Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’m home for one day after my Houston class, and I go back to the airport to fly to Denver at 6 AM tomorrow- this time, it’s work on the small producer plant that Steve is putting together there. Hopefully I will also get to see John Bush and Lorance and John Meuser, the people who are working on the biodiesel co-op conference in July. 0h, and, while I am home, I get to write a check for my remaining gas chromatograph parts, which are now on order!

Houston Biodiesel is an inspiring operation. They’re a very business-like, informed distributor of commercial biodiesel but they also homebrew a small amount, so we had a very interesting processor to show the class, and got to show people the effects of the glycerol remix prewash and the dramatic way that it reduces soap over normal processing. I absolutely loved meeting those guys. It’s great to see people who have a good head on their shoulders involved in biodiesel distribution.

Of course the class was sold out just like the others, so I got to start off the weekend by performing the now-regular ritual of ejecting rudely one man who has (also rudely) arrived without pre-registering “just to see if someone doesn’t show up and I can take their place “. Jeez, people! don’t do that! It’s so unfair to everyone else on the waiting list who bothered to ask in advance.

Houston itself was terrifying. The first thing I saw from the air as we were landing was a massive Wal-Mart. I spent a couple of days of class prep running around in a rented SUV around the cancerous ring of shopping development that encircles Houston. Like most places that suffered Los Angeles-like development, Houston seemed to have a corresponding ring of ‘dead malls’- older developments that had been abandoned as the city limits grew- in the middle, between the downtown and the outermost crust of Retail Development around the town. Strangely, the Dead Malls were full of companies that sold discount furniture.

Actually had no idea that Houston is something like the fourth-largest city in the U.S. which makes me really appreciate how terrible the hurricane evacuation must’ve been during Rita. It must have been like trying to evacuate Los Angeles.

The really aweome thing was that Shannon, who posts as Dodgeram on several of the biodiesel forums, came out and co-taught the class. He’s one of the people whose posts I always agree with, and obviously he really thinks through everything about this process. I think he also helped out one of the other forum members who evacuated to Houston from New Orleans during Katrina and that guy raved about Shannon being great. We had him do a talk and demonstration about the use of Magnesol, and about the glycerol remix wash, and more. I always love having experienced homebrewers around during the class because I think it means more for the students to hear about how the process actually works for a ‘normal person’ who has this as a hobby, rather than how it works for me, who focuses on biodiesel all the time. Here’s Shannon’s write up of the event.

On Friday night after hours of socializing at Houston Biodiesel, Shannon, and his wife Bonnie and I, tried to go out to eat. We were starving by then, and hadn’t thought about the fact that was the Friday of Valentine’s Day weekend – every restaurant had a full parking lot, and the good place we wanted to go had a 1 1/2 hour wait for a table. Bonnie had a great idea – we went to Hooters, where people were least likely to bring their dates for a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner. Sure enough, plenty of free tables. For those who have been hiding under rocks, or perhaps living in Australia, Hooters is a chain of college-bar themed ‘restaurants’ whose claim to fame is hiring waitresses with boob jobs and squeezing them into very skimpy collegiate sports-ish (?) costumes and flesh-toned pantihose to serve food , and, of course, beer, to drunks. There was a famous lawsuit a few years ago where a group of men alleged sex discrimination because Hooters would not hire them as waiters, and am sure it was amusing to see the whole concept described in lawyerese by the defense.

A few days ago there was a thread on the infopop biodiesel discussion forum where we North Americans talked a lot of trash about the strange things that people in the UK eat. For example, I’ve heard many horrified reports about deep-fried pizza. They serve it (over there) with vinegar drizzled on top. Yick.

