The price went up because the producers who work with waste oil raised their price. This happened because they both (Yokayo and Bentley I think) had some bad experiences running out of fuel due to being cheaper than diesel (also, methanol and KOH and electricity and steel and everything else keeps going up, though this isn't the biggest factor currently).

If they're lower than diesel (which by the way was at $4.50 at most gas stations in Berkeley when you wrote that cause I immediately tried to find myself some cheap diesel), then the 'cheap fuel' guys suck down the entire supply one day, and there isn't enough of it to supply the 'regular' customers who would be your business' predictable bread and butter.

Obviously the other option which I've suggested to Oasis is to have a membership option where your original, regular, loyal customers get one price and everyone who comes in during a diesel price spike gets a higher price to discourage that kind of bulk buying , or you cap the total number of gallons anyone can get so that the irregular customers aren't coming in with a 300 gallon tote , or both. Various biodiesel producers have explored that in the past, and there are problems with that model also. So everyone just raises prices a little bit higher than diesel to discourage the 'cheap fuel' kinds of customers.
You can't build a business around that kind of unpredictable customer base because you'd have to have an enormous biodiesel plant one month and then see all your demand vanish the next time prices go down (which they did last fall I think, which caused a loss of customers who went back to cheaper petroleum).

Also, having customers who only purchase based on price means that they tend to not take the time to learn about biodiesel use and they don't pay attention to things like filter clogging/solvency and cold weather issues (not a problem right now but was a problem when diesel prices spiked in fall 05 and lots of 'buying based on cheaper price' types of customers got stuck with gelled biodiesel going into winter) .


Remember, no one in the biodiesel production business is producing/distributing because of cheap prices- they're producing because they believe in helping lower emissions, keeping money in the farm economy rather than sending it abroad, or other reasons other than price. If you want to go into the biodiesel business to help people save money, then you start selling homebrewing equipment, or teaching workshops on how to make it, or doing farm-scale or fleet-scale biodiesel production consulting, or you put up a website on how to make biodiesel (and, like me, Jennifer of the Oasis actually does teach people how to make their own fuel even though that's technically competition for Oasos' business). Those business options actually make you (me, actually, that's what I do) a lot more money than making biodiesel or distributing biodiesel does.

If you go to the trouble of investing several million dollars in a factory (oasis does not make their own fuel), you're not doing so in order to save people money, as there's absolutely no business model where that makes sense (other than maybe some kind of co-op models such as large ethanol plants sometimes use, which doesn't really exist in the biodiesel industry).


Remember, you've got options when it comes to this fuel. You can make it yourself. Tons of people who run businesses where they really have to count their labor costs and so forth have figured out how to make it work for them. So it's not like, say, the rising cost of steel or natural gas affecting your bottom line, where you don't really have options other than what the industry decides to charge you- in this particular case, you really do have the option of lowering costs yourself. If when you started using biodiesel someone had told you that you can buy it for less than diesel, then that's a different problem due to bad information, as it's almost never been cheaper than diesel other than during temporary flukes like what we discussed above.

I saw your electric motorcycle (which is fucking impressive by the way) so I know that you have the skills to do this. If you dont have time, then you're at the mercy of the marketplace which is unfortunately affected by things like the 'cheap fuel' opportunists who would only buy biodiesel to save money rather than for the reasons why you probably use it.