Diary of a Mad Scientist

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I had already planned to just fly to the NBB meeting, meet up with the Piedmont Biofuels people to coteach a workshop in the DC area at a homebrew site that already had a processor similar to mine. I was going to fly out and fly back, which these days is cheap what with discount airlines and all. But Tom bought an eBay van on the East Coast at the same time as I was going through my deliberations, and it needed to be driven back West as well- I put two and two together and we all agreed that all this van-juggling could be combined into one logical trip. Obviously the word ‘easy’ didn’t surface during the logistics discussions. Did I mention that Tom’s van was in North Carolina and Jeff’s was in Maine, a distance of some 1000 more miles, and that’s before the crosscontinent haul?

So I put in a phone call to Piedmont Biofuels in North Carolina, who were coteaching our Washington DC workshop. Rachel agreed to pick up Tom’s van, drive it to DC with some workshop supplies, hand it off to me at the class. I was going to fly out a few days before the class with tools, class text books, and a bunch of other materials, and spend a couple of days or so setting up the rest of the class prep. The logistics of the classes I teach are staggering, and I was going to figure it out in two days of prep, starting with nothing (buying all kinds of supplies, making fuel for wash demonstration, making sure that there was good oil and a variety of bad oil samples for class, buying methanol, and checking out/finishing the reactor we were going to use). After the class and the NBB meeting, I’d build a reactor for a gentleman from the Biofuel list, and scrounge a water heater and the supplies to build one for myself somehow. Then I was to drive north, pick up Jeff at Boston airport, and while in Maine, somehow find oil and make fuel for the trip while we worked on the D-309 bus. Or so the theory goes.

Trouble is that the Piedmonters couldn’t get to DC till the night before our incredibly logistically complex workshop, and they didn’t want to drive 6 hours with methanol in the van, nor could I reasonably ask them to do ALL the runaround for class prep as they were far too busy themselves.

In order to deal with the class prep, I started to rent a car- then decided to double check on the company’s credit card policy. To my fright, I learned that since I don’t have a real credit card (ie I use ‘ATM’ card for such things), none of the rental companies would guarantee that they’d actually rent to me until they do a credit check. And they absolutely won’t do a credit check till I’m at the airport in DC, and no there’s no way to do it online, over the phone, or at their offices in California, or at all before I arrive in DC with all my crap. And since I don’t have a credit card and any credit, I’d probably fail the credit check- but I don’t actually know that for sure. Also my plans depended on bringing an immensely heavy collection of luggage along (ie tools and class supplies, oil pump and processor parts), and I didn’t know anyone in DC well enough to ask them to drag out to the evil Dulles Airport and get me. arghhhh.

I made my usual ‘spam’ round of class advertisements all over the internet- and we got some 30 people responding. The Mid-Atlantic region is practically one gigantic city- from Boston to Richmond- and a lot of people seemed willing to brave the drive up I-95 to go shake up bottles of biodiesel and hear the four of us quack about quality control. In all of this communicating, a solution to my car errands dilemma emerged- I found out that there were a couple of ‘coops’ in DC- one for commercial fuel bulk buy, and one small one that homebrews. That Takoma Park homebrewer group contacted me and offered all sorts of wonderful help. I found out where the methanol sources were, what public transit goes where, and found places for me and the Piedmont Biofuels horde to stay during our spree in DC. People from both coops collected two-liter bottles for the class, and lent us lab gear, and offered a location to brew up the various ‘samples’ I would use in class. All this happened over the internet about three days before I was to fly to the East Coast, and they were absolutely awesome about the last-minute requests I kept flinging onto their poor listserve.

I got to the airport, worried about how security would feel about the bromothymol blue indicator powder (with the label worn off but still obviously some sort of LAB CHEMICALS) and the box of syringes (for the class to use in titration practice) which were in my checked luggage. It turned out that I also had a pocketknife (that I’d forgotten about) visible right in the outside mesh pocket of my carryon bag. They found and threw out that one of course, then waved me through. I landed in DC and found that I had also had accidentally brought along a box cutter in the same carryon bag, which the airport screeners and I didn’t find! You get what you pay for I guess- my flight crosscountry was $92. Scary.

Bill Levitt, the host of the Pasadena MD workshop we were doing, picked me up from public transit. I told him over the phone that I would be the one at the station who has the ‘Okie Dust Bowl Refugee look”- my luggage needed an ‘Oregon or Bust’ sign. Bill had taken the day off work to run errands for the class with me, and we ran him ragged doing this. I got to Pasadena at 10 am, and we weren’t out of the errand-running/workshop prep till 10 that night. In between we were babbling on about biodiesel and all the lists we were both on. I remembered that there’s the hobby of biodiesel making and then there’s the hobby of biodiesel lists and forums. It’s like a huge penpalship. One of my objectives on this trip and on my fall tour is to meet as many of the penpals as possible.

Bill has a warehouse space for his business selling valves to wastewater treatment plants. He’d been making biodiesel in 5-gallon buckets for a while, doing lots of liter batch experimenting, and had just built a water heater reactor using the Appleseed design and some nice salvaged parts. We decided to alter it somewhat, and to work on the oil pump I’d brought, and to pick up hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and titration stuff, along with methanol and lye and small pots for oil testing and safety gear for 20 people and so on!

One of the my most hated activities is going to Home Depot. We made several trips there, and to a couple of Ace Hardwares, and to the thrift store, and to an industrial supply, and on and on like that for the remainder of the day. Finally we ended up at Tilley Chemical in Baltimore to buy methanol that he’d prearranged for. Big mistake.

The chemical supplier segregated visitors to a sort of stairwell lobby, and we had to phone in our order to some peon upstairs. We asked about the assay on some KOH and ordered our barrel of methanol. The place gave us about 8 wrong answers on the KOH as different underlings kept trying to find the answer and their overlings kept changing their minds about whether or not they had it in stock. Then the parade of Methanol Questions came charging at us. We waited in the stairwell for a full hour while several different grades of company bureaucrats came out every eight minutes like clockwork to ask us what the application is. I guess we kept giving the wrong answer as they’d send their higher-ups to intorrogate us on what the application is. Now take note that Bill is an articulate, conservatively dressed middleaged engineer type (in fact he’s an engineer or something in his professional life)- the exact ‘type’ of person I’d imagine running a commercial biodiesel facility and ordering methanol by the barrel during the pilot plant stage, not the average person’s stereotype of either a terrorist or a methamphetamine producer. It was amazing to watch the bureaucratic wheels grind along.