Well, I hereby retract all terrible things I said about the British, the Scots, and their food, because on Friday night I ate deep-fried pickles. We ordered a huge bowl of them. Bonnie said that when she was pregnant this was what she craved all the time, and that she would go to Hooters ‘all the time’ because of this pregnancy-induced craving. I guess the stereotypes about pregnant women and weird food combinations must be true. Personally, I don’t like deep-fried food very much to begin with (spending a couple of months in Mexico City and eating a lot of overfried street food there, cured me of loving fried things for good) - and making biodiesel for several years has turned me off to the flavor (and odor) even more. So I was amazed that deep-fried pickles is actually pretty good. It’s kind of like putting relish on fried fast food. It makes me think that the deep-fried pizza of Scottish infamy may actually not be as disgustingly gross as it sounds. Now, deep-fried Mars bars, that sounds gross. And they eat that. Over there.

Well it seemed as if I’d barely gotten home, when it’s time to get on another plane. and that’s just the beginning of the next few months worth of traveling to teach around the USA.

I had not actually unpacked, and was still basically living out of my carry-on bag in my room.

ok, whatever, I’m whining- it’s not that bad this time. There was a real defining moment at the start of the truck tour that I did in the fall of 2004, when I found myself eating breakfast at a table in a convenience store after night a driving, staring in the fluorescent glare out at the institutional floor tiles with little bits of mop caught in the corner, and it really hit me that because I was doing the trip on such a shoestring budget, for the next two months I would be at the mercy of crappy road food and institutional amenities. Like plastic forks and microwave burritos at 6 AM at a minimart and brushing my teeth in a rest stop sink. And it felt at the time like I was committing myself to a homeless shelter for survival or enduring a hospital stay, or entering two months at some other institution designed for handling the needs of the many, the bare minimum way. Driving felt kind of gritty that way.

This time around, it’s just airlines- a few hours and it’s over. And I get a week in between to eat the roommates’ good cooking and sleep in my own fantastic bed. Then I"m off again. That ain’t too bad.

While I’m gone I hope that I can get the van fuel system timed. I really love that van (the voice recognition program, which looks for context to figure out what the hell you’re saying, keeps interpreting ‘I really love that van’ as ‘I really love that man’. It also adamantly refuses to curse, no matter how much I try to train it to say ‘hell’ and ‘damn’).

Anyway, the ace mechanic at East Bay Truck and Auto, who was recommended by everyone, just had a stroke and won’t be back to work, so I am trying out some new place for the Ford fuel system work. The van is awesome, and it has no visible smoke, ever, but it gets 10 mpg. I think those two things are related the- that the pump timing is way off in the direction that cuts down on particle emissions but destroys fuel economy.

After just ten days of living out of my carry-on bag on the southeast trip, I’m somewhat dreading spending four or five weeks later this spring on another long trip. So I’m hoping that I can take the van out that time, and somehow RV-ize it before then so I can take the comfortable bed with me this time. But not if that means 10 mpg.

Off to Houston, wish me luck. I’m scared of Texas, I think./

Mark

Tonight I got onto Google to see if anyone had posted a recent review of any of my classes that I could link from the class page. Of course, running a search on “Girl Mark biodiesel class” pulls up every old posting I’ve ever made on every forum advertising the damn things.. Anyway, in the process I found a good blog by one of the biodieselers from Durham, Jurgen. Here’s his biodiesel category, he seems prolific at writing the things:

http://words.yovo.info/category/biodiesel/

Today I tried something new. I’m still at square one with my right hand injury, and typing really aggravates it. I have been fooling around with the left-handed typing using the ‘Dvorak for left-hand’ layout, which is one of the options installed on Windows machines. Of course it doesn’t work so well with a laptop – the touchpad mouse gets in the way because that is where your hand wants a palm rest. It does feel a lot like learning to play a new musical instrument, something that I’ve been through several times. I’m starting to get marginally better at the typing. Because I’m a fast touch typist with two hands, it’s very difficult to go back to looking at the keyboard, which have to do while learning the left-hand layout.

