Yellow grease was the gold in the Wasatch Front for Utah entrepreneur Gerald Pezely.

While earning his master’s degree in business administration, he collected waste vegetable oil from restaurants for a Logan-based company. When it discontinued the service, Pezely filled the vacuum by starting Renegade Oil Inc. in Salt Lake City. Besides collecting and processing the product, he pumped grease traps. His built-in clientele encompassed the entire northern part of the state.

In 2002, Pezely hired Dennis Brunetti, vice president of sales and service for Information Consultants Inc. in Salt Lake City, to expand the company. Together, they tripled the annual revenue to $3.5 million, with yellow grease accounting for $3 million.

In 2010, Renegade hauled 750,000 gallons of yellow grease, and 2.5 million gallons of other liquid waste from grease traps, car and truck washes, storm drains, industrial manufacturing and food-processing facilities. Continued rapid expansion enabled Renegade to hire four more employees in 2011.

GOOD GREASE RISES

The Wasatch Front, a 130-mile urban area in the northcentral part of the state, extends from Logan in the north to Provo in the south. Approximately 80 percent of the population resides there in cities such as Salt Lake City, Provo and Ogden.

To process the grease, Pezely rented a building and installed frac tanks to store it and cone-bottom tanks with inline heaters and thermostats to render it. “No. 1 grade yellow grease rises to the surface, while the unusable portion settles to the bottom and is siphoned off,” Brunetti says.

The residue still contained usable grease, and Pezely invested thousands of dollars in various horizontal centrifuges to extract it. None worked. “Today, we run the residue through separators, which are vertical centrifuges that capture most of the remaining fines,” Brunetti says. “The liquid – No. 2 grade yellow grease – is incorporated into our No. 1 product. The fines go to a transfer station, then to a landfill.”

From the beginning, Pezely paid cash for everything. He had no mortgages, leans or debts. He built a company by being prudent with his money and providing a service other contractors didn’t want to provide. “Grease stinks,” Brunetti says. “The odor clings to clothes, skin and hair. Drop it on shoes and you may as well throw them out.”

The work was brutal, even for Pezely’s 6-foot 2-inch frame. Full barrels weigh more than 300 pounds. His pickup truck, outfitted with rails 31 inches apart, held eight barrels. He rolled them to the liftgate, rode it up, rolled the barrel between the rails, and pushed it forward along the steel bed. Pezely ran the routes himself, working seven days a week from 11 p.m. until sometime in the morning when he finished.

In the 1980s, the price of used fryer oil was 6 to 8 cents per pound. Today, it is more than 40 cents per pound. A broker sells some Renegade No. 1 grease on the commodities market in Kansas and Texas, but the bulk remains in Utah for use as a tasting and caloric additive in animal feed.

EXPANDING THE FOOTPRINT

When Pezely had the money, he bought two midsize truck frames capable of holding 24 barrels each and made his own barrel trucks. Ron White, who processed grease on the midnight shift, welded the beds from steel plates. The two drivers Pezely hired became 10, and son Ryan joined the team. Arthur Chiverall, plant foreman, and Jorge Medina, processing and pumping foreman, now oversee six processors. The grease fleet includes three Kenworth barrel trucks and one Dodge 5500 barrel truck.

In 1985, Pezely built a larger processing plant with adequate loading and unloading docks. Several years later, the one-acre site was up and running. It includes an 8,000-square-foot prestressed concrete building with a 40,000-gallon horizontal settling/mixing tank for grease trap waste, a 20,000-gallon tank for oily water, and a 1,886-square-foot garage.

As competition for yellow grease developed, Pezely envisioned expanding into different markets, and hired Brunetti in 2002, who hit the streets, meeting potential customers throughout the state.

“We sold Renegade Oil on our ability to provide consistent service and by offering service packages,” Brunetti says. “I discovered that most people were unhappy with their vendor. They’d show me buckets of oil sitting next to full containers and say they called for a pickup three weeks ago.”

THE FIT FLEET

Within 24 hours, a Renegade driver delivered a clean container and removed the full one. Brunetti then returned to consolidate the customer’s vendor services, offering drain cleaning and grease trap interceptor pumping. Today, Renegade makes more than 100 stops per week servicing grease traps.

