Diary of a Mad Scientist

I tried to take some photos of the Methoxide Mixer From Hell but they didn’t look very impressive and it still looks like a pile of steel parts.

However, I’ve also been working on another project the past few months- Hot Mama. Hot Mama is a big 350-gallon heavy steel IBC tank, which I’ve been doing oil dewatering experiments with- it’s got a lot of horizontal surface area and it’s weldable. Most of the weldable free tanks I come across are vertical cylinders without a lot of surface area available, which you need for evaporation or boiling. this weekend me and Jeff ran a batch of particularly disgusting grease through the Hot Mama boiler to test out various nozzles:

This photo is a 40 psi spray through one of the nozzles we’re trying out- turned out to be a flat 180 degree despite the nozzle’s claims of 60 degree cone spray:

I’m in a position to buy yellow grease at an attractively cheap price for the Machine Shop setup, but it’s got major hurdles to overcome- one of them being water. The price is low enough that if I can figure out how to use the nasty stuff, it might really make the cost of running the Machine Shop generator system a lot easier on the “labor costs” (collections is a big issue when you use 300 gallons a month for just one user, not counting anyone else’s vehicles). Our generator had a disasterous experience with some bad homebrew bought from my friend jess last winter, so I’m kind of concerned about quality control a bit more than usual.

Yellow Grease is rendering industry terminology for recycled fats that are of a certain percentage free fatty acids. Many people in homebrewing assume that yellow grease is the stuff you get from the local restaurant fryers. The industry reality is quite a bit nastier than just what’s in the barrels- either it rots on the way in or they mix in some trap grease type stuff. In either case it’s been found by many peopel to be a LOT nastier than the nastiest stuff you may find, for example the nastiness that’s in back of McDonald’s on San Pablo and 63rd in Berkeley. You can’t just go buy some yellow grease ad expect to throw the journeytoforever biodiesel webpage at it, and actually get biodiesel.

The big challenge with the stuff I’m playing with is water. I use KOH as a catalyst so I can handle solid fats and high FFA at once without getting ‘glop’ like you’d see with NaOH. But it’s also got a fair amount of water in it. I can ‘heat to 140F and let settle’ after filtering the nastiness but the bottom third gets all the water.

That’s where Hot Mama comes in. her current incarnation is as a boiler tank for the vacuum-assist flash evaporator system I"m going to build someday. In the meantime I’ve boiled oil dry in Hot Mama, and boy is it disgusting.

high-FFA grease STINKS something fierce. I actually gave up on dewatering at all when I was first making biodiesel , because the smell of heated oil is just foul and carries far and away to the nearest yuppie neighbor’s nosehairs- if I were neighbors with a rendering plant I"d be upset. So I haven’t been able to experiment with the bad grease that the urban Machine Shop coop needs- lord knows the neighbors are the last thing we need to antagonize. here in the foothills I can go to a metal shop in the middle of no where and make bad odors with yellow grease to my heart’s content, the odor control for the city version will come later.

There IS somethign nastier than yellow grease- brown grease. That’s a category of ‘product’ from a rendering plant which contains trap grease, fats from dead rotten animals, and other free fatty acids (with a bit of triglycerides thrown in). One of the participants of the Infopop biodiesel forum, the Diff, earns my great and undying respect for being able to apply homebrew technology and some of the ISU processes to making successful biodiesel out of brown grease. He described it as ‘it looks like crap and it smells like feces’. That pretty much describes the yellow grease I’m working with- looks like some sort of diarrhea. ANd I"m boiling this goo and spraying it through the air to try and separate the water content out.

Hot Mama has a heating element in the tank and a pair of them inline in the pipe, and a spray nozzle from McMaster-Carr at the end. It’s also got a Harbor Freight Pump circulating the oil through these features. This weekend Jeff re-plumbed the piping circuit to add a pressure gauge and a place for a future pressure switch and a pressure bypass around the pump so we could spray the grease that looks like crap and smells like feces through a sprayer nozzle and see if any (water) vapor comes off of it. BLORT is right.