However, right now, I am actually using a voice recognition program instead of typing at all. A friend who cannot type worth a damn gave me his copy of Dragon software, this being version 4 or something very ancient. It works well enough – you train it for half an hour to recognize yourself reading various words (in fact it gave me 2001 a space Odyssey to read), then give it some of your own writing samples so it can figure out what the hell you’re saying more easily. In my case, I gave it the entire text of my homebrewing book to read. It now recognizes the word “carboy” flawlessly, which makes me laugh. It was amusing seeing what exactly it thought ’strange’ about my vocabulary after it had analyzed my book for weird words.

I like it well enough that I went ahead and ordered a copy of the most recent version, which is several years newer, as I have heard that it has improved greatly.

It’s even more amusing when the microphone comes on by accident when I’m on the phone. The program allows you use voice commands to browse around documents, and to execute various commands. I had a document open when a long phone call came on, and something in what I was saying triggered the program’s own microphone to come back on in the middle of the conversation. It turned my document into gibberish, and of course you can’t laugh while using it or it writes more gibberish trying to interpret your laugh.

having spent just a very short time training the program, and getting myself used to using it, on extremely impressed with what a useful tool this is. All you non typists, this is worth trying.

Today was as overbusy with farm biomass plant discussions as Friday was. On Friday I’d pulled what was literally a 9-5 marathon session of phone calls and email having to do with both ends of biodiesel business. Welcome to small business- it still feels like I’m participating in my hobby or activism, but it’s starting to head into something more concrete. My head hurts from all the talking. I’ll be heading down to the county office to pick up my business license next week.

I had a series of fascinating conversations this weekend with engineers and farmers large and small: two educators, three dairy and cattle farmers, two engineers, an organic farmer, and a soon-to-be Republican candidate for Congress. People interested in sunflower oil, waste oil, sugar beet ethanol, biomass of all kinds, and da Insta-Pro press. And a partridge in a pear tree- that would be me. This idea of collaborating with a number of players is starting to take somewhat of a more concrete shape. Or if I don’t collaborate in a business sense, there’ll be a lot of info sharing that ought to come of my exploration into these farm projects. I’m already trying to connect people with each other and it’s amazing what a good fit some of them are for each other, as far as sharing equipment purchasing research and the like.

It turned out that several people I contacted from the forums, were folks I"d already met in real life, or otherwise had connections with, or who knew each other. There were a lot of “a-ha moments". The homebrew classes are doing their job which I’m now endlessly grateful for- I’ve done a better job of meeting the people, and finding out what information is buried where around the country, than I could have had I sat at home and focused on teaching locally two years ago, which could have had different short-term rewards.

It was really painful doing the tour I did in the fall of ‘03 but now I"m kind of reaping the long-term results to some extent, because of who I’d met and a variety of things I got to learn in the process.

I think my strengths in this business are that a. I have a pretty good handle on troubleshooting quality control problems from a technical standpoint and b. I have a REALLY good handle on where the information is buried, on the net and otherwise, and whom to ask when I don’t know the answer. I’ve worked (intentionally) at building up connections all over the spectrum, and it’s time to call on everybody for information.

For example, today I heard from an organic farmer who came to one of my classes and wants to grow sunflower and gave me a lot of details about his size operation, needs, history, etc. On Friday I had by chance spoken with a farmer/educator who had more or less the answers to everything that the organic guy was asking me today. So I’ll just connect the two of them and let them brainstorm together about some of the solutions that I don’t have good answers for. Maybe the “CSA System"- the little open-source ‘upscaled homebrew’ plant- can evolve with them speaking and comparing notes on a seed press and the sunflower processing equipment.

There was another dairyman I met in one of my classes in the Midwest on the tour up there, with whom I’d chatted briefly with about glycerine feeding to ruminants, which his family farm was going to have a nutritionist analyze. Recently- a year and a half later- I wanted to touch base on that data, so my to-do list said that I was to write to him next week.

