Scholastic Beginnings: Bob Cerio Blazed the Biodiesel-Blended Heating Oil Trail—This Is His Story

by Luke Geiver ( Biodiesel Magazine) Until 2001, the electrode tip or the fuel nozzle in an oilheat burner didn’t mean much to the biodiesel industry. But after an energy resource manager for the Warwick, R.I., public schools department decided to test biodiesel-blended heating oil at several of the department’s locations, the term we use today to describe such biodiesel-blended heating oil, Bioheat, was born. Robert Cerio, the Warwick public schools department energy resource manager who led that effort, says that to the best of his knowledge, he was the first person in the U.S. to run biodiesel as heating oil.

...Although Cerio first ran several blends of biodiesel heating oil in his schools in 2001, his biodiesel work began in 1999 when he was in charge of 29 buildings, consisting of 20 elementary schools, three junior highs, three high schools and one vocational school, 13 of which were heated with No. 2 heating oil. In response both to the district’s need to offset the cost of heating oil, and a Rhode Island grant calling for the use of bioenergy, Cerio began researching the possibility of using biodiesel.

... “I said to myself, ‘this would be a great blending stock for a No. 6 oil or a No. 4 oil,’ because I knew they were both very polluting and I knew those systems heated their oil year-round to get it to flow.”

...In September, they began running B10, B15 and B20 at three different schools with an administration building running on straight heating oil as a control. “We did that for an entire year,” Cerio says, “and then I received a second grant to continue it for an additional year, and to also run biodiesel in our school buses.”

To comply with NREL’s testing protocol, Cerio’s crew would take a monthly fuel sample to analyze blend ratio accuracy. “We ran it for two straight years without any problems,” Cerio says. During that time, he learned a lot and he has the documentation to prove why Bioheat is better.

......In the 11 Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states, Cerio says there is more heating oil used than transportation fuel. Of all the middle distillate diesel fuel that comes into those states, he says, 58 percent goes into heating oil and 42 percent goes into transportation. READ MORE