Well, it works OK- but man what a nasty odor. We turned on the tank and ran away for the evening (and burned out the in-tank heating element which I havne’t seen happen before, might have something to do with really wet grease and steam pockets, somehow?????). You really had to pretty much turn it on and run. The point was to be able to see the spray pattern and that took some serious nausea-supression:

me trying to not run away from the nauseating stench:

Jeff did in fact run away and still looked like he was about to heave:

it’s a really good thing that you cant’ transmit odors via computer yet. I am getting these horrible odor flashbacks just looking at the photos!

Mark

I’m in the foothills job, dealing with building, and it’s August weather. I can count my blessings, though- when I was working on a roof in Eastern Montana a few years ago, it was 118 regularly all of July, and the survival strategies of construction workers made front page news. Here we’re only dealing with 110. I go home to Berkeley and it’s 65 degrees at night and I friggin love it.

I will now loudly praise the name of Jeff Biosmell from the Infopop forums, for he came up here to work with me for a few days and he makes the most gourmet lunches ever eaten on a construction jobsite. Today’d special was freshly grilled wild salmon on spicy naan bread with goat milk brie and baby greens served with lime/cucumber-scented ice water. Breakfast was similarly fancy.

Normally at lunch here I go up and down all three blocks of Main Street marvelling over and over that there’s nothing to eat here, and I fix that by buying some overpriced processed food at the health food store like it’s any different than the regular supermarket’s processed crap.

Like the weather, I can fix this particular foothills problem by running home to berkeley where I can pig out on sushi and Ethiopian food and the ethnic food court mall at Emeryville Public Market and the southern style barbeque place and the mediterranean buffet across from the Ecology Center and my own damn cooking of whatever was fresh and in season that hour at the Berkeley Bowl market.

In the foothills I’m in a rush and dont’ really have my act together to eat properly. I’m kind of camping out at the jobsite which screws me up for cooking - with the extremely notable exception of a couple of nights a week cooking with the hippie bosses (translation- there’s nothing to do here- and at their house we tend to look at really fancy cookbooks for fun and occasionally I cook great fanciness with these folks). The problem isn’t really the “camping out"- that’s never stopped me before- it’s just one more facet of autoimmune illness that makes easy things and regular “life maintenance” tasks difficult.

There’s no way to just throw money at the situation and ‘eat out’ - cause there’s nothing to buy and here in town they roll up the sidewalks completely by 9 pm, just as I"m getting off work to go to dinner. Not eating properly really sucks for autoimmune illness and makes me even stupider/spacier than usual and starts the vicious cycle that I"m too tired to cook or feel like I want any of the food that’s for sale in town.

When jeff came up here I realized just how much I kind of depend on other people to take care of me when I’m not feeling well- I can always go to Jeff’s and someone’s feasting. Right now I"m typing this at a friend’s office where we’re using internet, and Jeff’s sitting at a conference table cutting up a marinated buffalo steak with blackberry sauce and feeding me slivers before shoving the office fridge full of good stuff again. Tomorrow night we invade another friend’s home with the rest of the roast. The friend, who barely knows us, was really pleased to hear the pronouncement that Jeff just showed up in town with a cooler full of gourmet food to share with her. Jeff’s middle name happens to be ‘welcomed guest’.

I know, one of the sucky things about blogs, is people posting the stupid mundane garbage like what they ate that day as though anyone cared. Tough shit, you’re still reading.

Mark

I’m finally working on a motorized methoxide mixer, or, actually, a pair of slightly different ones- one for a customer and different type for Machine Shop.

I’ve been OK with the carboy system for years, but most of my reactors (except the trailer one I hauled around the country last fall) have been over 80 gallons-oil-per-batch, which makes them require 3 or more carboys of methoxide. 2 carboys I’m OK with, 3 is a bit annoying to handle mixing. So I"m trying to come up with a standardizable design for a larger methoxide mixer that’s both safe and doesn’t release any methanol vapor that EPA et al would be concerned about.