Finally an older guy with mussed hair came downstairs and got into an argument with Bill over the fact that he didn’t understand why it is we were buying a flammable product for and that Bill shouldn’t be questioning why they kept us waiting for an hour because they had a protocol to follow. Amazing. Obviously this one was from the north end of the nearby Mason-Dixon line, judging by his New Jersey-like attitude towards customer service.
Worst of all, we knew already that we could have just driven down to the MRI racetrack (www.mridrag.com) near DC with whatever kind of fuel container we happened to have on hand and they’d have filled us up with blue dyed methanol for a cheap price. Besides, Bill IS actually professionally in an industry that uses methanol for one of it’s processes. It was weird watching the standoff that resulted as though we were trying to buy anthrax culture or something. The older guy invoked the fact that it was ‘Post-9/11’ and practically accused Bill of being a potential terrorist, and kept ranting that he had no way of knowing that Bill’s was a legitimate company. Bill kind of pointed out that he was frustrated that there was no way to prove right then and there that his company was a ‘legitimate’ one. Wow. I mean, the customer is always right, right? Wrong. I’d hate to be a hippie biodieseler who tries to deal with this place.

Well, they finally released the poor barrel of methanol to us, and off we went into Rush Hour Traffic (I think that gets a proper noun on the I-95 corridor), having wasted our precious ‘before Rush Hour’ timing on these idiots. We spent a few hours re-building and welding on some optional ‘bells and whistles’ onto his processor, and I got to Takoma Park at 11 pm, absolutely exhausted and grateful for all the logistics coming together and everyone who was making it happen . I was staying there that night with someone I didn’t know, who left me a key and a bed and was gone dancing for the night. I was so worn out that I didn’t even have the energy to go check out her co-op’s biodiesel processor setup till the following morning.

Contrasts and a Countdown

I”m in the countdown to leaving on my two or three-month trip (the duration depends on how I choose to look at it- I’m back to California in November, but then am off on other shorter teaching jaunts until January). I will be on the road on September 1st, teaching in Salt Lake City where some really enthusiastic people have been setting up a co-op. Then it’s on to Colorado, then to North Carolina, and then all around the Midwest with a shorter East Coast visit. In the meantime I”m buried by work in preparation for this project. I”m still working on getting my travel vehicle set up. The July trip kind of eaten the majority of my prep time (and most of my money!), and I’m scrambling, just as I expected.

It seems like every other day I alternate time at Machine Shop down in West Oakland, and time up in Marin County where I actually live. What a contrast. We’re in the industrial dead zone down there, near the freeway that collapsed in the 89 earthquake. Out of the dead zone is typical inner city poverty. It’s grey- grey concrete, grey industrial warehouses, and drab asphalt siding on the homes you pass on the way over, with the occasional burned out car. Up here in San Rafael I live in a beautiful house on a hill, with treetops at eye level. Our place has skylights and glass everywhere. I’ve got a huge window with a view of the squirrels and birds’ playgrounds right from my bedroom. There’s a hawk that hunts pigeons in our yard. The skylights draw the bright green of the treetops inside, and everywhere you look in our living room is a riot of green year-round. Our windows overlook downtown and everything is within walking distance- if I wasn’t always getting in a car to drive to Oakland. Two of my three roommates are somewhat New Age, and the place is beautifully decorated. Machine Shop on the other hand is dark and greasy. You can’t sit down on any surfaces without getting dirty.

I can’t sustain the contrasts. I’m moving out of the Marin County household when I leave for my trip- it just makes no sense to commute the distance. I’m not making firm plans for where I’ll live when I get back, but it’ll have to be in Berkeley or Oakland again. Which can have it’s own peace, as far as cities go. I’m really looking forward to biking everywhere again.

In the meantime I’m trying to decide what I’m driving on that trip and how I’m paying for it -two weeks from now (yikes). I”ve got an elderly Ford pickup truck and a trailer- which would be the cheapest route, but I’m not looking forward to traveling in an open-top truck for two months, and I already know that things are seriously wrong with the Ford (ie smoking, stickshift tranny’s somewhat on the way out) . On the other hand it’s actually reasonably (well, sort of) fuel-efficient for a big vehicle that can handle all that weight- I got 20 mpg if I recall correctly, towing a heavy trailer, on the way back from my Southwest trip in May, with plenty of power to spare.

But I’m looking instead at buying a van in a hurry- so I’m off this morning to rural West Marin to go work on a ’short bus’- a 1990 van-schoolbus hybrid for $1500 (basically a van chassis with dually wheels in the back and a square short-bus box body). It’s powered by a GM 6.2 which isn’t something I’ve owned before. There’s a big ding on one side where they hit a tree, which makes it cheap.

I’m quite broke after the July trip and am scrambling, finding everyone who owes me $100 here or $75 there, and trying to hustle up some cash building biodiesel processors (hence part of the welding marathon). (And yes, I’m whining). I’m about 1/3 of the way to the $3,000 that I wanted to have to pay for the trip, and it only took about a week of work, so it’s looking manageable. My elderly computer is driving me nuts (when I try and do graphics work for Veggieavenger or elsewhere) and I’ll need to spend$ to get a better one somewhere on this trip or at least find some cheap RAM for it. Arggh. Somewhere in all of this madness is a class or two here, tabling (I think) at SolFest, work on a PowerPoint for another biodiesel project, and learning how to do websites. Arggh! Oh and making a few hundred gallons of fuel to pay my rent trade at Machine Shop for two months. Arggh! And making a couple hundred book copies somehow for the trip. Arggh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I decided somewhere on the last road trip that I am probably going to spend a couple of years doing these tours, so I”m looking at these wide-box-body vehicles with the long-term view in mind, and am looking forward to having a camper/RV setup inside. Even if I don’t buy this particular Chevy bus, I think I want to look for something similar for future tours (I’ve got to admit that I was considering the 55 mph Mercedes 0-309-D like Jeff got… but that’s not something to put together in a hurry we’ve learned) . My plan is to divide the shortbus van down the middle and have a little living area in the front, and store the class gear/fuel tanks/welder/tools in the other half (which leaves room for me to put the heavy stuff over the rear axle). I’m not looking forward to parking something this big (van-length, but wider), but it seems like a good tradeoff for the living space flexibility. I really want to have a desk while I’m on the road! I’ve been enjoying my organized space at home, and don’t want to try recreating this “organizing” on the bench seat of a non-king-cab pickup truck. I gotta admit that I was reading Jan Steinman’s blog about his VeggieVanGogh art fair van with no small amount of envy. Before Tom bought his GMC Savana that I delivered across country for him, he had a discussion list for Burning Man RV’ers called ‘Vanlust’ (they apparently talk about setting up their various RV conversion systems in there- the essential stuff like the laptop full of music, the GPS and the hot springs locator software. Computer Geeks… um, just in case someone takes this the wrong way, I wouldn’t do things that tech-ed-out myself and I think they’re just a little silly about the whole thing). I’ve got that Vanllust thing pretty bad, though with all my friends buying vans lately, it’s more starting to be more like ‘vanjealousy’.

