Diary of a Mad Scientist

click here for biodiesel article in the ESSN online renewable energy magazine

In spite of some of the craziest computer trouble ever (if I was superstitious I’d think this project was cursed, the way my hardware was misbehaving just about every single day- new antivirus software got my computer stuck in endless ‘restart’ one day, my scanner driver disappeared completely one day, took photos with a really high-resolution camera and THEN remembered that I do not have enough disc space for the photos I took, the (borrowed) $20,000 camera’s removable media had a bug that wouldn’t let us download my new photos even though we could see they were there, SaraHope’s disc of Biofuel Oasis photos that I was supposed to use wouldn’t open at all etc, etc, etc….)

… I’ve managed to write an ‘introduction to biodiesel’ article which is in the March issue of the Energy Self-Sufficiency Newsletter, which you can download for free from http://rebelwolf.com/

I’ll be running an ongoing ‘column’ on homebrewing and biodiesel topics there (co-ops are a subject of one of the upcoming articles for instance) in future months. ESSN is a new e-magazine now in it’s third issue, which presents an off-grid perspective on renewable energy. I really like the other issues too- they’ve got a lot of substance behind all of their articles.

Mark

Forrest started a blogs aggregator for the biodiesel blogs he knows of. It’s an excellent tool for those of us scene geeks who religiously read Lyle and Kumar and others. It’s sort of like what I"d wanted to do with the infopop forum blogs thread, but completely inclusive (I used to just re-post blog entries I liked, which means that some of Lyle’s speech transcriptions got left on the cutting room floor). That means all those folks tuning in there wanting to read about the fuel will unfortunately also have to endure my rambling about my health and my social life.

Mark

I just added a few more of my posts from the old infopop biodiesel discussion forum blogs thread, and edited the timestamp on them so that they now are in chronological order. I still have a whole set of stories from the Appleseed Tour this fall to print here, and a few more things from the infopop blogs thread to re-post here.

Mark

I just lost a couple of weeks being extremely sick. This time it was the flu from hell, not autoimmune issues, and I’m driving myself crazy with Day 12 of this explosive cough I’ve acquired. Blech. The boyfriend recently pointed out that I’ve lost roughly half of my ‘time’ to being sick in one way or another this winter, which makes me feel a bit less awful about how little I’m getting done- I’ve managed to be sick with the infectuous sort of stuff four times since early November, which is really annoying considering that I didn’t get a single cold for two years straight, recently.

Somewhere in the middle of my flu-ridden fog, we had a really intense group writeup of a comment letter to the IRS on the topic of the tax incentives for biodiesel- some of the way that the incentives are written could potentially drive smaller distributors out of business depending on how larger competitors behave, and the IRS has already said that the excise tax credit does not apply to B100. So while the tax incentives were the biggest news in consumer biodiesel this year, they’re really not going to help most of the B100 people.

So we’re back to letting the NBB run the show with biodiesel policy in the US, and the B100 user crowd not getting what we want out of it, surprise surprise. Someday! (shakes fist at the NBB). Anyway we managed to write up a letter trying to convince the IRS to change their stance on a few things- and got something like 70 organizations and businesses to sign it. I hope it means something to them. Generally though our stance on policy should be written into proposals from the very beginning, and reacting to existing rules is friggin ‘ difficult.

I went totally nuts on a welding spree right before this crap hit me- I was making a bunch of my barrels and tanks into various processors and other ‘equipment’. It was something like three or four days of full-time welding. I’d been gradually working on my shop before then and was really ecstatic about everything being in it’s place. My shop is a 20′ shipping container, and it’s been in a state of half-usability for a year and a half. Basically once you move belongings into a shipping container, you can’t weld anything to the walls because of the grinding dust- and I’d moved in before I modified it into a shop format at all. So all of December, when I wasn’t sick that is, I’d been gradually shoving my stuff to the back, taping off the front third with a dropcloth, and slowly towards welding on the structures (or infrastructure) that I”ve needed- mostly electrical boxes, shelves, and supports for a big lab table I”ve been needing. It’s turned into a lot of hours with little to show for it for a few weeks, all to get away from a tangle of extension cords. This month I finally managed to get all the basic electrical in and roll those extension cords up- I can walk in and flip a switch to turn the lights on- 19th century technology, here I come.

