The day was bright and sunny when I went to meet up with Alex Brendel, a local inventor / craftsman / machinist with an environmental science flair. I was excited to get to know more about him and his work, and our time together proved to be insightful, informative, and fun.

We sat down for our interview in an office a few buildings down from his workshop and his enthusiasm for what he does was surprising, it's not too often you find someone so happy, passionate, and deeply into their work as Alex is. His work and words were inspiring to me; I hope you think so too.  Our interview was as follows...

What exactly do you do?

My real passion lies in building machines, hands on. And with a focus, or emphasis, on equipment that will enable people to do basically good things. Good things for other people, good things for the planet. I kind of like the moniker of scientist or professor. It's kind of funny because 'Gilligan's Island' was one of my favorite shows when I was about 10 or 12 years old. I used to watch it every single day. I didn't really realize until recently that people jokingly called me 'The Professor' around here. But I thought, hey I guess that's not an insult, or at least it's an insult I can live with. [laughs] I see myself as kind of an absent-minded professor. Or another inspiration for me was the movie 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'. Dick Van Dyke played the character of a guy who builds this flying car. I especially remember the scene where he comes inside - he's been out working in the garage for days without stop - and his kids are sitting in the living room; they haven't seen him since he disappeared into the garage. All of a sudden he comes running in and measures the size of the sheet metal hood over the fireplace. He says, 'Oh, this is perfect!' and rips the fireplace apart [laughs] because he needed the sheet metal to build the car. That's kind of who I am. [laughs again]

Where do you work on your projects?

Well, it's nice to have a garage or a hiding spot. Most of my work I do here in Concord.  One part of the work is the thinking and inventing, and a lot of that happens when I'm taking a shower in the morning. [laughs] But the hands on stuff, the machining stuff, happens in my shop in Concord. A lot of it's online too, I do homework that involves an awful lot of web surfing and information gathering. I just bought a new amazing Kindle so I can read the stuff that I download online while I'm traveling.

Do you get grants to fund your work?

I haven't yet; I've applied for some grants. But that's tough business. It's hard work writing for a grant, it takes a long time, and it’s a big investment. I've applied for a million dollar CDC Grant. I paired up with some people at Cal State Fresno to apply for this grant a year or so ago. I remember spending about three weeks and then my entire Christmas vacation that one year working on it. And it was painful, I was up until 3-4 am every night, and then my computer crashed and I lost everything two days before the grant was due! [laughs] I kid you not; it's one of the horror stories. I didn't lose everything; I lost the last five days of updates. So I lost a lot of it, but we pulled it together and got something submitted at the very last second. We actually had to have somebody drive and hand deliver it to Sacramento. [laughs]  But if you're wondering about income, all of the work I do is coming out of my own pocket right now.

When did you start working on all of this? How did you get involved?

Let's define what all of this is, I'll back up as far as to my getting involved with Bio-Diesel, and that I can peg to about 1998. A friend of mine, who I met at a solar car race, invited me to come to a class that he was putting on in Santa Cruz. And that class was a weekend workshop where we converted a Mercedes Benz to run on straight vegetable oil. I was amazed at that, I wondered, can you really run a car on vegetable oil?! It took a while for the astonishment to sink in, and for that idea of a magical fuel that you didn't have to pay for at a gas pump, you could get fuel from a waste product, used cooking oil.

Once that soaked in, I impressed, and I started looking online for more information.  That was in 1998, a lot of what I've been doing more recently is research to extract oils and thereby make fuels from algae. And that started roughly four years ago. I went to a big conference in Sacramento and they were talking about how can we first recognize and then deal with the air pollution problem? At that point I had been making small-scale amounts of bio-diesel for a good number of years, and had explored the concept of collecting waste vegetable oil from restaurants and making it into fuel. And then we started looking at the numbers, looking at the statistics of how much oil we could get this way. So just looking at the state of California, a man had told me that if you took every last drop of used vegetable oil from all the restaurants up and down the state of California and made every last drop of that into fuel, you'd be able to displace about two percent of the diesel fuel, and just the diesel fuel, not the gasoline, that's currently burned on the roads in California. So basically, the best we could do is displace about two-percent of the diesel fuel. Well, obviously there's a problem then, because what good is it if we can only have a two-percent solution? I was looking for at least a 50-percent solution or better.  Then it's what if we start farming more soybeans, because that's where most of the bio-diesel comes from in the United States. But then that gets into a whole Pandora's Box of new problems.