Mark

Last week I was back to my normal (abnormal) Bay Area existence.
I did a day of paid work on a friend’s big homebrew system that I’m building. I ran into a stopping point where I needed to weld fittings onto some tanks before I could do anything else, and went over with my tanks to Machine Shop (see first Blogs and Bio-diaries thread for details, which have been changed to protect the guilty).

Machine Shop is where I make fuel and have my own shop/"tools staging area", and yes, we really do have a machine shop stocked with huge machine shop tools (lathe, mill, CNC mill, and much more) from a naval base that was decommisioned. The place has a lot of character, or rather, characters. Including the bad neighborhood’s street people and characters- a tweaker (that’s methamphetamine addict to you) showed up on our block last month with an oxyacetylene torch, and proceeded to cut our landlord’s very large military truck in half (granted, it’s a ‘parts truck that looks completely derelict, but that’s still the weirdest Oakland Tweeker story I’ve ever experienced…)

Unfortunately for my little welding project there was a two-evening art show/rock show slated for that weekend. In the days leading up to the Art Thing, everyone at the shop was hogging all the welders 24 hours a day, as they were, in typical artist fashion, all about five days behind on their sculpture projects for the show but there were only two days left. I killed time for two days in the midst of the chaos by making the biodiesel space functional again while I waited for an unattended welder to appear. Not a chance. The first thing that happened in my reuniting with the biodiesel room, was getting sprayed at high pressure with rancid waste vegetable oil when I cracked open a drum that had gotten slightly dented by a forklift. Oil in the eyes sucks- you can’t wash it out. Constant and embarrassing blinking gets rid of it hours later.

I had very much ‘stepped back’ from working on the biodiesel project over there after my Southwest trip in May, having completely burned out in the fall/winter/spring. Machine Shop biodiesel room is a theoretically 200-gallon-per-day facility (I do not in fact make that much). The equipment parts costs are paid for by a guy I call The Investor (since we’re not planning on making money with this thing, and since it’s not a business, he’s not really an investor, more like a landlord), and right now I’m the only participant. The project used to be the Oakland Biodiesel Brigade co-op, but Tom fired the other members after it took too much work organizing non-resident volunteers, then dropped out himself for the most part. So I’m stuck with a very heavy time investment into a project that was supposed to be a co-op but is now going no where, but don’t quite want to abandon it as that sort of throws away a lot of work I did for eight or nine months of the past year. I’m slowly continuing to work on the infrastructure, figuring that sometime it’ll attract people (who are hopefully also Shop renters) for a co-op. I think I talked a lot about co-ops in the other Blogs and Bio-diariesthread- they are an amazingly difficult thing to manage in the Bay Area, especially on a large scale.

Friday night art opening came and I was in the biodiesel room behind people’s backs, clandestinely making some fuel while well-dressed people whom I didn’t know wandered around just inches from (and on the other side of a wall from) the dirty greasy hell that is the half-abandoned co-op space. I had weird feelings all weekend about being at this show- These days, I am absolutely NOT social outside the biodiesel world- my biodiesel pursuit has swallowed up my social life- I never go to music events or parties or have any appreciation for art or go to anything like this- and this party’s happening in my metal shop. These are all Burning Man attendees (which may not mean much to most of you, just imagine several thousand weird-looking freaky artist stereotypes all in one campout)- and I always seem to have something else to do (activist-wise usually) on the weekend that that festival happens. Tom’s been trying to drag me into that scene with no success, trying to interest me with stories of the various mechanical wonders and engineering marvels that people build in the name of machine art. No luck. This year I’ll be on my way to my Midwest Tour during Burning Man. Anyway, it was weird to finally see those people. My life is such a contrast. I’m pretty humorless, and focused sharply on this biodiesel stuff (I do consider this unhealthy and temporary). The shop was filled with people dressed to the nines. Lots of top-hats. Interesting seeing it from an outside perspective- lots of people from my age (mid-30
s) to much older, who still look like punk rock freaks, and like I should be friends with them or something. San Francisco. Me, I hang out online and talk about conservative biodiesel hobbyists.

The Art had finally been (mostly) installed and finished, I thought. I showed up the following day, Day 2 of the Art Show/Rock Thing, and people were still working. Finally by mid-afternoon I was able to get to a welder. It was like a two and a half day wait. Jeez! My project involved welding pipe to barrels- and I’m a novice welder- so it required a long practice session first. Having already ruined a good barrel in the past, I’d recently made myself a practice piece- cut a barrel in half for portability, wirebrushed the paint off in places, and drilled about ten holes in it. Now every time I weld pipe to barrels, I first practice on the half-barrel scrap before risking ruining something useful- I’m still nervous about burning holes in these tanks. The halfbarrel is now bristling with spikey pipe pieces and looks like some work of art itself. Maybe I could sell the thing as art. Anyway, getting this job done was hours of work, especially since our metal shop had been transformed into sound equipment storage from the night before, and it took three times as long as normal to do anything in the shop since you had to find where it had been “cleaned up to” first. Eventually Rock people, their roadies, their sound people, their girlfriends, their music critics, their indy video camerapersons, were flooding the place getting set up for their shows. I moved the welder outside to the alley. It involved losing about an hour- messing with the power system first to find and then make the right type of 240V outlet appear nearby, and other delays typical of working at this shop.

