Company changes

Worley & Obetz is a distributor of biofuels as well as conventional diesel fuel, gasoline and propane.

Those renewable fuels are bioheating oil (containing some refined soybean oil) and biodiesel fuel (also containing some refined soybean oil) and E85 fuel (made of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline) for motor vehicles.

The other major focus of the 120-employee firm, which posted 2005 sales of $312 million, is providing HVAC (heating, ventilating and air conditioning) installation and service.

Worley & Obetz was founded in 1946 as a conventional heating-oil company by Obetz’s great-grandfather Raymond Worley and Obetz’s grandfather, Robert Obetz Sr., Worley’s son-in-law.

Obetz, like many children whose parents have their own businesses, spent much of his youth there. He has a photo of himself as an infant being held by his father, Robert Jr., at work.

When he was just a few years older, he watched his father cut firewood, which Worley & Obetz sold with wood stoves and methanol-augmented gasoline during the oil embargo.

He did various odd jobs there as a youngster, such as pulling weeds from the office lawn, and eventually was old enough to drive a delivery truck.

Still, after graduating from Manheim Central, where he played football and wrestled, and Western Maryland College, where he also played football, Obetz wasn’t sure the family business was for him.

He started there nonetheless during the nasty winter of 1994 because his father needed a truck driver for a couple of weeks. The temporary job turned into several years, with Obetz becoming general manager.

Then he put his career at Worley & Obetz on hold.

“I ended up thinking, without experiencing anything else in life, how do I know this is really what I want to do? And I’m sure there were also parts of me that wanted to make sure I could do this on my own, that I wasn’t just there because I was part of the family,” he said.

Looking elsewhere

Obetz enrolled at Temple University and earned a master’s degree in organization development, the study of the people side of business.

He then spent four years with Arthur Andersen, becoming a manager in its business consulting group, spending several months at a time at a series of Fortune 500 firms.

While at Arthur Andersen, he completed a certificate program in systems dynamics at MIT, gaining insight into how remote variables still can connect and affect each other.

After Arthur Andersen shut down in 2002 in the wake of the Enron scandal, Obetz returned to Worley & Obetz, wiser for the years spent away but comfortable with going back.

“It ended up being one of the best things I’ve ever done. It really broadened my horizons and gave me a lot of exposure into (how other corporations operate),” he said.

Obetz, who remains a consultant on organizational and business strategy issues for energy and pharmaceutical firms, continued to find that Worley & Obetz was widening his horizons too.

Worley & Obetz needs Obetz to be a jack of all trades, as local fuel company executives often are.

On occasion he still drives delivery trucks and makes service calls to fix heating systems.

“It’s no fun to get up at 2 o’clock in the morning to go out and fix somebody’s heating system. But at the same time, people are very appreciative of that.

“It’s something that you can see makes a difference in the quality of their lives,” he said.

Although he finds driving trucks enjoyable and service calls satisfying, Obetz is most passionate about Worley & Obetz’s initiatives in renewable fuels.

Energy independence

The environmental and economic advantages of the cleaner-burning, domestic-source fuels appeal to him.

But what resonates the deepest in Obetz is the prospect of saving American lives by helping the nation become energy independent.

“The reality of it is — and I will say this strongly because I have a lot of conviction around it — the longer we take to develop ethanol and other alternative fuels, the reality is, the more of our children are going to die fighting for oil...,” said Obetz, referring to the current war in Iraq and the Persian Gulf War before it.

Obetz, who with his wife Melissa have a 16-month-old son named Gavin, continued:

“There are other local issues that certainly need to be addressed (in building renewable-fuel production capacity). But that to me is the overriding concern and the biggest driver for renewable fuels.

“The environmental aspects are nice about it; the economic aspects are nice about it. But we’ve got to stop fighting for oil. The reality of it is, we don’t have to (fight for oil).

