F O R WAR D M O TI ON
Truckin’ Awesome
Willie Nelson brings biofuel to the red states
“why do people use biodiesel? Because
they love it, that’s why,” Carl Cornelius
barks at me over the phone. “Heck, even
Wal-Mart fuels here.”
Cornelius is the owner of Carl’s Corner
Truck Stop in central Texas, and when we
spoke he was in the process of tearing down
and rebuilding his entire truck stop, ordering workers around between sentences. “We
just finished building a biofuel plant out
back that converts Texas-grown cottonseed
into biodiesel,” Cornelius continued, before
launching into a laundry list of biodiesel’s
advantages over petroleum diesel. “It cools
and lubricates the engine, reduces vibrations, cleans the motor. You gettin’ all this?”
Demographically, Cornelius may seem
like an unlikely member of the green
movement, but running trucks on fuel
made from plants is a concept that’s
close to the heartland. In fact, due to its
abundance of soy farms, the Midwest has
30 | Feb/Mar/07 plentymag.com
Truckers just can’t wait to get on
the road again with BioWillie.
BY PHILIP ARMOUR
more filling stations that sell biofuel than
anywhere else in the country. Minnesota
has even legislated that all diesel sold in the
state must be blended with biodiesel.
In Texas, musician Willie Nelson has
thrown his celebrity—and money—behind
a new brand of biodiesel called BioWillie,
which is what Cornelius sells. Expanding on
his work with Farm Aid, the concert series
and nonprofit organization he co-founded
in 1985, Nelson had the good sense to
focus his biodiesel sales on truckers. Diesel
passenger cars only make up a tiny percent
of the market, but there are millions of
truckers on America’s highways, and they
each drive several thousand miles per week
at six miles to the gallon. That means U.S.
truckers buy up to a billion gallons of diesel
fuel or more per week.
Right now, less than one percent of U.S.
diesel sales are biodiesel. But Nelson is convinced that