I’m not even bothering with no-weld methods - I dont’ think there’s a simple one available here. You need various ports for no-weld, and methoxide needs a big top port- I think that most common metal containers with a top port big enough to introduce catalyst (15 gallon drums etc) tend to be sealed by some sort of degradable rubber gasket. I think various folks have tried soda syrup kegs, but they’re smaller than a carboy so defeat my purpose.

I"m working with big old decommissioned propane tanks (beer kegs are another handy size). I think there’s a potential Appleseed in one of the systems I"m trying out- something that a lot of peopel in the USA can buy and build easily- though the cost of building these methoxide mixers is in a quite different costs bracket than the seat-of-the-pants Appleseed.

I’m using a FilRite explosionproof gasoline transfer pump to do the mixing and trying out two different methods of introducing the catalyst- what I call the Airlock method and the laundry soap method.

Before you get the obvious idea, no, you can’t use a cheap FilRite transfer pump to mix a biodiesel reactor- the duty cycle’s too short.

Yes of course I’ll post pictures when it’s done. Later- nothing to see here yet, move along, move along.

Mark

A while back, Jennifer Radtke wrote a story about ‘Hearing Biodiesel Everywhere’. She came up with this when we were driving back from the Iowa biodiesel production workshops a while back, where we’d been surrounded by a geek convention talking about biodiesel 8+ hours a day for 5 days.

On the 1500 mile drive back home, we kept experiencing this illusion, whereby overheard conversations in truck stops or gas stations sounded like they included the word ‘biodiesel’.

from Blogs and Bio-diaries 2 thread at infopop

since i’ve gotten obsessed with biodiesel, i’m always walking around overhearing conversations (like on BART, on the street, at restaurants, etc.) where i think i hear the word ‘biodiesel.’ of course, i’m just mistaking some other word for it, until…

ANyway, i had a particularly embarrassing case of ’seeing biodiesel everywhere’ the other week. Someone made a joke about sex and somewhere in the back of my mind the autopilot thought it referred to biodiesel instead.

Someone friend sent me a random email joke about polyamory. For those of you from the Midwest who dont’ know about such things, that’s like consentual informed non-monogamy. Yes, I live in the San Francisco area and you don’t. The leftie crowd certainly has it’s share of experiences with polyamory, some of which get processed-about, discussed, argued-over, support-group-meeting’ed about, and certainly joked about. The topic is kind of an institution. Peopel often shorten the awkward Latin term to ‘poly’.

ANyway that email had a subject line about ‘going poly’.

The friend who sent me this isn’t a biodiesel person, and I don’t know him particularly well at all.

So I had a very strange confused moment when I first checked my email, wondering why the hell this person wants my advice about building a processor out of polyethylene tanks when he doesn’t even have a diesel vehicle yet.

Mark

Over at the Infopop biodiesel discussion forum they’re running a storytelling thread called ‘how you got into biodiesel’. here’s what I posted. I don’t usually talk politics in the biodiesel world, but here’s some of the deep dark secrets of why I’m a biodiesel pusher:

Well I was 17 and hitch-hiked around the country by myself for a summer, and met a lot of different vehicles. I decided I wanted to do the same trip in a van. But how to pay for gas with such a potential gas hog?

6 months later I was hitch-hiking home to New York City from a bluegrass New Years’ Eve party in Mt Airy NC. I got picked up by a guy driving a diesel Ford Tempo. It was the first time I’d heard of a diesel passenger car. We started talking about it and he told me about 50 miles per gallon and a few other positive things about diesels. I was HOOKED- it looked like the solution to the ‘gas hog’ dilemma.

I went back to NY and this kindly old mafia guy neighbor I knew, tried to sell me on a shortbus schoolbus sort of thing. I decided that if I were to own such a thing I"d need to learn how to fix it, since I was under the impression that it was hard to find a diesel mechanic. Another 6 months later I had a hard time finding a job (in New Orleans this time, right during the recession in ‘91). I applied for a JTPA job training program and went to mechanic school.