And then along came this great book by Josh Tickell called 'From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank'. In it was a chapter that mentioned algae, and I thought, I know algae! When I was 14-15 years old, I had a tropical fresh water aquarium and the algae grew like crazy in this aquarium. I put a special fluorescent light over it because I wanted to grow plants in there. Not just plastic plants, but real plants in the fish tank. I wanted it to be natural. So I got this special grow lamp for the aquarium and it was also by a sunny window, so the algae grew like crazy. I ran to the pet store and asked, “How do I deal with this problem?” They gave me this special little magnet for rubbing the algae off of the glass off from the outside. Also, they said I could buy certain species of fish that feeds on algae, so I bought some of those. Anyhow, I knew from a boy that algae grows prolifically and so when I first heard about it in Josh Tickell's book that algae can be cropped to raise oil, essentially, I was pretty excited about that. I started looking into that and then I found out that low and behold, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado was also looking into algae for fuel. I thought, if they're looking into it, then maybe it is a viable idea. So I said, I got to look into that too!

So fuel from algae is a big focus of what I'm doing. But the broader picture, even broader than making fuel from algae, is a carbon-neutral fuel. I'm looking for a carbon-neutral fuel for transportation, as well as a fuel for power production and heating. There's this giant problem to solve, how can we replace fossil fuels like petroleum and coal with something that's cleaner and greener? Certainly algae is both of those, cleaner and greener.

What do you plan on doing in the future, what's in store for you? What do you think you'll be working on?

That's an important question, but not an easy one to answer. It's really important to me now, and in the future, to do what I really like doing, where I really feel motivated. I'm going to the best of my knowledge, to do what I love doing, which is hands-on research and development of alternative fuels. And not just be working for a paycheck, not just making money, not doing something that's not so important just because it's a paycheck that only pays the bills.

However, there is that important fact that a CEO's job is to make sure that his/her company doesn't run out of money. And that's the other part of doing what you love doing, if you run out of money you might have to make compromises to do something that you so much don't love to do, but at least it brings in money. I'm going to be making a run for the money to make sure I don't run out of money. And that may mean I can't keep doing what I love to do.

There's a number a neat projects going on though. In terms of displacing coal there's this whole neat thing called Terra Preta and Biochar and everybody should Google those terms. There's a professor Lehmann at Cornell University who kind of rediscovered ancient cultures living in the Amazon Basin had either intentionally or unintentionally added charcoal to the soils. Now if it was intentional, they were, and I'm sure they were, very smart people. They knowingly added charcoal from certain sources. Or maybe unintentional, maybe and they were merely burning their trash, making biochar unintentionally in the process. But the concept is that soils that are black with biochar are amazingly fertile for amazingly long periods. And that does two things - one is that it makes their gardening, or crop growth, more productive. But also they're solving one of today's problems and that is sequestering carbon dioxide. And that's something I'm working on. I got started roughly just a couple of months ago and I have some ongoing experiments in my shop right now.

Do you have anybody that works with you?

Yes, I formed this group called AlgaeFuel.org and there's loosely three or four people working together within this group. And that's sort of the tight knit group. But there's a larger spread of people, contacts, and associates that I have. Some of them I may just email once in a while and others I see much more regularly. And the wonderful power of the internet today and email is great, and it's enabled AlgaeFuel quite a bit. And people all over the world. I really got to hand it to people like Steve Jobs and a lot of the people who came before us who were very willing to share their ideas of technology. I think the reason why a lot of us have so much technology today is because they weren't greedy for money, they weren't looking to get a patent and make it rich, and they were willing to share their ideas freely. If you had something better than the other guy, you could one-up them by going out and bragging about why your software program or your piece of hardware was better than theirs. And that created an environment where it was free and easy to share ideas, and it's that sharing of ideas that can be so enabling.

What is your hypothesis on the environmental crisis and everything that's going on?

Well, I'm optimistic, I tend to be optimistic. I'd say there's a big challenge in front of us. I think that there are solutions to global warming and I think that humanity will implement these solutions before we all go extinct.  Actually it's kind of funny, the solution to global warming is really simple, and I’m convinced that it's a no-brainer. There are a lot of parts to it, and it gets technical at times. I'll explain it like this, by drawing an analogy:  Being overweight, obesity is a challenge, but doctors know the solution to that. You just simply eat less and exercise more. But really doing that, making it happen, is not so easy. There are a lot of details, a lot of variations. We all have different metabolism, we're all under different pressure, there's certain factors that cause all kinds of problems like bulimia, binge eating disorders, etc. So the solution to being overweight is to eat less, exercise more. So in the same way, the solution to global warming is we have to simply burn less carbon fuels and bury more of the carbon, CO2 in the air. We have to sequester more CO2. So that's the answer, the magic trick - burn less, bury more. It's as simple as that. But do we really have the will to do that? Are we motivated enough to do that? I hope that politically, we will find the motivation to do that.