There was a weird gambling phenomenon going on at the same time. The Investor had made noises about putting a pretentious sounding piece of Art in the show, and later procrastinated/wavered on getting it done (he has a history of hyping up his Art to our immediate circles, and then not getting it done!). One of the other Shop residents made a public bet that The Investor wouldn’t deliver and would’t finish his project- and a ferocious betting pool started with the whole circle of friends/tenants participating. The rules of The Bet were that we could help or hinder The Investor depending on how we were betting. We have an email list and the email medium just fired this into a total frenzy. Numerous suggestions were made on what form the hindering could take. I bet $2 against the success of his Art Piece. He was supposed to hang it by 11:59:59 on the last day of the show, and timekeepers were standing by.

Anyway before the show started I was still welding and I was feeling guilty about the fact that I was working visibly and the show was about to begin- it seemed like a rude thing to do to the organizers, like I was in the way or detracting from the atmosphere or something. The Investor came through the alley and asked if I’d be out of the way when the forklift had to come through (for his project). It was 8 pm, right before the show start time, so I felt even more guilty because of the reminder. Then I realized that the conversation he was in the middle of at the time was about how to actually ‘hang’ his betted-against Art Piece (a hanging ice sculpture actually). He was still on the ‘what metal are we going to use and what should the order of installing it be’ sorts of details. I didn’t feel so bad then, about being in the middle of work and not contributing to the party atmosphere when I realized that his project- part of the show allegedly- still involved ‘planning’ with four hours of the show left of the weekend.

Anyway, at 11:40 pm, The Investor and the all the people who The Investor was able to bribe into helping him, were finally ready to hang his stupid sculpture, which he had finally finished. The Metal Shop crew inadvertently divided up into teams- Bettors Against and Bettors For. (I was loudly on the Betting Against team) At 11:40 the forklift (it’s a 35 feet tall, massive diesel monster) was driving through the art crowd. 20 minutes of art show left and he’s finally going to install the art piece. A total madhouse erupted in the alley where the thing was being installed- with people from both teams competing in some sort of sick Help Or Hinder Marathon.

Most of the well-dressed people inside, in the shop where the actual art and music were happening, had no idea that all this madness was happening out back. My clue came when someone asked me if the shop had a spare car battery, which didn’t seem like a proper request for a high-heels-and-costumes (um, not on any of us shop residents though) sort of evening. I walked out to the alley to see what the commotion was. There was a boisterous mob surrounding the huge forklift and they were jeering, hiding or stealing his tools from his helpers, trading insults, pelting The Investor with ice cubes, squirting him in the head with a spray bottle set on ‘jet’, all while he maneuvered the giant forklift into position. Since he was our authority figure in some ways, it resembled some sick ritual or something- make an effigy of the king, dressed in sackcloth and have a mob throw tomatoes at him, one day a year??? Someone jumped on the forklift, turned it off, and stole the keys. The Investor demonstrated his redneck reflexes and hot-wired the forklift. Meanwhile someone else stole the battery from behind him and ran. The “Bettors For” somehow produced another battery. The moment he got busy with the sculpture again, “Bettors Against” stole this second battery too.

I dove right into the fray and manned the water sprayer. At some point he fought back against the crowd by revving the engine repeatedly and filling the alley with acrid poorly-burned biodiesel exhaust. Biodiesel as a weapon…

I spotted my friend (now a traitor, having switched to the “Bettors For” team) bringing over the sawzall so they could free the ice sculpture from it’s fiberglass mold. I grabbed the sawzall away from him and a wrestling match for the sawzall ensued in the middle of the crowd- someone else grabbed me in a bearhug and I couldn’t see who it was- so I found myself fighting to keep from being dragged towards the Other Team by the first guy, while holding onto the sawzall, and trying to elbow or otherwise inflict harm on the person bearhugging me. It turned out the guy bearhugging me was on my team and was actually trying to help keep the sawzall from falling to the Investor’s team. We ran off with the sawzall. The ‘Betters For’ persevered with hacksaws allegedly.

“Bettors For” and The Investor prevailed, and actually hung the ice sculpture exactly two minutes before the bet was up, in spite of our best efforts. I realized that a few ‘firsts’ had occurred- the first time I’d actually attended any of the Machine Shop ‘scene’s art events, the ‘first’ time in a couple of years that I’d been to a rock show of any sort, the ‘first’ time I’d been seen “purely socializing” in about three years, and on a related note, the ‘I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun’ (since I don’t’ ever go anywhere to have fun) feeling.

I continued on my welding marathon the next couple of days while everyone else was recovering from their weekend madness. I basically made myself a bucket of wirebrushed pipe halves, and welded every scrap barrel in sight into various pieces of equipment, untill I finally got better at the thick-to-thin sort of jobs- which still did not reduce the pile of metalwork that the biodiesel room needs done, by all that much. I stayed for two days working at the metal shop, making fuel, organizing the stupid space- and degreasing. Today I had to drag myself home and forcibly leave the tools in Oakland. Which backfired when I spent the evening working on someone’s van that I’m considering buying for the tour… aaahh, vaaaan… Hope I can get it running

August 6th biodiesel.infopop.cc blogs thread:
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Steve Howell had made a board meeting presentation earlier from the NBB Technical Committee which identified obstacles within the ASTM biodiesel standards development process (mostly applies to B02 and B05, and B20- there is varied work being done to include B05 in the petrodiesel standard (ie trying to get ASTM to agree that the properties of petroleum diesel stuff aren’t widely changed when 5% biodiesel is added to it, which I think is the case in the European standard or at least in some European coutries’ rules around petrodiesel use. Yes, feel free to yawn. Lyle wrote all about how boring industry meetings are in his blog at http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000106.html).

-There is unprecedented resistance within ASTM to including 5% biodiesel in the petrodiesel standard. The resistance is coming from fuel injection equipment people, engine manufacturers, petroleum people… you name it. Their concerns are that you there isn’t a ‘good’ test for testing the blends level (there’s one in the European specs, but the US won’t accept it as adequate, MN Department of Commerce was one of the culprits in objecting to this test within the ASTM committee apparently if I understand right). God forbid someone should buy some B06 by accident. Another major concern is the lack of an oxidative or thermal stability test. We are something like at least a year from having an acceptible test developed.