****

I never did end up getting a diesel van, but spent a lot of time obsessing about diesels and fuel economy and pestering anyone I knew who knew anything about them. I learned that one of the advantages was that you could run them on ‘other’ fuels if you couldn’t find any diesel.

****

In the summer of 1995 I was on the road again (in a slightly more respectable manner, like with a vehicle of my own) and met up with a group of NY friends who were doing their own disorganized tour of some sort. We met up in San Francisco after a couple of months traveling around the country separately.

A few days into the visit to SF, I was sick of being the non-drinker/designated driver who was always ‘herding’ the whole scatterbrained group of them around ( I earned the nickname Drill Sargeant on that trip). One day they were planning a day trip to ‘visit some artists’. I was dreading another ‘cat herding’ incident with the too-large group of my friends, and I generally find that artists are YAWN boring to me, so I ditched the group and went on a date instead (which turned into a 6-year long-distance relationship, which later brought me to California).

When I got back from my date and asked my friends how the ‘artist’ thing went, they said, “We went to see the Vegetable OIl Ladies". What, huh? they said, “you know, those ladies who did that trip with that diesel van that runs on that used vegetable oil stuff” (my friends had apparently seen the documentary Fat of the Land when the ‘ladies’- the filmmakers- showed it in NYC that spring, but I hadn’t heard of it yet).

At that point I got this incredible sinking feeling that I"d missed out on something important, and at the same time, bells started going off inside my head from everything I knew about diesels (the fuel-flexibility thing, and wanting a van, etc, etc) and my other interests. It just made SO MUCH SENSE.

I went back East and took a diesel class so I could figure out how to do the same thing, though I still had no idea about biodiesel, or that the ‘ladies’ had a film, or how exactly the vegoil thing worked. Sascha, one of the people I was traipsing around SF with, went to Guatemala later that year- where he met Josh and Kaia Tickell in language school, and told them about biodiesel, which apparently lit some light bulbs over their heads (ever hear of Kaia Tickell? She was 1/2 of the Veggievan project as much as Josh was. She’s also been edited out of Tickell’s official story, as was any mention of Fat of the Land. Too threatening to think of Josh not inventing the whole vegoil van tour concept…).
****

A couple of years later still, I was fast becoming a solar nut. I was frustrated with what I was or was not doing as a leftist and what was happening politically with the rise of right-wing radio and various political issues that the far right seemed very successful at inserting into public debate while we leftists floundered meaninglessly (and frustrated with the Clinton policies hauling us ass-first into Americas-wide globalization and some other scary issues that arose back then, but that’s another story).

I felt disconnected and decided to spend one summer hitchiking around the South, partly so I could talk to people and learn what the hell they were thinking. By chance, my travel clothing involved some camoflauge pants- and I happened to carry an olive green backpack and had short hair. A lot of people who hadnt’ looked very closely, had pulled over to pick me up, because at 50 miles per hour they assumed that I was a military guy heading home (I dont think soldiers hitchiked anymore at that point, but the image was there in older people’s heads). So I got a lot of very candid conversations out of the drivers, because I was being picked up by relatively ‘normal’ working class people or Christians who’d initially thought they’d be picking up a young man to tell stories with to pass the time (ie they weren’t pervert ax murderers who wanted to talk about sex or anything like that). They were all ready with their life story and it was interesting research.

I had one pivotal experience that made me realize that unlike other environmental issues, people were universally open to the idea of renewable energy as long as they thought that the costs weren’t very high (in 2005 they’re a lot more willing to spend on it than anybody was in 1997). I was traveling across Tennessee to go to an event and for the entire 450-mile stretch, splashed across the Knoxville Sunday paper front page news was a story about the troubled Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power program and some revelations about serious safety infractions that had been covered up by the authorities in charge of public safety. It made great hitchhiking talk.

