Diary of a Mad Scientist

This is from the infopop forum blogs thread, and it was dated
22 July 2004 . Not to be confused with my current East Coast trip (I’m posting it in feb 2005 and editing the timestamp so it goes back into the archives back when this particular blog didnt’ exist yet).
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I’m sitting here on the other side of the continent from home, and I’m on a road trip I didn’t plan to do. I had no intention of going to New England anytime really. Oops. Going home tomorrow.

Jeff Biosmell talked me into coming out here with him to pick up /fix up a van he’d bought via eBay- it’s one of the Mercedes 0309-D buses that are supposedly all over Europe but which are oddities here. They’re 19 feet long- the size of an airport shuttle bus, and are powered by a cute little 4-cylinder diesel. This one, a 1975 model, came with custom license plates that say “Turtle” and a speedometer that rather optimistically goes up to 80 mph. I think that perhaps the importers didn’t do the math right on their kilometers to miles per hour conversion or something- everyone I’ve ever talked to says these trucks have a top speed of 50 mph top speed or so.

Anyway Jeff wanted me along to help him get this thing running and to help him drive it back across country - it’s been sitting for about two years and is in “restoration project” condition. We live about 3,000 miles from it’s current resting place. I really, really can’t afford the time or the expense or the lost wages of being on a road trip right now, especially as I’m going off on a huge long teaching trip at the end of the summer. I’m supposed to be home, working to pay for the ‘other’ trip, and also just working on the organizing logistics- something that involves internet access and a phone, not easy to do from a passenger seat 3000 miles away. I tried really hard over the past few months to weasel out of the trip, but in the end everyone else whom Jeff asked along backed out too, and I agreed that we could tag the trip onto what was originally supposed to be my short jaunt to the NBB meeting in Washington DC in mid-July.

from July 22

The following morning was a frantic re-costuming into business clothes costumes for that afternoon’s National Biodiesel Board board meeting. You see, the meeting had a dress code, and today was Business Casual (the next day was more formal ‘business attire’ as that was the day we were supposed to meet with our Elected Officials, lobby them about biodiesel, and impress them with our ability to wear business clothing). I’d been wondering for days just what Business Casual means for women’s clothing, and watching commuters on public transit to try and decipher the code. Of course I flew out here with three bags of tools and books, and brought almost no extra clothes due to the ‘weight of luggage/getting around on public transit’ issue (but I brought along some high heel shoes that I’d dumpster-dived), figuring I’d stop at a thrift store or some Sweatshop Clothing Outlet or something and buy the appropriate costumes that day. Fortunately we were now staying with another Takoma Park woman who dresses like a model, and she had a closetful of Business Costume to loan out. She lent all four of us (including the men) the appropriate clothing, and off we went in appropriate Business Casual (theirs all involved mustard yellow Piedmont Biofuels shirts, so they made quite a uniformed crowd once we hit the board meeting). Socially retarded that we are, we were making fun of each other for not being dressed in our usual grease or workclothes. Oh and talking about tanks if I remember right.

The first thing to greet me coming out of the Metro in DC was a giant sign that blared “THIS BUS POWERED BY CLEAN NATURAL GAS”. Oh brother. Biodiesel’s not even on the map as far as marketing goes. Then I passed a billboard for “Clean Energy From Coal” and remembered that I was in DC where it seems that half the (middleclass that is) residents seem to have some sort of government consultant job and that their opinions help shape the government that covers all the rest of the country. And that there were about a bazillion special interests vying for their attention and for that of the Elected Officials (and their aides and their aides’ consultants). Biodiesel was supposed to do it’s best this week against the clamor of other Special Interests.

