still think,” he says. Nearly five decades after he took $2,000 and built 50 pacemakers in a barn behind his house, Greatbatch now is turning his attention to finding alternative sources of energy that could replace the world’s dwindling and ever more costly oil supply. “We’re dreamers,” Greatbatch told about 100 members of the New York State Engineering Technology Association last week at Niagara County Community College. “We don’t get into something until someone tells us it can’t be done,” he says. “If we weren’t dreamers, there wouldn’t be any pacemakers.” His mother, Greatbatch says, taught him that there’s always a way to do something if you put your mind to it. “If someone tells you it’s not going to work . . . that’s more incentive than anything else,” he says. Indeed, Greatbatch’s fame and fortune stems from his curiosity and ingenuity, which enabled him to develop a key advance in a new device created by a pair of Swedes — the cardiac pacemaker. That early device, however, had battery problems. The pacemaker could be completely sealed, but the batteries that powered it could not. Greatbatch came up with the lithium batteries that would work longer and more reliably within the pacemakers — a crucial development that has saved countless lives and spawned the company now known as Greatbatch Inc. in Clarence. It’s that kind of inventiveness that the Buffalo Niagara region needs, where good ideas turn into practical products that can be profitably produced here by hundreds of workers. It happened with Greatbatch, who used his idea to build a company that now employs upwards of 500 people here. Bill Moog’s servovalves turned into upwards of 2,000 jobs at Moog Inc. in Elma. For now, Greatbatch is thinking about energy. He expects oil prices to keep going up, so much so that he wouldn’t be surprised to see gasoline hit $10 a gallon within a few years. “We’re going to have to make better use of alternate forms of energy,” he says. Greatbatch sees great potential in vegetable oil, specifically soy and canola oil that he thinks can be turned into a fuel for use in diesel engines. Soy beans and canola can be grown with far higher yields per acre and far less fertilizer and other costly inputs than corn, he says. But it will take years of work to overcome problems with consistency, cold temperatures and compatibility with conventional diesel engine designs. Greatbatch now has his own small research and development business. There, he and his chief engineer, Jeff Deal, have been trying to come up with a biodiesel fuel that would be reliable and require a minimum of processing. “Within the next 10 years, we feel you’re going to see predominantly vegetable oil-based diesel fuel engines,” he says. “You don’t see it much now, but when you do, remember that you heard it here.” Greatbatch and Deal’s focus now is on a mixture that’s one part kerosene, two parts soy oil and three parts canola oil. Greatbatch calls it “Biodiesel 1,2,3″ and he’s even applied for a trademark for the name. They’ve been testing it in a small, four-horsepower engine. If biodiesel is the next big thing in energy, Greatbatch says the region needs to get ready by getting its colleges and universities to put more emphasis on agricultural engineering programs. It may sound like a reach now, but at the time, so did pacemakers. “It’s not new to me to do something that no one has done before,” Greatbatch says. drobinson@buffnews.com Credit: The Buffalo News, N.Y.

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