Collin Evenson

Devils Lake

An article “My day without oil,” written by Dennis Johnson, concentrated on plastics made from crude oil. In 1940, Henry Ford manufactured a car whose body was completely made of plastic. The plastic was made from corn oil. Velva North Dakota has a huge oil crushing facility that produces excellent plant based oil that can also be made into high quality plastic. The North Dakota Legacy Fund could make a wise investment for the future in building a facility to make plastic out of that plant based oil.

The facility in Velva also crushes sunflower oil. In 1980, I was a sales agronomist for a hybrid sunflower company out of Davis, California. We sponsored a car dealer from Placerville, Ca to enter a race across America using alternate fuels. He had converted a Jeep Waggoner with a diesel engine to burn sunflower oil. He drove the Jeep burning sunflower oil from California to New York City. At the time I did a radio show “Focus on Flowers” and did a 20 minute interview with him after the race. In the same race Mother Earth News had sponsored a pickup with a still in the back that converted corn to alcohol which they used for the contest. There was debate about who won as the Jeep burning sunflower oil drove a longer route. At this same time 1979-80 North Dakota State University had taken a diesel tractor and equipped it to burn sunflower oil. It reminded me of my mother cooking donuts in her kitchen

In 2010 an agriculture economist from South Dakota State published an article in an Ag publication out of Aberdeen, SD that stated under President Obama’s Green Deal farmers could make more money selling carbon tax credits per acre then they could selling corn.

If farmers in North Dakota, Minnesota and South Dakota could receive subsides that oil billionaires in Texas and Oklahoma receive they could be using fuel made from crops they produce. The same oil crops could be used to produce plastic for wind turbines. The wind turbines could be put on all the fracking pads covering western North Dakota.