It’s been a familiar sight for me for 20 years. Raleigh CAT (Capital Area Transit) buses running around town with billowing black exhaust smoke out as they ride down the road. More than once in the last few years, I remember thinking “if they just used biodiesel, they wouldn’t smoke so badly.”
Well, as it turns out, they do. Although I haven’t confirmed with the city yet what blend they use (I hear B20, but got recent information that it is B5), they clearly need to be using a higher blend! The picture shown here is not as clear as it could be, but it was obviously spewing out raw diesel smoke that could be greatly reduced by using a biodiesel blend. Now, to be fair, it’s possible that this picture shows a bus that isn’t running biodiesel at all.
We’ve seen older trucks come to fill up at the plant that are running petroleum diesel fuel and fill up on B20 for the first time, only to see the engine noise reduced and smoke down to the point where it is almost nonexistent. We know it works. We only hope Raleigh continues to use biodiesel in it’s fleet in order to reduce the amount of diesel exhaust it pours into the city air.
We supply B20 biodiesel to several municipalities in North Carolina, including city trucks and fire department vehicles. So far we’ve had very positive feedback from all our customers regarding the use of our biodiesel blends in existing municipal fleets.