After my welding spree I shoved gear back into the shop and it looked like a tornado had hit it- but the amount of work it stood for made it a happy kind of a mess

Mark

I finally got around to putting up photos from the conference:

www.localb100.com/conference

Mark

More of my own unending conference reportback from the Piedmont event…

I caught parts of a few sessions at the conference, but didn’t quite have the attention span to deal with an in-depth discussion for the most part. There was an amazing emissions presentation by Michal Vojtisek-lom (www.buffalobiodiesel.com). Not only did he do a great presentation on diesel engines and diesel emissions in general, something that I think we need better literacy about within the biodiesel enthusiast community- but he’d also done a number of onboard, on-road emissions tests, including on SVO. The SVO had performed really well. If I remember right he was somewhat advocating (maybe just on a theoretical basis) driving SVO for longer distances and highway trips, and using biodiesel for short trips, due to data from his emissions tests. The tests were done in conjunction with Greasecar, so perhaps some of the data is on their site?

Recently Tom Judd from Boulder Biodiesel had posted something about wanting to buy emissions testing equipment and to pay for a round of testing to answer some of the questions about SVO once and for all. He was concerned about non-regulated emissions- the questions about aldehydes and formaldehydes and acrolein and all that kind of questionable stuff. Michal didn’t have those answers, but his presentation covered a lot of important questions about the regulated emissions, and got me thinking about whether it was possible to just build some of the emissions testing gear ourselves. Surely within my community of electronics nerds, the skills must exist.

The conference had really good representation from a bunch of biodiesel co-ops. The Asheville co-op, Blue Ridge Biofuels, is trying to approach the issue from the ‘legitimate’ small producer/legal distributor angle. Their plan is to try and produce fuel for their town’s biodiesel needs- in compliance with all local, state, and federal regulations blah blah blah. I”m not sure this has been done successfully by a co-op before. Most of our groups have talked that line but never got out of the 100 gallon batch once a week sort of range.

They’ve got a building, have an intermediate sized homebrew-style system, and they’ve been fundraising for both the equipment and the salaries to go ‘the rest of the way’ with making it safe and legitimate in the eyes of their regulatory agencies, (and joining the NBB as one of the new small producer associate membership members). You guys better keep the rest of us in the loop on what you find yourselves dealing with in terms of permitting for your small plant. If I remember right, they’re currently mired in the fun and joy of proving to their county that biodiesel handling shouldnt be ruled by the stringent laws that govern gasoline distribution. That’s one of those situations that should be a no-brainer (ie biodiesel isn’t flammable on it’s own) but fire marshalls and other regulatory agencies don’t like to make exceptions for rules on the books. Fuel is fuel, the thinking goes, what’s non-flammable fuel? Of course this county is quite nervous about fuel now after this autumn’s hurricane-induced floods, which caused quite a few huge diesel spills in the flood zone).

Colorado’s CU Biodiesel group was there en masse, there were folks from Madison WI, Seattle, up and down Virginia and North Carolina, one of the James Madison University staff came out in support, lots of DC area people, a lot of Buffalo NY people, a couple of the local Clean Cities Coalition B20 people, a number of wants-to-be Clean Cities folks from other areas. The St Louis Biodiesel Club drove 12 hours on clouding-over homebrew that almost bogged their Mercedes down over the icy WV mountains. We had lots of farmers and locals who want to support a better farm economy in NC (which has been in recent years decimated by the collapse of the tobacco industry here, and several men and women spoke eloquently to this issue and their hopes that biofuels oilcrop production could help the local farm economy). There were quite a few students from elsewhere, a few teachers, and a couple of vocal homeschooling parents. Tons of homebrewers and people who wanted to be homebrewers. Libertarians, conservatives, liberals, former liberals, and Bill Levitt and son. There were a few different folks whose businesses run heavy equipment, who were looking into biodiesel as an alternative. Many people came with SVO experience, good and bad. The list goes on and on.