I developed a routine that summer when hitchhiking, bringing up the subject of renewable energy and asking the drivers something or another about how far they’d go to support it in favor of energy independence. I found that as long as people thought it was going to save money, they were very supportive of the idea of renewables, and that in fact truckers etc had given the whole issue of energy quite a bit of thought (thanks to the economics of their business).

They didn’t always have the facts straight, but it was a real eye-opener for me to see that this was one facet of the pollution/renewability/sane energy issue which hadn’t yet been assassinated by the media as some ‘evil environmentalist’ thing. I was thinking about strategy and tactics in the environmentalist movement a lot at the time and was quite discouraged at the uphill battle we faced on most issues and the distortions that a lot of issues received in the media which it seemed most peopel swallowed whole.

Another bell went off in my head- this energy independence/clean energy approach seemed quite frankly like an inspiring and positive campaign direction from which to approach pollution or nuclear power issues - I was surprised to find that average Americans inherently support the “idea” of solar or renewable energy, at least in theory (one particularly angry and racist and nonstop-ranting trucker that I rode with on that trip was going on and on about how ‘if Al Gore is elected President he says he’s going to ban all internal combustion engines- and he’d be right ‘ and then would rant some more about the importance of voting against Gore so that we could still have our cars. The “and he’d be right” part was a major eye-opener and I’ve been looking for ways to pry at the little undiscovered crack between ‘I know cars pollute’ and ‘but I"m going to keep my way of life dammit’ ever since.

Today, after 9/11 a lot more of us support energy independence, but you’ve got to remember gas was $1.09 a gallon back then in ‘97 and the California energy crisis/Enron corporate scandal hadn’t yet happened (and it certainly wasn’t affecting anyone in Tennessee back then, whereas Iraq is now)

I realized on those trips that I’d discovered a potential activist gold mine- what I now think of as a ‘gateway drug’ approach- a way to talk about conservation or other environmentalist issues to people who would otherwise not listen if they thought it was a traditional environmentalist issue, by playing on the economics of it. It seemed to me that one of the things that attracted people to the idea of wind or solar power was a (false) sense of payback economics- the idea that you’d personally save money over paying utility bills (whether that’s true in any particular installation varies in reality, but people seemed to think that it would, and everybody loves the idea of ditching their bills). Later on , this realization fit neatly with the biodiesel homebrewing or SVO angle- first you reel them in with the promise of cheap fuel, then they inevitably start thinking about energy conservation just a little and they suddenly support solar initiatives too. Heh heh heh…

The event I was hitchiking across Tennessee to go to that summer was a women’s gathering in the woods in western Arkansas Ozarks. In the ‘literature’ area with the other flyers, I found a stack of brochures that someone had photocopied from the Fat of the Land filmmakers trip from back in ‘94. I think it had the biodiesel recipe (as now preserved at the Dancing Rabbit website). Interestingly Rachel Burton, who is one of the two original founders of Piedmont Biofuels was also at that 100-person event, and probably saw the same flyer. I was elated to finally find out what the fuel ‘mod’ was actually called.

All the pieces kind of came together in my head that week in Arkansas- my longstanding interest in diesels and finally learning what ‘the process’ was actually called, my obsession with trying that vegetable oil thing I’d heard about, some guilt I’ve always felt over the fact that I devoted a lot of my (mechanic) time to keeping polluting old gas-hogs on the road, and the weird activist “hook” on environment and air pollution and clean energy I"d just discovered. I decided I’d found energy issues as my longterm cause and wanted to explore just how far I could ‘pry’ at that strange loose end I"d just found in American attitudes.

I went home, discovered the Internet, and started working towards doing what you guys see me doing now about 8 years later. That summer it looked like inserting renewables into the American dialogue was going to be an easy win because people seemed kind of primed for it for economics reasons. Now I’ve got an interesting feeling that we’ve ‘arrived’ to some extent-the stuff has hit the mainstream, who the heck would have expected BioWillie? I feel a little redundant in the role I’ve been playing for the past few years, and that’s a good feeling- though I"m a little murky on what the future of this technology in America looks like.

Mark