The drain cleaning fleet has a model 798 trailer jetter from Spartan Tool with 83-hp turbo diesel engine coupled to a triplex ceramic plunger pump delivering 18 gpm/4,000 psi from a 300-gallon water tank.

Other vehicles include four 3,500- and 4,500-gallon industrial vacuum trucks with Progress and Beall tanks built on Kenworth, White and International chassis. Pumps from Masport and Gardner Denver power jetters at 5 gpm and 2,000 psi. A Vactor 2100 series PD vacuum truck on a Sterling chassis has a 3,000-gallon debris tank, 1,500 gallon freshwater tank, and Vactor water pump putting out 85 gpm/2,000 psi for cleaning car/truck washes and tackling heavy-duty jobs.

The business expanded handshake by handshake, with Brunetti returning to ask customers if they had problems with the route driver, if he kept the area clean and sanitary, and if they were happy with the service. Such maintenance calls often led to additional sales.

PROCESSING TO PERFECTION

When the yellow grease market spiked in 2006, the old selling feature of rebating customers for their product returned. The rebate went from 3 cents per pound to 10 cents, about 25 percent of the market value. To make up the difference, Pezely and Brunetti hired sales representative Jared Chase and expanded into areas with higher profit margins, such as cleaning car wash pits.

Expanding into oily water reclassified Renegade Oil from a solid waste processing facility to a highly regulated subcategory B centralized wastewater treatment facility. Yellow grease cannot commingle with oily water, so Pezely installed a 20,000-gallon frac tank and separate processing line.

When Renegade’s 1,500-gallon tankers or another company’s straight trucks arrive, workers bench-test the waste for acceptability. “We can’t handle more than 3 percent antifreeze,” Brunetti says. “We also test for heavy metals and other bad boys including excessive hydrocarbons.”

If samples pass the tests, drivers offload into one of the frac tanks in which three mixing blades homogenize the wastes. When blended, operators open a valve, releasing the liquid into a 6-inch pipe. About 20 feet downstream, a Poly-Mate dosing station from Flo Trend Systems mixes and injects 748-E polymer from Aqua Ben Corp. Another 10 feet downstream, a Flo Trend Lime-Mate station injects dry lime.

MORE CAPACITY

The chemically conditioned solution then enters a truck-mounted 30- or 40-cubic-yard Sludge Mate roll-off container from Flo Trend Systems. The box has Poly 2000 filter media with 44 micron mesh weave to dewater the mixture. Workers finish processing at 3 p.m., then the mixture dewaters for up to 15 hours.

Effluent drains into an underground 6,000-gallon concrete grease interceptor outside the plant. Residual grease rises to the top, sludge settles on the bottom, and effluent flows out at mid-level and downstream to the Salt Lake City publicly owned treatment works. “We draw a sample to test the pH, which must be between 6 and 10.5, before discharging the water,” Brunetti says.

Solids in the dewatering boxes go to the transfer station. Drivers open the back door of the container, turn on the truck’s hydraulic lift, and the cake slides out. “It’s usually 75 to 85 percent dry,” Brunetti says. “If it’s a little wet, the attendant mixes in some sawdust.”

To handle the influx of wastes, Pezely needed more storage. This year, he added more 30- and 40-cubic-yard Sludge Mates and a mini drying/tending pit.

LOOKING AHEAD

Pezely, 65, and Brunetti, 66, continue to identify new niche markets. For example, small companies collect produce and bakery goods from supermarkets and transport them to local composting facilities, but they are too small to handle organics from multiple stores.

Renegade wants to broker a deal with an out-of-state company to open a 10- to 15-acre organics farm in Utah. “We already collect the yellow grease from these supermarkets, and want to propose pumping their grease traps and collecting the organics for future fertilizer,” Brunetti says. “This is all forward-thinking stuff, which is what business is about.”

In three to five years, Renegade also wants to handle different types of off-spec fuel and antifreeze. “As markets that we have never seen before develop, the challenge is having the knowledge and understanding that they will be profitable,” Brunetti says. “That is our vision for Renegade Oil.”

Learn more about Renegade Oil at www.renegadeoil.net.