The NBB meeting started with some routine work and then proceeded to the small producer issue which we were partially there to witness. They voted on the new NBB compromise policy (cutting the dues for small producers in half), after announcing that they’d struck the small producer workgroup’s recommended “quality testing requirements for all members” before it went to the vote . Wow, that was quick, we’d been demanding something along the lines of that compromise, in the NBB convention hallway just six months ago, and I was insisting that the NBB could make the issue go away “ at the stroke of a pen”. I’d known that this compromise was likely to be the change in policy for a few months now (Joe Jobe had been promoting “$2500 a year, with a deal on BQ 9000 certification” for about six months). Right after that, a guy from ADM had the appropriately clueless industry kneejerk reaction and stood up to proclaim that it was tragic (well he didn’t really say tragic) that allowing small producers access to the market was going to doom them to selling B100 where quality matters much more than in blends, and that there’s no way that these small producers can afford the safety equipment and quality control to make quality fuel “the way we [bigger producers that is] can”. He also mentioned something about 1970’s European biodiesel plants having explosions (I think) in this context of our lack of safety equipment. As Mr. Kneejerk sat down, I spied in front of him the NBB member whose company had made and sold to us some offspec fuel about a year ago.

Me and Jennifer and the Mustard Yellow Shirt Crowd and Bill Levitt all filed out to the hallway to have a huddle on how we felt about the compromise issue. Joe Jobe followed us out to ask the same. I of course immediately played my self-appointed role (as “bad cop”) and asked him why the “quality testing for all NBB members” rule got struck. He said that the NBB’s concern is that they don’t want to become a policing organization or something along those lines. Waahhh! This could have really been a revolutionary change in the biodiesel industry had this rule become policy. It’s really kind of amazing that forcing the small producer issue resulted in a much greater issue coming to light- that of quality control and large scale producers. I had the feeling that we were somewhat playing roles- The Piedmonts took the opportunity to tell Joe that instead of giving the NBB $2500 last winter they’d instead spent it on a tanker truck to sell B100 from, and several of us waved my copy of the NBB membership agreement in his face and asked him questions about how the new ruling affects some of the other NBB regulations (the NBB really doestn’ like giving these out). I occasionally got the feeling that some of us like pointing out to the NBB that sometimes, well, we are in a position to do ‘an end run around the NBB’ on some issues that the NBB would rather be leading all us sheep along on.

The rest of the day was interesting because much of it was dominated by committee presentations, which some of us techie heads liked. Steve Howell, the Technical Committee Chair (I think) presented a lot of great info about where NBB research is going. At lunch we followed him out like a flock of mustard yellow polo shirts, and surrounded him with questions.

I was bugging Steve about the justifications that are used in the auto/Fuel Injection Equipment/petroleum industries for opposing biodiesel based on “distillation curve” specifications grounds, and on viscosity grounds. At one point I mentioned the point that Dr. Van Gerpen’s always makes about the fact that biodiesel’s greater viscosity doesn’t actually impair operation or equipment lifespan, since the same FIE equipment is designed to operate on petrodiesel in winter temperatures which can have the same viscosity as biodiesel has at it’s lowest usable temps, since biodiesel stops being usable (ie clouding/cold weather filter clogging and gelling) long before it gets more viscous and gets outside the normal diesel viscosity range. Steve sounded glad to hear this argument again but pointed out that Delphi asserts that they have had injector pump seizures where shafts snapped on biodiesel in cold weather. He happened to mention them as “Delphi, formerly Lucas”, which rang a bell for me about viscosity and those injection pumps.
I told him that it’s well known among SVO enthusiasts worldwide that Lucas/CAV pumps are inordinately sensitive to viscosity and that they are prone to failures on SVO but that other pumps don’t have the same experience. He was surprised to hear this, and I realized that some of the technical experience we have with pushing the envelope with SVO and biodiesel can actually be useful in the work that he and others do via the ASTM standards development and other work that involves answering to fuel injection equipment manufacturers concerns. Essentially I think that this sort of exchange on technical issues is something that the NBB needs to hear.

