Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’m just coming down off of several weeks of hell and mental anguish that revolved around finishing up the farm biodiesel plant design. I got commissioned to design a system for some farmers, exactly what I’ve been wanting to do all year. We have decided to put together a really tiny little pilot plant, with the idea being that it would be mobile, and that the farmers could sell it off when they wanted to upscale. There were a variety of reasons why ‘tiny little’ made sense for them, although it was not what they ultimately intend to install.

I decided to change everything around 100% after what I learned on my last trip out of town. I’d gone out to Asheville to teach a class and to do some consulting for Blue Ridge Biofuels. They have designed a teeny little pilot plant very similar to one of my designs, which I think means that I get to leapfrog that teeny little pilot plant stage in the pursuit of our farm plant, as they have one on-line exactly like what I would have built. BRB were having some very minor problems, which we were able to troubleshoot pretty quickly, and I learned a tremendous amount from seeing the thing in action. I have a few friends in the small producer world right now who all have similar size little systems, all of which were set to go online this summer, and being able collaborate amongst ourselves has been phenomenally helpful. I actually modified my theoretical system when I met Rob Del Bueno and talked about systems earlier this winter, bringing mine more in line with what he’s building, so that we can collaborate over troubleshooting if problems come up. of course the other side of that is that if the designs turn out to be mistakes, then we have two people with the same problem in their plant, and the same problematic equipment to replace- it’s kind of an ‘all eggs in one basket’ approach.

I’ve been thinking about codifying the sort of informal friendly collaboration that I’ve been involved in, into a farm-scale plant listserve- no one who is in the process of building a system seems to want talk about their progress in public, partially because of the regulatory/code compliance issues involved, and partially because they don’t want to look foolish if they make mistakes, so unfortunately there’s not a very detailed public discussion going on, even though the technology involved is very simple and there aren’t the major issues with competitive disadvantage that exist with larger systems that use proprietary technologies.

I decided that there is no reason for me to put another tiny little plant into the world.

I’d assigned myself a series of different design constraints, and spent a couple of weeks designing two different kinds of plants that fit those differing constraints.

One of the design constraints was that I wanted to make sure the system fit inside of a shipping container. That’s what Rob has done as well. In fact, I think there are an awful lot of theoretical plants sketched out on Whiteboards out there in the world, all designed around fitting the process equipment inside of a shipping container, and plunking the shipping container down next to a tank farm full of oil. Mine is no different. Shipping containers are fantastic little portable buildings, but they have extremely limited dimensions which makes a plant an interesting design challenge. Of course with a big enough tank farm and continuous process technology (not something I’m interested in tackling), you can squeeze a million gallons a year out of one of these things, but that requires a few million dollars also.

I stared at graph paper for weeks trying to figure out how to squeeze the maximum gallons out of a 40 foot shipping container using commonly available equipment. I came up with a rough estimate of a theoretical 250,000 gallons a year, still pilot plant sized but large enough for the niche projects I"m interested in. Next project is seen how well it works in reality.