On Friday I wrote to what I thought was a Colorado-based engineer who had posted somethign interesting on one of the forums. When he wrote me back, he turned out to be the man I’d met whose family had the herd nutritionist look at the glycerine-molasses replacement (?) possibility. And all these dairy guys are looking at the same seed press, which means there’ll be some share-able data coming out of one of these farms this year about it’s operation.

At this point the missing piece of the puzzle for me is that I"d like to talk with an oilseed researcher. Oh, wait, I know where there is one, in South Dakota…

Anyone else interested in talking?

alovert@b100.org

I spent a bunch of time on the East Coast trip in meetings with various potential collaborators about the small producer plant I’ve designed. While I was there, I got a consulting job offer from a small fleet owner who wants to produce fuel in-house with basically the same size system as I am working on- so, allegedly, I now have a pilot project to test out some of these designs, and they’ve got an in-house chemist already and know what they’re getting into.

While I was on the East Coast I had a couple of very productive meetings with other small producers. With one of them, I’m working closely with on our similar designs, and with the other, I may be doing some minor consulting/testing later in the spring. Having the gas chromatograph really opens some doors to thorough testing of various aspects of this production technology- I sat down with one of the guys and worked through some lists of potential problems we expect to be sticking points for our two technologies, and we drew up somewhat of a test protocol for experiments around those problems. I also managed quite by accident to ‘fire up’ a potential investor- investment was not something I was really looking for, but this is a biodiesel-industry-informed person, and a real smart businessman, so it was interesting brainstorming with him about the direction my project could take.) It’s all quite exciting and I learned a tremendous amount on that trip.

I got home and got on the phone for another round of discussions with farmers. I’ve been talking to farmers large and small about two different types of systems- my 10,000 gallon a month commercial-type design which I’d like to deploy, and, if it works as planned, market myself as a consultant/technology provider for, and an unrelated smaller, open-source design for the ‘upsized homebrew’ system similar to what we’ve been using in co-ops around the country. The small open-source system is what I think of as the ‘CSA plant’- community supported agriculture farms tend to be smaller organic vegetable or fruit growers who use one or three tractors, own a couple of market trucks, and not spend a lot of money running irrigation equipment. Their needs are really different than the larger farms.

For the larger 10,000 gallon per month system, I’ve had an idea for a while to put together an R&D cost-sharing consortium for developing this system by collaborating with several farmers/fleets who want one. The theory is that 5 or so businesses buy in to offset the costs of the first pilot plant and to pay for some of the initial engineering studies required by regulatory agencies, and that the data gathered from the pilot plant phase makes it easier for the rest of them to build their systems later. The first farmer/fleet physically builds the pilot plant and gets to make the mistakes, with the risk offset by the others’ investment. I help with design and experimentation. The other owners of the consortium get the documentation to build their own , and everyone goes their separate ways after the pilot plant phase is complete. This of course might be more complicated than desired- working with multiple partners- farmers aren’t known for being good businessmen necessarily- they know farming and are not necessarily product development experts- and business collaboratives like this are tricky in general. I think I originally wrote about this here.

Today I was on the phone with a farmer in Kentucky who’s working on the CSA Plant type of system himself, I grilled him on the finer points of animal feed and the economics of oilseed production. He’s exploring sunflowers and thinking of buying this press: http://flinthillsdiesel.com/

Then I wrote several annoying letters to various other folks from the forums, pestering them about farm biodiesel production and trying to finagle meetings or phone conversations out of them. The beat goes on…

I went back and forth about whether to go to the NBB convention this week to drum up some enthusiasm for the project, or potential partners for the consortium.

It bothers me tremendously that there is currently a bit of a ‘circus’ atmosphere around small scale production- I get the impression for various reasons that there are a lot of people hawking systems that don’t work, or haven’t been adequately tested, and a lot of bad fuel continues getting out there from both small and large producers.

