By 2005, Zadig set his sights on Thunderhill. He found a good racing partner in businessman and fellow driver Richard Hatfield. They took their purpose-built sports racer, landed the pole position in 2006 and at one point led the 25-hour race. Ultimately, they finished third overall, but it was the highest finish by a sports racer in the event’s 10-year history. Zadig was living his dream.

Then guilt set in. Seeing his rotary motor-powered race car refuel a dozen times, burning more than 500 gallons of fuel in 25 hours, didn’t sit well. He was torn between his passion for racing and his responsibility to the environment. “My interest in renewable fuels in the context of global warming and greenhouse gas reduction strategies—especially considering my long history as someone interested in environmental issues—placed me in a rather peculiar conflict,” he says.

After the 2006 Thunderhill, Zadig told his partner he was through with racing unless he could do it in a more sustainable way. “I didn’t feel I could continue racing unless we made a dramatic change and tried to take our success and use it as a vehicle to promote alternatives,” he says. That was the start of Zadig’s search for a clean, renewable racing fuel.

Finding a New Fuel
In early 2007, with Hatfield’s backing, Zadig marched off on a quest to find an alternative fuel that would allow him to indulge in a hobby not typically deemed environmentally sound. He evaluated an array of fuels and technologies, from electric hybrids to hydrogen fuel cells. He considered biodiesel but couldn’t get past one major sticking point. Despite great advances, diesel passenger vehicles haven’t gained widespread U.S. acceptance. “We wanted to demonstrate a technology with a race car that was applicable to a large number of U.S. consumers,” he says. “We just couldn’t do that with diesel.”

Zadig is quick to point out, however, that diesel-powered race cars are gaining considerable attention in the world of motor sports. For example, diesel-powered vehicles (some running on synthetic diesel and/or biodiesel) are now competing in sanctioned Le Mans events. Unfortunately, Europe’s excitement over diesel power continues to get lost in translation with Americans. Meanwhile, the American Le Mans series switched to E10 in 2007 and at the sametime the IRL made a full leap to pure denatured ethanol. The answer was clear. If Zadig wanted to use a fuel Americans could relate to, ethanol was the way to go. He discovered that corn ethanol had about 20 percent fewer lifecycle GHG emissions than gasoline and that cellulosic ethanol—if he could get it—had about 80 percent less GHG emissions than gas. He could run straight denatured ethanol (E98) like Indy was doing, but that lacked the “demonstration” effect he sought because consumers can’t get pure ethanol at the pump. What he really needed was cellulose-based E85. “We saw a connection between what consumers could get at the pump, particularly in the Midwest, and what we could use in competition,” Zadig says.

Until recently, San Diego, Calif., had the only E85 pump in the state. Now, according to the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition, California has four public E85 pumps. For Zadig, coupling the consumer applicability of E85 with the environmental benefits of cellulosic ethanol was a win-win prospect. It was no longer if, but how he’d make it happen.

Getting at the Source
Once he decided to use cellulose-based E85, Zadig set out to find it and was swiftly disappointed. “It just wasn’t available,” he says. “I learned about all of these wonderful things, all of this activity and all of these people proposing to start biorefineries. Then, to my disappointment, I discovered that only one company in all of North America made any amount of cellulosic fuel that a person could even propose to acquire. That’s Iogen.”

Iogen Corp., one of Canada’s leading biotechnology firms and perhaps one of the most well-known players in the global race to commercialize cellulosic ethanol, has operated a demonstration/research and demonstration facility in Ottawa for years. Once in a territory all its own, Iogen is now competing against a hoard of aggressive new entrants to the cellulosic ethanol game. Established corn ethanol giants like Poet LLC, Abengoa BioEnergy and VeraSun Energy Corp. all have ambitious cellulosic ethanol programs, while new players like Range Fuels, BlueFire Ethanol Fuels Inc. and Colusa Biomass Energy Corp. have also entered the fray. Still, Iogen stands as the only company that is able to produce and occasionally deliver significant quantities of ethanol produced from biomass. The company primarily uses wheat and barley straw, but has also experimented with corn stover and other ag residues.

As it were, fortuitous association would eventually connect Zadig with Iogen. One of Zadig’s fellow company board members is close friends with the Foody family, which owns Iogen. That allowed Zadig to create a dialogue in the summer of 2007 with Iogen Executive Vice President Jeff Passmore. “I met Jeff and he quickly agreed that Iogen would seriously look at this,” Zadig says. “Everything started to fall into place from there.”

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