I’d already been planning to join ASTM and to get on the biodiesel committees, but this Board meeting really brought home the importance of having more of us do this. Jennifer talked with him about the same subject, and about trying to work together on making more quantitative and useful the ‘data’ that Biofuel Oasis has to collect on it’s customers for the California Department of Measurement Standards (a huge issue in California is that they just made B100 sales illegal other than through variances and ‘coops’ and that Oasis and others have to apply for this variance until such a time as B100 standalone standard becomes available… and at the meeting that day, Steve admitted that the project of the B100 standalone standard wasn’t even on the table at ASTM anytime soon…)

also from July of this year:

Piedmont Biofuels arrived from their long journey from North Carolina at the crack of midnight, and I got to go out and meet the Van I was to drive for the next couple of weeks. It’s a beauty (1998 GMC Savana). Oh and the people attached to the vaaan were Rachel and Leif, who among other things teach a three-month biofuels class at a community college, and Chris Jude, who is starting a biodiesel project at Appalachian State University in Boone and is the Piedmont summer intern, starting that day. The Piedmonters were mumbling something about tanks they’d seen on the way and probably something about plumbing when I walked out to meet them. Uh-oh, The Geeks Have Landed, I’m not alone now.

I shook the poor Piedmonters awake after about four hours of sleep and headed down to class, still having no plan for how we were organizing the syllabus for the day between four teachers.

As expected, people were piling in to the parking lot about an hour early. We locked them out of the workshop space and made them drink coffee and entertain each other while we frantically arranged the last-minute labware that the Piedmonters brought, and gave the syllabus half an eye. Co-teacher Jennifer Radtke arrived at the last minute, from a redeye flight from the West Coast, and 30 other people crammed into the shop room to be educated (and entertained.)

Class was absolutely awesome! We did OK with all the hands-on stuff, blasted through almost all of the promised curriculum (with the exception of acid-base process). Ethanol and KOH and various equipment topics got covered, and everyone got hands-on and titrated and made various engineered failures and successes, and tested Bill’s fuel, and made a batch in the reactor, and bubblewashed a couple of five-gallon oil jugs full of two types of fuel to demonstrate emulsification. Jennifer was there to add biodiesel distributor experience to that of Piedmont, as well as her extensive homebrew teaching experience. It’s weird how much me and Jennifer’s experiences as “full-timer” biodiesel educators parallel Rachel and Leif’s- Jennifer and I also taught some three-month courses together just like they did, and we’re all going absolutely off the deep end with our nerdy obsessions with tanks and plumbing and pumps, to that point where I think we can’t really relate to normal people anymore (or at least it seems this way to me). I’m really impressed with Rachel and Leif’s teaching skills and knowledge of this topic.

People were there from several states. There were a few environmentalist organic farming hippie leftwingers with antiwar leftist stickers and there were right-wing people with “Get the US Out of the UN” bumper stickers as well. I’ve had the feeling, sitting in leftist California biodiesel circles, that unlike California , homebrewing is not a hippie hobby in other parts of the country, and the two classes I’ve done recently outside of California really bear this out- this is a more diverse movement than many people who haven’t met us in person often assume (Lyle’s blog at www.biofuels.coop/blog stereotypically refers to homebrewers as the ‘nipple ring crowd’ but I somehow doubt this is true for the large number of the middleaged conservative gentlemen in the room)

About 9 hours later we were back to Takoma Park at a party, hiding in the back like the socially-challenged tanks-and-plumbing crowd that we are, and it was time for… a meeting! Yep. It never ends. We had a meeting to design the curriculum for the five-day Biodiesel Intensive workshop we’re teaching in September at Piedmont. We’ll be building equipment at that class, using it, working on methanol recovery, making full batches and taking them through the entire wash process, and more, with far more student ‘contact hours’ with the material than our shorter classes can offer.

also from the blogs thread at the forum and from July 22 2004

I woke up in the morning to meet my host, and shortly figured out that we had met in the past (outside of biodiesel). Small world. She had been running SVO since about 1998, and was a very sharp, efficient organizer. Their coop was an informal ‘cell’-like affair with a beautifully built plastic processor and absolutely great basic infrastructure on a deck in the back of her garage. They’ve got the Host Institution connections (ie parasitising the waste that comes off of research facilities, just like we do in the Bay Area with lab salvage) and had nice lab gear. They kept apologizing for it being unprofessional!
The plumbing layout for this reactor/wash tank was exactly like the Appleseed reactor, but it preceded Appleseed and was nicely TIG-welded in stainless steel. It looks like we’ve hit on the lowest-common-denominator pump-mixed reactor, since everyone keeps arriving at the same place with how to plumb these things.