“It’s not going to be an easy road. But we can get there, if we commit to it. We want to be one of those companies that’s out in front and commits itself to it,” he said.

Worley & Obetz has done that for the last five years.

It began exploring biofuels containing refined soybean oil in 2001, when it began testing them at the request of High Steel, then added H.H. Stauffer to the test group.

Finding the product worked well, in 2004 Worley & Obetz put refined soybean oil in all of its heating oil and all of the diesel fuel sold at its stations, and started offering the biodiesel to all wholesale customers.

It was the first firm in Pennsylvania to sell bioheating oil.

“We didn’t really ask (customers). We told them. Very nicely, but we said, ‘If you want to do business with us, this is the way it is.’ We expected to lose customers.

“We were happily surprised that we did not. ... To date, we have not lost a single customer because of that. In fact, we’ve had a net gain in customers,” said Obetz.

Worley & Obetz didn’t stop there.

New plant

A year later, Worley & Obetz built the East Coast’s first biofuel blending plant at a pipeline terminal in Highspire. The plant uses a computerized blending system to mix biofuel with petroleum diesel or heating oil, for pickup by a host of fuel distributors.

In 2005, it deepened its involvement in alternative fuels by agreeing to buy some of the diesel fuel to be made out of waste coal at a plant under construction in Mahanoy City, Schuylkill County.

Earlier this year, Worley & Obetz became the first firm in Pennsylvania to sell E85, suitable for flexible-fuel vehicles, although sometimes it needs to send its tanker trucks as far as Iowa to pick up ethanol.

The need for those long-distance runs would be eliminated by the Conoy Township plant, which would supply ethanol to Worley & Obetz and other fuel distributors.

The site was eyed for an ethanol plant three years ago by another group, Penn-Mar, which later withdrew its plan and tried unsuccessfully to build the project in Chambersburg.

Obetz said Penn-Mar invited his firm to invest in that venture. But Worley & Obetz declined, in part because “we didn’t feel like the market was ready. We didn’t have enough demand for it.”

Now there is, Obetz believes.

Although oil prices fluctuate, the overall trend remains upward, a direction that pushes the public toward accepting renewable-fuel alternatives. State and federal policy now encourages renewable fuels too.

Pluses of Conoy

Locally, the Conoy Township tract since was rezoned from agricultural to industrial. As such, an enthanol plant is allowed there if the township approves it as a conditional use.

Lancaster Biofuels is expected to apply for a conditional use in late December or early January, leading to a hearing on the request starting as early as February or March.

If all approvals are secured, Lancaster Biofuels would buy the 65-acre site from the trash-to-steam incinerator’s operator, the Lancaster County Solid Waste Authority.

Having the incinerator next door is a key reason why Lancaster Biofuels wants the site for making ethanol out of corn.

The ethanol plant would use the steam to heat the corn mash, a major step in the production process, rather than burn fossil fuels to make the heat.

This would lead to the plant having a 200 percent positive energy balance, meaning the end product (ethanol) would provide twice the amount of energy that was consumed to create it.

“As far as we know, this would be the most environmentally beneficial ethanol plant in the country,” said Obetz.

Other assets of the rural site include a nearby freight-rail line and nearby roads, which would be used to bring in 20 million bushels of corn annually to produce 60 million gallons of ethanol.

Lancaster Biofuels has started talking to neighbors in the area to hear their concerns, which focus on the plant’s potential noise, traffic, safety and environmental impacts, and the tract’s geologic stability.

But Lancaster Biofuels still considers the property “the best site for ethanol in the area,” said Obetz.

“(The neighbors) support renewable fuels, but understandably, they don’t want it in their backyard. This is something we’ve thought long and hard about. Some of them are our customers.

“Unfortunately, it has to be in somebody’s backyard. And it makes sense, because of the infrastructure that’s available and the proper zoning..., to build it there. Unfortunately, it’s going to have to be. We can’t build it on the back side of the moon.”