- Another good piece of info to get ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ is that Steve Howell reported that ASTM D-6751 WAS designed for pure fuel (ie B100) use in mind, even though it’s labeled as a ‘blendstock’ spec and there is no current B100 standalone spec. This stuff is all important to us Californians because the difference in wording (ie blendstock versus standalone pure fuel spec) has led to regulations that effectively ban B100 sale unless you jump through some serious ‘variance’ bureaucratic hoops first. There was talk of applying these regs to the rest of the country throught he National Conference of Weights and Measures, but the NCWM decided differently recently (after lots of education by people like Jennifer, Hope, Kumar, Kimber, Kent Bullard, and the BCC I may add, along with the NBB which sort of takes all the credit in it’s own view).

-There is a move toward updating D-6751 (in terms of tightening up the regulations on acid number which are pretty lax in the US standard [they discussed what happens when they’ve done teardown tests on fuel with high acid number (like 1.3, and they found that gums, varnish, and polymers form on some types of fuel injection system components)], and tightening up the viscosity spec, which would bring it closer to European specs).
Fuel Injection manufacturers are requesting adding (or tightening up) a spec for Ca/Mg to the specification as this material can clog some new filter types (I think this is something that turns up in the wash processing with hard water, no? I have a poor understanding of this mineral residue issue), add a Na/K spec for the same clogging reason. Europe controls sodium to 5 ppm I think.
There’s another request form the FIE’s to add a 2 micron filterability spec to both the biodiesel and the petroleum diesel specs. Also there was a report that B20 has a negative effect on some fuel/water separators- which I presume also means B100??? (though that wasn’t tested of course).
-There is no real motion happening on developing the stand-alone B100 spec.
-without a B20 specification, more original equipment manufacturers are unlikely to issue statements supporting biodiesel use. Getting OEM recognition for biodiesel (B20) is a major goal of NBB work at this time.
-there were some heating oil studies mentioned in the tech committee report. They show a NOx decrease (!) with some technologies which can be used by industry as a way to ‘offset’ overall Nox increase from onroad vehicles running biodiesel.
-they mentioned some SVO studies (I didn’t get a change to ask but assume that this was SVO done improperly, ie unheated) that were done, which showed increased aldehyde and formaldehyde emissions due to the glycerine content. I will bother Steve about this in the future to get more information.

August 6th biodiesel.infopop.cc blogs thread:
**************
Steve Howell had made a board meeting presentation earlier from the NBB Technical Committee which identified obstacles within the ASTM biodiesel standards development process (mostly applies to B02 and B05, and B20- there is varied work being done to include B05 in the petrodiesel standard (ie trying to get ASTM to agree that the properties of petroleum diesel stuff aren’t widely changed when 5% biodiesel is added to it, which I think is the case in the European standard or at least in some European coutries’ rules around petrodiesel use. Yes, feel free to yawn. Lyle wrote all about how boring industry meetings are in his blog at http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000106.html).

-There is unprecedented resistance within ASTM to including 5% biodiesel in the petrodiesel standard. The resistance is coming from fuel injection equipment people, engine manufacturers, petroleum people… you name it. Their concerns are that you there isn’t a ‘good’ test for testing the blends level (there’s one in the European specs, but the US won’t accept it as adequate, MN Department of Commerce was one of the culprits in objecting to this test within the ASTM committee apparently if I understand right). God forbid someone should buy some B06 by accident. Another major concern is the lack of an oxidative or thermal stability test. We are something like at least a year from having an acceptible test developed.

- Another good piece of info to get ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ is that Steve Howell reported that ASTM D-6751 WAS designed for pure fuel (ie B100) use in mind, even though it’s labeled as a ‘blendstock’ spec and there is no current B100 standalone spec. This stuff is all important to us Californians because the difference in wording (ie blendstock versus standalone pure fuel spec) has led to regulations that effectively ban B100 sale unless you jump through some serious ‘variance’ bureaucratic hoops first. There was talk of applying these regs to the rest of the country throught he National Conference of Weights and Measures, but the NCWM decided differently recently (after lots of education by people like Jennifer, Hope, Kumar, Kimber, Kent Bullard, and the BCC I may add, along with the NBB which sort of takes all the credit in it’s own view).

-There is a move toward updating D-6751 (in terms of tightening up the regulations on acid number which are pretty lax in the US standard [they discussed what happens when they’ve done teardown tests on fuel with high acid number (like 1.3, and they found that gums, varnish, and polymers form on some types of fuel injection system components)], and tightening up the viscosity spec, which would bring it closer to European specs).
Fuel Injection manufacturers are requesting adding (or tightening up) a spec for Ca/Mg to the specification as this material can clog some new filter types (I think this is something that turns up in the wash processing with hard water, no? I have a poor understanding of this mineral residue issue), add a Na/K spec for the same clogging reason. Europe controls sodium to 5 ppm I think.
There’s another request form the FIE’s to add a 2 micron filterability spec to both the biodiesel and the petroleum diesel specs. Also there was a report that B20 has a negative effect on some fuel/water separators- which I presume also means B100??? (though that wasn’t tested of course).
-There is no real motion happening on developing the stand-alone B100 spec.
-without a B20 specification, more original equipment manufacturers are unlikely to issue statements supporting biodiesel use. Getting OEM recognition for biodiesel (B20) is a major goal of NBB work at this time.
-there were some heating oil studies mentioned in the tech committee report. They show a NOx decrease (!) with some technologies which can be used by industry as a way to ‘offset’ overall Nox increase from onroad vehicles running biodiesel.
-they mentioned some SVO studies (I didn’t get a change to ask but assume that this was SVO done improperly, ie unheated) that were done, which showed increased aldehyde and formaldehyde emissions due to the glycerine content. I will bother Steve about this in the future to get more information.

August 6th infopop biodiesel forum:
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As I said earlier, the Piedmonts and Jennifer Radtke and Bill Levitt and I mobbed Steve Howell during a break, and peppered him with questions. While on the topic of ‘important trends’ in my opinion, I want to point out that I feel there’s a huge distinction between the corporate business folks like some of the soybean board people within the NBB, and tech nerds in the industry. We can exploit the differences between purely tech people and businesspeople, I think, especially if we know what we’re talking about when it comes to this biodiesel technology (and economics for that matter).

