Burning Ambition

Profile and analysis of a start-up manufacturer of waste oil and trash converters.

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Keith Burnett says his machines offer a safe, affordable way for small businesses to dispose of waste oil and trash by converting them to usable -- and salable -- electricity. How can he miss?

Keith Burnett isn't just starting a company, he'll tell you. He's creating a new industry. The 40-year-old mechanical engineer envisions his invention becoming as ubiquitous and essential as the personal computer and the fax machine. He calls it the Goldfire, representing as it does a kind of technological alchemy.

Burnett aims to create wealth and value from the lowliest of ingredients -- used motor oil and common trash. By converting waste to electricity in small machines, he hopes to build a business that will benefit the environment and, in the bargain, save his customers serious money.

The idea came to Burnett five years ago, while he was working for the Defense Department. He kept hearing about the landfill crisis, millions of tons of trash going to a fast-shrinking number of dumps. Then there was the controversy over waste motor oil. Some 1.35 billion gallons of it are produced each year by service stations, quick-lube centers, and private-vehicle owners, 52% of whom change their own oil.

Most of the commercially obtained oil, from quick-lube and service stations, is recycled. But each year 193 million gallons -- close to 20 times the amount spilled by the Exxon Valdez -- are wantonly dumped by do-it-yourselfers. They stick it in the trash, pour it down drains, or dump it on the ground, where it eventually contaminates wells and aquifers. It has posed such a problem that some states have sought to classify used oil as a hazardous waste.

"All this stuff has energy value," Burnett remembers thinking. "There has to be a way to build a small machine to turn it into electricity." The concept seemed so obvious that, at first, Burnett was sure that such a thing must already exist. Cogeneration itself was not new -- public utilities, for instance, had huge incinerators that burned trash for power. In scouring the files at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, however, Burnett found nothing that resembled a Goldfire.

Later, while working on jet-fighter programs at McDonnell Douglas Corp., he kept tinkering with the idea, building models in his home engineering lab at night. "I just sat down," he says, "and pretended that somebody had assigned me the task of designing a machine that turned the Btu [British thermal unit] content of waste into energy." He had no doubts that the machine could be built. There was nothing magical about it, after all. This was basic mechanical engineering.

As Burnett contemplated the market for his device, he thought of a quick-lube franchise as a typical customer. The average quick lube uses about $500 worth of electricity a month. It also ends up with some 1,500 gallons of used oil each month. By his calculations that was enough to generate $1,500 worth of electricity, from a machine that would cost about $17,000, installed.

That was more power than a quick lube could use, but a market existed for the surplus. The Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 requires electric utilities to allow cogenerators to connect to the electric grid so they'll have a market for excess power. It further requires that utilities pay a fair rate for that power. Not only would a quick lube with a Goldfire be electrically self-sufficient; it would actually get paid each month by the utility for the surfeit.

"I had people all over the country chuckling at the thought of making the power company send them a check," Burnett says.

The more Burnett studied his potential market, the bigger it looked. Operations like Pennzoil Co.'s Jiffy Lube International Inc. were proliferating, with Texaco, Exxon, Quaker State, and others entering the quick-oil-change industry with chains of their own. And the Goldfire, Burnett knew, could make electricity not only from oil but from any combustible fluid. Those included paint thinners, mineral spirits, and other liquid wastes commonly generated by auto-paint and -body shops, municipal garages, and car and truck dealerships.

Turning waste into a profit center, however, was only one advantage. Just as important to many automotive people was that, by disposing of liquid waste on-site, they could escape environmental risk. "I had a Chevrolet dealer tell me that when the waste-oil truck drives away, he feels as though he should get down on his knees and pray," Burnett says. "If the truck gets into an accident and oil spills, the legal bills and everything could put him out of business. The liability issue is big."

Solid waste represented a second market segment. Through pyrolysis, the chemical decomposition of a substance (such as trash) by heat, Burnett knew he could make natural hydrocarbon gases from ordinary garbage. The gas would be stored in a tank resembling a large version of a camp-stove propane canister. The same Goldfire that ran on oil vapors also could run on natural gas, by virtue of a special carburetor. The potential here was enormous. He envisioned the units serving every shopping mall, office building, and supermarket in the country.

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