Now there are a couple of parts to make the solution happen, and the three major parts to the global warming solution are, 1) The Political will of individuals and politicians / people in power. Do people have the will and motivation to enable the solution? And that kind of leads to 2) The Money or The Business System to also enable the solution. You kind of need to have a profit motive in this society. If you want to do something, it takes a lot of resources like time, energy, fuel. And if you're going to spend those things you have to think you're going to get some pay back for it, some profit. So it's important to set up a business system where in the process of solving global warming, you can also set up viable, sustainable businesses that people can make a profit from while they're doing it. Because what good is doing a whole bunch of work if it causes you to run out of money and be poor and living on the streets? All of a sudden, solving global warming doesn't really matter; you just want to put food on the table. And 3) An Attitude of not being greedy. If we can somehow live simply so others can simply live. Burn less fuels so that the common good of the people is better off, i.e. not having global warming. So it's kind of putting the needs of the team ahead of your own needs.
I should also add to this, there is a Chinese proverb and it says that "To know and to not do, is to not know." So if you know how to lose weight or you know how to solve the global warming problem, but you don't do it, you don't carry out the steps, well then in a difference sense, you really don't know how to solve the problem because you're not proving it, you're not putting it to action. And so maybe in a sense, even though knowing the solution to global warming is simple, we don't really know what it is.

I'm kind of picking out certain areas that are my strengths, I'm trying to use my abilities to enable some of the missing, or currently not available, pieces of machinery or processes so that we can work together to solve this global warming problem. And then you get into the nitty gritty and the details of the solution. Burn fewer carbon fuels, well that's easy, we'll just stop burning gas. So do we all just leave our cars in the parking lot from now on? That's not really a good solution, so you got to come up with a better solution for what fuels we use. Well, biodiesel I think is a better solution than petrol diesel, we can make that happen. There's a whole industry that's going into biodiesel. But if you look at the other side of transportation fuels, gasoline is a much more commonly used fuel in the United States than diesel. So we need to find a better, cleaner, greener fuel than gasoline.

One of the neat things about biodiesel as a fuel is that for many years in this country we have developed a diesel fuel system. There are diesel trucks on the road today, a lot of big rigs. And that's got to be one of the biggest incidents of diesel fuel. Well the diesel engine itself is well-developed and is very efficient and there are many diesel mechanics that are trained to fix diesel trucks when they break down. And there are appropriately located diesel fueling stations that have diesel fuel tanks that are stored safely underground. So there's this infrastructure that has been built up over the years; that is all of the diesel industry. So that's what we have today, we have a large infrastructure for the diesel industry, and one of the really neat things about biodiesel is that you can take advantage of all that infrastructure that’s already in place; and a lot of companies have spent a lot of money to set this infrastructure in place. You don't want to just waste that investment by completely switching to something that doesn't use any of those infrastructures. You want to take advantage of what you've already got and build off of what you've already got. And biodiesel does just that. It's really neat because you can manufacture your biodiesel from natural oil and put that into the fuel tanks that already exist. You can put it into diesel vehicles that are already engineered and developed. With biodiesel, there are all of these smart uses of the resources we now have on hand.

So I pick and choose areas where I can use what I know to the best advantage. And that's an important principle too, to understand what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, and build off what your strengths are and what you have to work with. This kind of ties into what you asked earlier, what am I going to do in the future? Well I'm going to try to do in the future what I have gained and the benefits I have built up from my past. From my past, this experience with raising a tropical fish tank and knowing about algae at an early age, I see that today, and think that it’s neat, I have some knowledge that I can use today that I gained 30 years ago. So that's another thing I'm going to try to do in the future as much as possible, is build upon what I know and the skills that I have.

Do you have any advice for youth?

Yes, that's an important question.

