which are the sexiest ball valves?

Dear Ester~

- How about Graham Laming's One-Day Method? Why don't you use it?

I hadn't heard of Graham Laming until last spring when Greg, our new (at the time) intern, showed up talking about his infopop forum hero. Graham is one of those guys who does an incredible job of posting many details about the biodiesel projects he's thinking about or working on.

The One-Day Method is based on the principle that soap is not soluble in biodiesel. Therefore, if you remove methanol from freshly reacted biodiesel, the soap can be filtered, centrifuged, or settled out.

At Piedmont, we are adept at making mistakes and learning from them. We call it "research and development." Greg is at the heart of most of our "R&D," which includes a lot of work in methanol recovery and soap removal.

We have developed a unit that recovers methanol from a continuous stream of biodiesel at 1.0 gallons per minute. And we have sat back and watched the soaps drop out. I can't wait to use this process at Industrial, where we make 4,000 gallons of fuel per day. Right now, we're still working out some of the finer details on the scaled up (15 to 30 times bigger) column.

Glycerin and the outside of soap are very hydrophilic. This means they love being dissolved in water. Biodiesel straight out of our reactors contains about 1.5% soap and about 20% glycerol. Soaps would rather be in water, glycerin and methanol than the biodiesel so adding some water to the mix, agitating for a few minutes and settling is a very effective method for reducing soaps. We have found that mixing about 5% water into the biodiesel, glycerin and methanol reduces soap to under 0.5%.

Yes. Exposing biodiesel to brass accelerates an oxidation reaction in the fuel that can create sediments, gels, salts, and free fatty acids. Oxidized biodiesel can be out of spec, have higher viscosity (thicker fuel that's harder to pump) and cause filter clogging. Plus stainless is sexier.

Yes. Of course, the cost effectiveness depends on how much your recovery equipment costs to build and run. Our 1.0 gpm recovery unit probably cost us $5,000 to build and about $0.03/gal to run. Assuming we make a measly 40 gallons of biodiesel per week, pay $2.80/gal for methanol and recover 40%, we hit pay dirt in a very reasonable 29 months, < 2.5 years. Spend less money building the unit, make more fuel, wait another month for methanol prices to increase and you hit breakeven faster. The homebrew community still needs a simple, affordable, bulletproof (read: safe) methanol recovery design.

Forget about future demand. Current demand is already strangling the feedstock market. This time two short years ago, soybean oil was trading at 20 cents per pound. Today it can't be had for less than 50 cents.

We, the biodiesel industry, are the reason for the most explosive value increase in the history of the commodity. When Renewable Diesel hits the scene in earnest, stand by for increasing shortages of traditional feedstocks and increasing supplies of alternative feedstocks.

Renewable Diesel wins hands down on cold weather. For your engine, my knowledge is shaky at best. It's probably a toss up on engine performance, though I bet it wins on material compatibility. It loses on energy balance, tailpipe and lifecycle emissions.

The cold flow improver market is dominated by diesel fuel. The biodiesel niche is so incredibly small (less than 0.5% of our national diesel consumption) that it hasn't shown up on the major additive manufacturer's market share spreadsheets yet. A few companies have come out with products that have limited positive impacts for soy B100. We have tested about a dozen additives and written them all off as ineffective in reasonable dose rates at improving cold flow characteristics of high blends. Anyone want to bet we'll see a real anti-gel before algae oil hits the market?

Quality control. Jan Warnqvist's 27/3 test, titrating for soap and acid value, and testing for water are four simple, cheap and essential tools for producing high quality fuel. Though slightly more expensive, Dr. Randall von Wedel's pHLip test is a great way for serious homebrewers to assess the completeness of their reactions.

For a more advanced class on biodiesel business I would share the following lesson.

Esterification pre-treatment, methanol recovery, and glycerin refining are no longer optional. If you want to be viable, you need to be able to take higher FFA feedstocks; recover your methanol for reuse, to save water, and increase capacity by saving time; and clean up glycerin so that it is saleable and becomes a profit center instead of a cost center.

I'll grant you that compared to a match, a cell phone is a poor way to light a cigarette.

But it can produce a spark.

Methanol vapors are so explosive and flammable the Department of Insurance requires rooms where even small amounts of methanol vapors could possibly be present to be explosion proof. Can you get away with taking a cell call in a room full of methanol vapors? Maybe. But you also have all the ingredients for an explosion (fuel, oxygen, ignition).

Leave your cell phone and corduroy pants outside.