Nadine introduced me to her 4-year-old with a “This is Mark- she makes biodiesel”. The four-year-old immediately got an extremely disturbed look on her face and hid behind her mother. “ she knows biodiesel’s the competitor for her mother’s attention” Nadine explained. I can only imagine, knowing how much time the stuff can take in a co-op setting!

We spent that afternoon making fuel and having a workday with a few folks from the co-op. What a nice feeling. People intermittently asked quality control and KOH questions , and we worked on making fuel with their reactor. They had the same experiences as we do out West with the coops- lots of curiosity and general interest from people, but many people without much time to put into the process. It seems that for them too, no great idea stands out about how to compensate people (ie in fuel) for their different levels of time involvement and oil collections contributions, and they also had a small listserve that served as an informational point for the locals. They started the group with a bunch of people putting in $100 (Team Canola Co-op was the same)

They’re using a 110 gallon reactor and mistwashing in the same tank, and are on a fairly slow schedule as far as their production schedules go. They also gave me a water heater and a barrel for my travel processor. I told them about standpipe wash tanks and about using multiple tanks to speed up production capacity. They had good titration technique and low-ffa oil, but had some inexplicably soapy samples. They are using the ‘heat and let settle’ method for dewatering, which doestn’ always work well. Since they have a plastic processor they can’t actually bring the oil up to ‘boiling off water’ temperatures. They also work outdoors and had trouble working with sludg-ey oil in the wintertime. I suggested building a preheating barrel out of an upside-down drum (ie turn a closed head barrel upside down, cut off the former bottom, then thread a water heater element and an adaptor into the former 2” bung, along with a ball valve in the smaller bung. Insulate the daylights out of the barrel. Wire some cable to the heating element, ground the heating element using a c-clamp and attach a plug on the other end. Voila! Dump in gloppy WVO Slush all you want, and heat to liquify so that your processor can handle it.)

In the middle of the workday I sat on the lawn with my book for 25 minutes and tried to figure out where I’d gone wrong in the soap titration info which I’d printed all over the web and in my book this spring. I called Kalib in California, and we both took out calculators and re-worked the formula we came up with. Eventually it turned out to be a fraction accidentally inverted in a formula, and I’ve got that squared away enough to correct the information.

Everyone gets excited about the ‘new’ (to homebrewers) soap test, I’m finding. It’s the test whereby you titrate a sample of unwashed biodiesel against a solution of hydrochloric acid in the presence of bromophenol blue (sp?) indicator, and it is one of the few quality tests that homebrewers have which is qualitative and gives you hard numbers you can compare to another brewers’ numbers. It helps troubleshoot just what it is that causes washing problems (ie emulsification). In general my quality testing goes something like this: do a wash test (shake a jar of biodiesel and water and see how long it takes the stuff to separate again after emulsifying), then try and discern what caused any emulsification. It used to be that looking at the color of the water and testing it’s pH was the way we guessed at soap causing the problems, which isnt’ terribly accurate. We would also perform a reprocess test to look for underconverted material (which could be the other emulsification-causing problem). Having one solid concrete set of numbers to work off of to eliminate one variable was a great step forward.
From talking to these guys and other homebrewers I’m also finding that a number of people don’t know about ‘drying’ their washed biodiesel and are often using it while it’s still hazy.

I met a guy who is working on a Bus Project (this one is an Independent Media machine with video production facilities) in Long Island, which is encouraging as I don’t think of NYC as a place that gets much biodiesel/SVO ‘live’ info.