I think that Steve is quite an NBB company man of course- most of his engineering consulting business is doing technical work for the NBB (I’ve heard anyway), but my impression is that talking with him about a topic like B100 (which he doesn’t support) is a little different than talking with a corporate Public Relations person like Joe Jobe or Jenna Higgins, or with the Soy Board wonks, whose job is justifying B02 (or P98, as in, Petroleum 98%).

In trying to identify pressure points within the NBB where we B100 supporters can have impact that eventually might lead to positive gains for B100, I strongly urge dealing with laboratory people, engineers, and other tech geeks. They just can’t resist discussin hard facts, and I’ve found that even the ones that disapprove of small producers or of B100 as a strategy for biodiesel acceptance, generally are somewhat openminded about it since they can’t resist hard facts (and really, some of our hard direct experience in the homebrew world and in the California B100 supporters community, constitutes much more ‘hard facts’ than some in the industry like to give us credit for). On the other hand, the PR guys’ job is to ‘present’ (ie twist in my admittedly biased opinion) facts in the ways that further the current Industry’s marketing strategy.

August 6th, infopop biodiesel forum:

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I think of Bill Levitt as being fairly typical of what I suspect the homebrewing population/grassroots biodiesel enthusiast world looks like. He’s a middle-class guy with college-age kids, has been running a small business for 25 years, and is politically conservative without being ‘far’ to either end of the spectrum. Bill started out with an environmental science degree, and went promptly into a career related to ‘environmental’- in the sense in which the word ‘environmental’ is applied to industrial health and safety (as opposed to ecology). He business provides equipment to the wastewater treatment industry.

I have met a number of biodiesel-interested people his age with environmental science degrees who made the same sort of career choices- there just weren’t many jobs in ‘environmental science’ 30 years ago but lots of schools in the 1970’s offering degrees in this line of study. I’m not sure those jobs are really available now either. So it looks to me like there are a number of ordinary people in the US with a sort of frustrated professional interest in environmental science who jump at the opportunity that biodiesel industry potentially provides to (potentially) get their beliefs in line with their livelihood. While checking out ‘what does the grassroots biodiesel scene REALLY look like’, I sort of filed this in my head as ‘important trend to watch out for’.

Bill went the ‘internet information overload’ route to biodiesel- lurked on the forums for a year, printed out and saved assorted info on homebrewing, and eventually started making liter batches, working his way up to 5-gallon buckets. He’s a handy engineer type, with his experience in a plumbing-related industry- and when me and the Piedmont folks visited his warehouse, everyone was quite impressed with some of the gear he’d already collected for his larger future biodiesel setup.

Bill found out about the U-Conn (university of Connecticut) presentation on biodiesel last year, and promptly drove the gazillion hours up the evil I-95 highway, to attend. If I’m not mistaking it for another New England biodiesel event, I think that conference was an industry presentation about how well everything is going in biodiesel. Keith Champa of World Energy was telling people at the U-Conn thing that ‘quality control has been great in the industry and the few problems we’ve found were ALL caught before making their way to vehicle-use consumers’ (dig around at forums.biodieselnow.com for details, Mike Briggs wrote a reportback to the forum on this event). At the same exact time (a little earlier actually) Graham Noyes of World Energy was apologizing to Northwest passenger car biodiesel users for accidentally selling them product high in glycerides and messing up their cars. The World Energy ‘quality control problem’ predated Keith Champa’s speech in which he reported that there have been no real problems. Hmmm. I swear I’m not making this up (asuming I got Keith Champa’s involvement with this correct, it might have been his replacement at WOrld Energy).

Bill went into this event as an open-minded newbie from the forums, met a bunch of other East Coast biodiesel enthusiasts, and then made a visit to Tom Leue’s homebrew setup (I think before Tom’s fire???). Somewhere down the line he got fired up about someday getting into the industry someday too. Yay. He also took an interest in the small producer issue, and like many other ‘ordinary’ people who also happen to have a good solid business sense, also thinks that there were a few problems with the NBB’s approach and that there is some merit to having different business structure and marketing strategy than the NBB pursues.

Anyway, at the NBB board meeting he was right alongside us needling Joe Jobe (well OK, sort of, I admit I’m exaggerating SLIGHTLY, I don’t think he was intending to needle anybody but we as a crowd kind of looked like we were at one point). At one point he walked up to Joe to say ‘well we’ve all been reading your NBB membership rules book that Mark has, may I get my own copy please?”. I watched Joe look slightly nervous (joe told Bill to contact the office after the board meeting). The industry and the NBB, (and I’m not speaking for Joe in particular), still has NO IDEA who we ‘grassroots’ people really are, and part of me suspects that many of them (again, not claiming to speak for Joe or anything) still have the stereotype that many of the supporters of B100 and of smallscale producers, are impractical raving lunatic idealistic hippies who know nothing about business. They haven’t really seen us at their events in any sort of numbers until recently, and the damn small producer scene is famously tight-lipped about what plans they are all actually hatching (ie no one wants to stick out their neck and talk about their business plans until they actually come to fruition, so none of us really have any idea of how many people there are out there actually trying to start up small biodiesel businesses or really of who they are. Maybe the ISU biodiesel course instructors have a better idea of this than anyone else).
I secretly find it amusing (and of course enheartening) that we turned out to be a more diverse bunch than the stereotype holds, especially since I’m sure I fall squarely into the stereotype myself just by virtue of having the stereotypical leftist SF Bay Area lifestyle. I also want to ‘out’ Bill for the fact that he was acting nervous around us and our ‘clique’- he asked me repeatedly whether it was OK for him to be tagging along with the Piedmont Biofuels folks and me and Jennifer. Some of them are young enough to be his kids.

So anyway, spending a few days hanging out with Bill and the Piedmonters, I’ve got some other vague idea forming in my head that I’m tentatively filing under ‘important trends’. It’s so vague I can’t even describe it without long rambling. It’s something about the importance of diversifying the ‘grassroots’ politically, without either side having to compromise about any of their ideologies. I think it’s quite easy within the context of the biodiesel industry specifically.