We had a great work session with the Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial workgroup- Maud Essen officiated, with Sam Ley and me for support. The Tutorial is a project a few of us have been working on for the last few weeks- a group-written, open-source ‘how-to’ project about homebrewing. The work so far has been online. This time we opened up the floor to 15-20 newbies and asked them detailed questions about what they like or dont like about existing Web biodiesel tools, and got some awesome and sometimes surprising responses. Some of them knew little about biodiesel but they had well-formed ideas on how they would like it presented in a Web tool. Some of them, Maud included, worked professionally in jobs that involved creating trainings, tutorials/presentations, and there were a number of computer geeks present, so there was a relatively high level of technical discussion on how to proceed. Graydon Blair’s simple graphics laying out the biodiesel process got rave reviews. My favorite technical term that we learned, was what one of the corporate trainer guys called “USA Today Graphics”. Lots of people had bought my book at the event, so I got some feedback on how I presented info- people found even my extremely crappy cartoons helpful- so everybody making a website, listen up, the people want cartoon outlines of their process. More sketches, less words.

There was a lot of discussion about Eric H’s “biodiesel-o-matic” spreadsheet tool that we have online at the localb100 forum, and suggestoins for other interactive tutorial tools that we can adapt to biodiesel homebrewing education. Again, stay tuned. The details and the project are at www.localb100.com/forum. I”m happy to report (not that anyone cares) that no one accosted me to ask about my motivation this time around, or asked me to tell them stories, with the exception of a really weird newbie SVO guy who went on and on, really excitedly, about something to the effect of “I know, I figured it out- you’re called Girl Mark because there was already someone else named Mark you knew, and you had to distinguish- did I get it right? Right??”. I managed to almost completely avoid talking about “Biodiesel and What It Means To Me” this weekend. Got to talk emissions instead. Success.

Mark

I’ll post more interesting stuff about the event a bit later, but here is a bit about how it was organized. Please note that in my post I say nothing about ‘anarchists and angry raw food vegans’ like Lyle persists in seeing at these events (which I think is wrong). In the photo in the last post, I see a bunch of grey heads, and relatively nondescript people, who have jobs like ‘farmer’ and ‘contractor’, and whose interests in biodiesel align nicely with their conservative, liberal, and libertarian politics… Unfortunately posing the biodiesel movement as this culturally polarized ‘b100 hippies versus corn-fed farmers’ thing makes for better storytelling, so journalist types like Lyle tend to make comments like that no matter how boring the reality is. Judging from his blog today, it sounds like he’s telling Wired magazine the same thing right now, which means damage control later. Damn.

So, more from the weekend’s conference:

I think that I actually did OK for being completely sleep-deprived on the main day of the conference. It was just such an awesome event. A few comments on the conference organizing, since I think we’ll be having more of these events in the future:

The Piedmonts organized their event with no ‘biodiesel 101′ introductory session, nor with an introductory ‘track’. So I got stuck in the “quality in the biodiesel industry” session on Saturday morning with a wide mix of people- both beginners who barely knew anything about biodiesel, and folks who were already involved in the industry.

We’d done a big go-around on Friday night in the opening session, and I’d learned that many of the folks present were local farmers/contractors/small business owners who wanted to make their own fuel, or to learn the basics, and some of them were there to look at the possibilities of growing fuel crops. Many of these folks were in my session. So I took the easy route and dragged everybody through a “Contaminants 101” rather than going into BQ-9000 and Certified: Biodiesel Driven and industry quality control issues.

My session was probably a waste of time for a few people but it seemed like a conference like this needs the ‘101′ level stuff addressed, and the next people to organize a conference should keep this in mind. Lyle said that they’d organized it this way because the folks from their co-op were bored with all the ‘101′ level stuff that we included in last year’s conference, but unfortunately I think that they actually had MORE beginners in this year’s event than last year’s, and that it was more necessary than at the California event.

Another constructive criticism I had, is that we should really hold these as two-day events. It’s VERY hard to see where a 101-level series of workshops could have fit into the schedule of the Piedmont conference, other than maybe replacing some of the ‘go-around’ from the first day with a 101-level workshop, or an optional 101-level class, or something. Maybe a basics ‘track’ could have been run. I don’t know.

Another criticism I have for future conference organizers is that there was no ‘basic’ handout on biodiesel (not that ours from last year was very well organized, but at least it was large). Last year for the California biodiesel consumers conference, I got permission from Dr. Jon Van Gerpen to do a handout of his 26-page online course, and my impression is that he would give that permission to anybody who needs it for such an event. Since many of the folks present were farmers who were probably not huge “internet biodiesel research’ junkies, it seems imperative to make sure everyone’d hav