I got some advice from a young lady once that was kind of career-guiding for me. I was at my nieces’ high school graduation and one of the valedictorians at her graduation was a young lady. And one of the things she said that I learned from her, which I found to be very enlightening: 'One of the things you need to learn in life is that there's a misconception, the idea that time is money. What you need to learn it is that time is love. If you're smart you'll realize that you're much better off to trade your time for doing what you love, rather than trading your time for money.'

And I, growing up, had always heard a lot people saying, almost as if it was an absolute truth, that time is money. “Hurry up, time is money.” Like that was good. And hearing her talk at that graduation ceremony, time is love, I kind of went, oh my gosh, she's right. I started looking back at experiences I had in the past and thought “She’s a genius!” It's a really smart way to run your life. Don't trade your time for money; trade your time for love.

So I would sort of return this idea I got from a young person back to the young people of today - Don't be tricked into trading in your time for money, trade your time for love. And it seems pretty clear that you would be financially rewarded as well, because if you do what you love, you're going to be really good at it, because you'll put a lot of time into it.

You have to accept the fact that you don't know everything. If you don't know something, you have to admit that. Otherwise, that will get in the way of learning new things.

As a young person, be a leader yourself, don't let somebody tell you – “you're young, take the backseat, just wait, we're in charge now, you'll get your turn.” That's bull, because your time is now. Your abilities, your physical abilities, your mental strengths are at their best. I mean, the older you get, the more forgetful you get, and you start losing these abilities. The future is yours, so you can't let the generation today dictate for you the world you're going to live in. You have to be willing to own up to the responsibility of being a leader today. I mean, there are some people more suited to be a leader than others. But my experience up to today has been often that other people you work with, typically older people, will want to have the leadership position and want you to take the back seat. And they'll present it to you as though this is right and natural for you to take the backseat; because then they get to be in the front seat!!!

Once I was in a parking lot and there was a woman and her three or four kids. And one of the young boys runs to the front of the car and says, “I get shotgun, I get shotgun!” because he wanted to sit in the front. But an older girl, about 14-15 years old, she just walked to the front door and took a hold of the door handle. She opened the door, got in and sat down. And so it's clear to me what's going on, this is older sister and younger brother. And so I said, out loud, “it looks to me like big sis gets shotgun.” The sister looks at me and smiles kind of knowingly like, yep, that's right. But the big sister was doing what I think was right. Which was saying, “You can demand that you deserve the front seat, but when it comes down to it, I’m going to take it, because I think it’s my rightful place?” And whether this be a man vs. woman issue, or an older person vs. younger person issue, I guess there's always kind of a struggle for who gets to be in charge. And I would say to young people today that it's your right as a human being to struggle for a position of leadership. Just because you're young, doesn't mean you can't be a leader. In fact it's more important that you're a leader as a young person because you might understand today’s world better than an older person.

I would also say to young people - you have to write your own rules. We live in a society of laws. Don't just accept the laws that we have, think about the laws we have and think about what you think makes sense. And make up your own laws, your own rules to live by. Decide for yourself, is it right for me to be the one who gets to sit in the front seat? Or maybe I should let little brother take the front seat because I'm going to be humble and generous. And how important is it to me to be the one who sits in the front seat? Think about the people that are around you, think about the well-being of yourself, but also think about the well-being of other people. And make your own decisions. And I would hope that most people give it some conscious thought, come up with more stringent laws for themselves to live by. Hopefully, we can all live to higher ideals than the bare minimum.

But what's really more important than the advice I would give the young people is that make your own laws and think about the laws that you make for yourself and think about all the consequences. We would have a better world if people would write their own rules and live up to their own rules and consciously accept to the consequences of breaking rules.

Mother Nature has her own set of rules. If you jump off a cliff, the law of gravity is that you're going to accelerate towards the ground at 9.8 meters per second squared. But that's not what's going to hurt you, it's the sudden stop at the bottom that's Mother Nature's way of saying, "You broke my rule and the consequences are that you're going to hit the ground and be in a lot of pain."
And there are all kinds of laws of nature. Learn the laws of nature, because those are laws that the penalty is paid usually instantly and there's no judge involved. It just happens. I suppose if you look at global warming, we're trying to beat the laws of Mother Nature and that's a falling.

By working together cooperatively we can achieve so much more. What we have in the world today is an example of what the generations that came before us achieved. What we have today was not built in a day. It's nice to have the roots of civilization and to be able enjoy what the generations before us achieved.

I want to send a huge thank you to Alex Brendel for taking the time to speak with me and for doing his amazing work to help save our planet - Thank You!