The Biodiesel Council of California and other groups I’ve worked with in California (the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop for instance) are pretty un-diverse politically. We are aware of this fact. At the CBCC conference (ie the shadow conference to the NBB convention last winter), it did come up in some of the California debates that we should not set up the BCC with completely far-leftist assumptions, language and other strategy, because even though many of the people involved in biodiesel business and advocacy in Northern California agree with this sort of language use, the Southern California biodiesel contingent is in general much more mainstream politically and actually includes conservatives unlike the groups most of us Northern California people were working in. Kalib and Spike kept playing ‘devil’s advocate’ during our CBCC ‘California statewide biodiesel organization’ discussion, kind of presenting the fact that some of the more radically leftist language just wouldn’t fly in So. Cal. I was squarely with them despite my own politics (actually all three of us are quite far-leftist I think). It just seems like it’s a stronger movement (within the development of the biodiesel industry) if it doesn’t polarize people. On the other hand, anytime you’ve got radical leftists and radical rightwing folks talking to each other, you get arguments. The Yahoo biodiesel and biofuel lists are a good example, as is the politics forum here at infopop occasionally (and parts of tdiclub once in a while). Early on in the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop we used to get rather conservative people trying to join who all thought we should run our operation completely differently (ie as a business) and it took a while for it to all “shake out” (without any fighting though) before we figured out our identity- but the conservatives never stayed. I think for industry/policy groups like the Biodiesel Council of California, we need to figure out how to diversify without all getting on each others’ nerves.

August 4th Infopop biodiesel discussion group:
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One thing that probably doesn’t ‘come across’ very well in my writing on the forums is that although I’m pretty far-left politically (I’ve almost never voted for instance because I don’t support ‘the lesser of two evils’), in real life I tend to get along with people from all sides of the political spectrum, and depending on where I live, I sometimes have as many conservative friends as radical leftist friends. My current boyfriend is a corporate dropout libertarian who at one time worked in the Alaska oil fields and therefore supports drilling in ANWR (um, we don’t talk about it). (and while we’re on the subject of political parties and political labels, I suppose I’d be called a ‘leftist agnostic’- as in, heck if I know what’s right for others?)

In addition to my political beliefs, I also have a pretty oddball background as a New York City high school dropout, and live an obviously pretty odd lifestyle (ie the fulltime biodiesel work for instance, no cell phone, tend to live with huge households of roommates, am involved with a wildly strange Burning Man artist enclave despite not being an artist, don’t work a 40 hour a week job, no credit card, used to ride freight trains and still occasionally hitchike, have run businesses and have also been a street musician, no savings, woman construction worker’s pretty unusual in my trade, no health insurance.) I think that I’m about as ‘weird’ as most people will encounter. Hopefully I have good enough communication skills that this doesn’t stop me from being friends with people who don’t fall into the same category. I have exactly three months of ‘college’ behind me- in my mid-20’s I tried it out after being deeply immersed in being a musician and in folklife study for many years – and during ‘college’ (AB Tech in Asheville, NC) the people I hung out with at school were Fundamentalist Christians which is quite far from my own background. I was fascinated by their faiths, visited their churches as a sort of anthropology/music thing, and mostly neglected to tell them a few things about my real background, which regardless of my politics, is pretty unusual (I grew up in New York City so it’s gotta seem unusual for most people in small-town North Carolina). One day it kind of came out in the creative writing class we took- me and the Fundamentalist Christians had a sort of study group at lunch- one of my Fundamentalist friends asked me to help edit her essay on Christ, and I let her read my essay, which just so happened to focus on a (heterosexual) junkie friend I had in high school whose tragic heroin addiction was driving him to (homosexual) prostitution which had been quite world-shattering information to 16-year-old me when this was all happening in real life. After reading my essay, the fundamentalist lady was kind of a bit more restrained around me to say the least. But we were still friends.

Anyway, I got involved in biodiesel after years of assorted leftist activism, and like many of us, I’d been wanting to ‘do something’ about energy misuse for years. I spent many years trying to find myself a role in ‘energy politics’, after I discovered that renewable energy is attractive to both left-wing people and right-wing people.

I discovered that if you prod ordinary people about solar power for instance, they’ll generally say that they support development of it and would use it as long as it doesn’t impact their pocketbook too heavily- and that if you ask the same people about some more touchy environment subjects like Endangered Species Act restrictions on logging, they generally have far more emotional opinions that keep us polarized to the left and the right. And renewable energy is even more attractive to some of us because of the economics involved—everyone’s affected by paying a power bill and knows what one looks like intimately, whereas not everyone’s affected by logging jobs nor has necessarily met any real-life loggers, and the two topics are therefore less and more polarizing.

Everyone loves the idea of biodiesel or biomass/farm grown fuels- whether they say ‘great idea- it’ll keep us from giving money to the oil corporations’ or whether they say ‘great idea- it’ll keep us from giving money to the terrrorists’, the subject touches on the same thing whether you come from left or right, though it tends to be said in different words. Control. Empowerment. Whatever you want to call it, I tend to think of it as ‘choice’. And Im hoping that the movement for local B100 as biodiesel, rather than faraway B20 as we have it now, is going to continue to offer that choice, for sale.

There is a stereotype in the biodiesel homebrew community that says that the folks who are homebrewing are a bunch of idealistic hippie fringe dwellers. Lyle Estill keeps referring to biodiesel activists as ‘the nipple ring crowd’ and to the biodiesel industry as ‘fat white guys’. It makes for easy ‘straw man’ setups for his essays. (and to my absolute horror, people on this forum sometimes think that his essays are my writing!)

From reading the boards like this one, I suspect this is stereotype is pretty bogus. The majory of the homebrewers I hear from seem to be middle of the road conservatives or middle or the road liberals, generally with some small bit of disposable income to throw at hobbies, and this biodiesel hobby fits squarely into the good old American Car Hobbies routine. It simply takes too much work and routine, for unstable hippies to do it well (or maybe I don’t hang out in hippie circles enough to see this).

Biodiesel brewing or SVO’ing also happens to make everyone feel somewhat better about not sending their fuel dollars to “the oil corporations or the terrorists”. Face it, whatever your politics, oil is on everyone’s minds the past couple of years in the US, left and right. And it just so happens that the overall impact of all these little hobbyist brewers or SVO filterers is much greater than the amount of petroleum that their efforts displace- in terms of press coverage, and of educational impact. But the stereotype persists that it’s a liberal or far-left bunch of people who do this biodiesel thing.