I think it’s extra bad in California where liberals are so supportive of ’sustainability’ that there’s a ready-made niche for anyone who markets their company as being part of the ’sustainability’ movement. If you’re an investor, do your homework. Research thoroughly. Get hard facts. Remember that EVERYBODY in biodiesel is singing an ‘ideals’ tune. Some of them are awfully good orators, and dishonest businessmen. This research is very difficult to do in several cases I know about in my state, and I"m sure that when it all shakes out there’ll be a lot of small investors who didn’t do their homework and who’ll lose their little life savings they’ve investing in some of these rather scary companies. On the other hand, several distributors and other players in the industry are running an honest business and losing money, or close to it, and yet supplying an important role as suppliers, advocates, educators- it’s difficult to tell who’s legitimate as an investment, and who isn’t. Im sure they’ll all be at the NBB and this weekend’s CBCC hawking their wares and promoting themselves as leaders of the local, sustainable biodiesel movement.

It reminds me of the tax credit era solar thermal manufacturers, who did tremendous damage to the solar hot water equipment industry by providing bad products at a time when tax credits incentives worked the wrong way. High energy prices, biodiesel tax incentives, idealism on behalf of consumers, and poor quality control are inspiring the same thing in my opinion at the moment, and for various reasons I think I can do better sitting it out with the farmer/fleet focus until some of the BS shakes out, which I expect would happen in the next year or two. I have the feeling that the farmers/fleet customers are going to be a little more pragmatic than some of the other industry players I"ve encoutered. Or so I hope.

This message has been brought to you by My Inner Republican.

I just had great news about my remaining GC setup. The unit itself was $1,000, donations paid for a quarter of that, thank you. I was facing a remaining $2700ish in costs - a $1500 cool-on-column injector, a $580ish column/guard column, and the gas bottle/gas regulator costs (probably about $250 all together). I’d gotten the money together for that and was ready to drop it all this week on the parts.

It turned out that the school where I’m placing the GC finagled a trade for some other equipment, so we ‘re getting the expensive cool-on-column injector essentially “for free” now. Amazing. They’re also buying the gas regulators for their own unit, and I can use theirs until I move my machine out of there, so I’m now only having to purchase the column alone. Fantastic.

The downside is this is still a few weeks from operational, but we’re on track for coming online with it.

Mark

The boyfriend and I went out to SF tonight to drink coffee and work on our laptops. I spent something like 8 hours today answering old email that I let slide during the last two weeks. That stuff piles up fast, and a big part of the work of the tour is just the email in between the classes.

Anyway, we’d parked in a somewhat out-of-the-way spot on Mission, and on the way back to the car, there was a crowd of street people hanging out near the car. A couple of them tried one of those tricks of ‘HEY- HEY! Some guy just tried to break into your car, and I stopped them, andI been watching it for you, and now give me money for saving your car!’ We had walked up to the car and were loading things into it and one guy kind of jumped the gun on telling us the pre-arranged story before all his buddies were assembled there with him. I was looking around as I was getting in, and there were several drunken bums hobbling rapidly across the street as fast as they could, trying to catch us before we drove off, so as to sing us their line about the car. Of course, being a diesel, Tom couldn’t just drive off in a rush- I’d always joked about how you couldn’t use a diesel as a getaway car because you’d have the glow plug cycle to distract you. At one point the lead bum kind of grabbed the open door of the vehicle to steady himself, and was slurring the line about the alleged break-in.

I threw down my stuff and jumped out and found myself just about to jump over the hood to go hit him, which pretty much made him back off long enough for us to shut the door. It was one of those out-of-body moments for me- kind of like a piece of the brain was watching from a distance and saying ‘look, she’s about to hit him… look, she’s jumping out of the car and getting belligerent… Jeez, I wonder what she’s going to do next?’

It’s a great feeling that there’s not a whole lot to worry about with an old beater getting uglier- the guy’s more upright/less staggery friend managed to ‘key’ a corner of the vehicle as we were driving off. I was laughing.

Did I mention it gets 50 miles per gallon?