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"Five-hundred thousand gallons would displace about six million tons of CO2," he said.

Biodiesel is considered a safe and biodegradable product that reduces air pollutants.

Northern Biodiesel is working toward using locally farmed canola and grapeseed to produce biodiesel.

"It provides the farmers a winter crop. It can be grown through the winter, much like winter wheat, they go out they plant it they forget about it and in spring they can harvest that, convert the oil then they can bring it to us and add value to their farm land through the winter months," Vavalo said.

Farmers can also help Northern Biodiesel produce its own electricity by providing animal waste.

"We have plans to put in an anerobic digester out back which we could combine manure from a local farm and manure from a local horse hospital with the glycerin,” Vavalo said. "The bugs in the anerobic digester will digest that releasing methane gas it will be burned in a turbine and create electricity."

The company already gets most of its electricity from neighbor Harbec Plastics and its windmill.

Research is underway in one of the hottest areas of the energy industry--producing biofuel from algae.

"The real benefit is that there's a much higher oil yield per acreage,” Vavalo said. "We are actually looking at doing a small scale proof of concept here that would be done in a greenhouse."

Home-heating biodiesel is an emerging market. If you already use oil, the conversion to biodiesel is relatively simple.

"There's no real conversion necessary, depending on the age of the boiler. You may have certain hoses that may be incompatible but changing a couple of hoses isn't really hard," he said.

Vavalo says right now surrounding states provide incentives to biodiesel producers, but not New York.

Vavalo is hoping that will change in the near future.

Northern Biodiesel