I think I said already that part of the point of me going on the road and doing a ‘tour’ is to sort of map out the biodiesel brewer landscape for myself- I want to see who these anonymous names on the forums actually are. I suspect that they’re mostly ‘normal’ mainstream folks (well OK I sort of avoid the few who write me who I think might be wackos). More importantly than setting the record straight on homebrewers, I’m interested in seeing just what we can do with a more united sort of homebrew network, and in seeing if it’s possible to make the biodiesel ‘local b100’ (ie locally controlled biodiesel business) sort of activism a little more politically diverse than it is in my circles in California. I don’t know what that would be like. There’s a lot of unknowns and i-don’t-knows and no-easy-answers to left-right politics in this country.

Jeff got in the passenger seat and started trailering. We got on the freeway-
And the truck started fishtailing immediately.

The truck swung from one end of the lane to the other, looked for a moment like he was going to regain control. I saw Jeff let off the pedals and steer. Then the fishtailing doubled in amplitude and we were swinging wildly from one side of the road to the other. No one was in the other lane- but we were on a bridge over another highway. I found myself wondering if we hit the guard rail, would it slow us or would we break through and go over?

Suddenly we were no longer heading ‘forward’ and were going into a wild spin, the trailer swinging the truck around. For part of the spin we were sliding head-first towards the concrete guard rail at the edge of the bridge.

Then we spun 180 and jackknifed the trailer, and came to a stop. A sports car pulled over and turned out to be a cop on another call, who was quite a bit more shaken than we seemed to be (almost immediately someone else nearly ran him over while avoiding us). No one was hurt. We’d somehow avoided hitting anything. Jeff had done an amazing job of steering through the accident.

I want to point out that Jeff always talks about being dyslexic, and occasionally gets left and right backwards. And that for anyone, backing up and steering with a trailer is a difficult task if you’re not used to it. Jeff was looking in the rear view mirror during the spinout, steering the truck to follow the out-of-control spinning trailer while it dragged the truck, and did an absolutely flawless job of steering, dyslexia and all. He says that the trailer began to flip as well while we were on the bridge (I didn’t feel this myself) and that he was steering to avoid the flipping. Had we flipped we would’ve been over the bridge guard rail.

August 1st, infopop biodiesel forum continued..

U-Haul rents car towing dollies for cheap. They also have a computerized system for determining if your vehicle can tow the desired load, and will absolutely refuse to rent you the tow dolly if the system shows that your towed vehicle exceeds the safe weight for the one doing the towing.

But U-Haul isn’t the only company that rents trailers. The tow dolly was too narrow for a van, and Jeff kept calling other companies. Some budget-priced local place reassured him that the car hauler flatbed trailer they had would fit the van and that doing this tow was safe according to their calculations.

We loaded the van onto the trailer in Reno at 11 pm. I’ve never been so happy to see my own pickup truck in my life. I was a little concerned about how small the flatbed was, and whether it was really designed for trailering a van…

This is also incidentally when I discovered that my pickup truck was missing a battery. Crackheads had broken into it between the time I flew to the East Coast and the day or two later later when Jeff drove it home from where I’d parked it at my shop. They’d broken a wing window but it wasn’t obvious to Jeff what was stolen. I expected that I’d find something and was disconcerted that it all seemed to be in place. I opened the hood to check the oil… and one of my two batteries was gone. Quite by chance the battery cables (ie connected to the other battery, and the entire electrical system) were hanging in mid-air by some random hose, and would have probably shorted out the whole system and perhaps killed the other battery or the alternator if the crackheads hadn’t accidentally left it dangling ‘just right’.

I was having somewhat of an energy meltdown and wasn’t prepared to think of other options to the trailer questions I had. I got in the passenger seat, ecstatic about not having a steering wheel in front of me anymore.

August 1st continued
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The Savana had taken up the habit of running rough and of stalling intermittently at highway speeds. Such as 85 miles per hour, which is how fast I was traveling through Wyoming or Nebraska (not that it’s legal). The ‘trouble light’ was showing about 4 fuel system related codes and a crankshaft-position-sensor code. I’d long stopped feeding it biodiesel due to another fuel system problem, and was trying to eliminate as many variables as possible while playing an on-road game of ‘guess what causes that car trouble’, rather blindly. The trouble light also liked to come on in the middle of road construction, the kind of road construction where there is no breakdown lane. I had no tools or time, and don’t know anything about these engines or their electrical system/electronic controls- and couldn’t find a manual or electrical diagrams for that vehicle. Ironically enough given my concern with quality fuel and my dislike of petrodiesel, a gas station had sold me some bad petroleum diesel when I first picked up the van. I was draining water and sediment out of the fuel filter for a few thousand miles. My main worry was that crap had made it past the filter or that the IP screen (assuming that this IP has one, which it might not) was clogged, doing lord-knows-what to the actual IP itself. Uphill seemed like one of the commonalities to what caused the van to break down. Ahead loomed the Sierra Nevada mountains- and quite a lot of Up.

Eventually, I limped it to Reno (on the edge of the Sierras) after calling The Men to come deal with the predicament they were partially responsible for. Tom was rather easy-going about the fact that his van might possibly be on the verge of puking an injection pump to the tune of several thousand dollars (though we all understood that it might not be anything that bad either) but was in court for jury duty and wouldn’t be able to do anything about my problem before the end of business hours and the start of rush hour. Jeff felt quite guilty about dragging me on this trip that I didn’t want to be on, and agreed to take my pickup truck, rent a trailer, and meet me in Reno so as to trailer the poor van over the Sierras for the last 200 miles of my trip.

August 1

In the end I went up and down the East Coast and collected Jeff and his new vehicle, and then watched it break down. Then drove my 3,000+ miles by myself in Tom’s new vehicle.

Jeff was back to California before I was, and I was limping the nice new GMC Savana across the Great Plains and the desert, with daily breakdowns or repairs. I thought ‘fix or repair daily’ was supposed to be what FORD stood for, not GMC? The poor van was sick. I was spectacularly sick of driving, I’ve gotta say. It was Tourist Season, and all around me were peopel driving for fun (the one time of year everyone justifies their SUV’s, there really should be an SUV rental agency for this ten days or whatever vacation they get).