w o r d s

Last weekend was a big weekend for my biodiesel production project. Friday I pulled a 220 Volt/30 Amp circuit to the reactor in the basement. A friend who is an electrician emailed me instructions for what breaker and wiring to get, after I explained the project. So I cut the power, plugged in the new breaker, pulled the wire and hooked up the reactor. No biggie.

Saturday I filtered 120 Liters (30 Gals) of veggie oil and pumped it into the reactor, 20 Liters at a time, to calibrate the sight tube. That way I now know how much feedstock is in the vessel. Since I turned the water heater upside down, the heating element is a bit higher off the bottom as it would be the other way around. So the minimum fill is about 100 liters (25 Gals) for a batch. I then fired up the heater, and began circulating the oil to warm it up. I ran it for several hours to test it and to calibrate the temperature to just below 140 Deg. F. Once the oil was warm, I noticed a couple of leaks in the plumbing - nothing serious, just a little dripping. I’ll fix that this week.

Sunday I tinkered with my wash tank setup and realized that the stand for the tank is not sturdy enough. I’ll need to improve it - probably with some plywood. Also, the stand pipe leaks, because it’s not glued in yet. I’ll do that once I am happy with the setup.

This is very exciting. I am so close, I can smell my first big batch of homebrew!

To do:

• Fix plumbing
• Buy methanol and KOH
• Fix washtank
• Drying tank
• Setup for final filtering
• Prepare storage

There’s still a bit of work, but it looks like the centerpiece of my homebrew operation is in place now.

Praise the Lard!

Wal Mart is throwing the towel in Germany! Looks like they’ll sell their 85 German stores at a loss of $1Billion to Germany’s largest retailer Metro. I despise Wal Mart, and I find an odd sense of satisfaction in the news that German stubborn attitudes brought Wal Mart, the death star of retail, to its knees. I can just see Grandma Mayer slapping the bagger at the checkout on his fingers: “Those are MY groceries, young man - leave them alone! I bought ‘em -I’ll bag ‘em!”

Maybe stubborn consumer attitudes hurt Wal Mart, but stubborn worker attitudes really gave Wal Mart the rest. You just try telling German store workers they cannot unionize! Wal Mart sports a patronizing corporate “culture” which encourages ratting on fellow workers, frowns on dating fellow workers (not that I think that that’s generally a smart idea) and generally aims at disenfranchising its employees. This did not go over too well with the German workforce and gave Wal Mart a really negative image in the eyes of the consumer.

Seems like Germans have this funny, antiquated sense that store clerks should be competent professionals, and that they should be treated as such by their employers. Those silly Krautheimers and their attitudes!

Ah - hark the master of the moral high ground: the chief ethical executive from Royal Dutch Shell has spoken:

Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s top marketer of biofuels, considers using food crops to make biofuels “morally inappropriate” as long as there are people in the world who are starving, an executive said on Thursday.
Shell Says Biofuels From Food Crops “Morally Inappropriate” - PlanetArk, July 7, 2006

Yeah, biodiesel becomes popular and Big Oil finds its soft spot for the poor, starving masses. I would like to see them to produce a single current example where the biofuels cause hunger. Food shortages are usually caused by war, which in turn is often caused by conflict over scarce or valuable resources like oil. If any fuel is “morally inappropriate” it’s petroleum based fuel. Access to oil is the underlying reason for war, oppression and violence. Oil extraction destroys environmental resources and pollutes the earth.

Just ask the Ogoni people in Nigeria if Shell is acting in a “morally appropriate” way in the Niger delta:

Since Shell began drilling oil in Ogoniland in 1958, the people of Ogoniland have had pipelines built across their farmlands and in front of their homes, suffered endemic oil leaks from these very pipelines, been forced to live with the constant flaring of gas. This environmental assault has smothered land with oil, killed masses of fish and other aquatic life, and introduced devastating acid rain to the land of the Ogoni.
Shell in Nigeria: What are the issues? - Boycott Shell, 2001.

Big Oil buys arms for the Nigerian military, which terrorizes and kills anyone critical of the actions of Big Oil in the Niger Delta. A huge portion of Nigeria’s revenues come from oil, but the people who live in the Niger Delta, where the oil is extracted, see nothing of it. Except maybe the guns bought from it. But they are at the wrong end of the gun barrel.

Clearly it would be preferable for fuel and food production NOT not to be in competition. Pursuing ways to make fuel from waste biomass is great. We need to pursue all options that might yield efficient, renewable sources of fuels, and if Shell can come up with a way to make fuel efficiently without competing with food crops for land or resources - more power to them. But to have Big Oil make pronouncements regarding the ethics of fuel production is absurd.

No, biodiesel is not much of a spectator sport and provides only little entertainment value to most people. But when Lyle talks about biodiesel he is really funny and quite entertaining. Lyle’s humorous and insightful stories from the epicenter of the North Carolina biofuels movement made yesterday’s book reading at the Regulator Bookstore in Durham a real success. The event was well attended - roughly 40 - 50 people - and the discussion after the reading was quite lively. Just like the book, the discussion was focused less on technical issues and more on “big-picture” topics, like the regulatory environment, the status of the sustainability movement, biofuels-centered lifestyles, and the place of biofuels in the sustainable-energy toolbox for this country.

Lyle posts regular updates about his adventures and insights on his energy blog on the Piedmont Biofuels website.

Mexico’s presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (or AMLO), unlike Gore or Kerry, is not about to give up his fight for democracy and justice in his country. In light of evidence of blatant ballot-stuffing by the ruling party PAN, and considering that nearly one million votes have not been counted, the PRD’s candidate has called for massive protests in Mexico City and across the country to pressure the electoral commission (which is controlled by the ruling PAN) to order a complete re-count.

There does seem to be evidence that the ruling PAN also had help from North-of-the-Border. Greg Palast, who published many reports about the problems with the elections in 2000 and 2004, says he has evidence that the Republican-friendly voter-purgers from ChoicePoint compiled citizen files and voter lists for Mexico and Venezuela, just like they did for Florida, under the cover of a “counter-terrorism” contract with the FBI. The Mexican list was apparently provided to the ruling PAN in order to be used to “scrub” AMLO-supporters from the voter rolls for the presidential election earlier this month.

Why does the US government want to influence the elections in Mexico? Could it be because Mexico sell more crude oil to the US than Saudi Arabia:

US Crude Oil Imports (Thousand Barrels per Day)

Country 	YTD 2006
CANADA 		1,757
MEXICO 		1,668
SAUDI ARABIA 	1,422
VENEZUELA 	1,186
NIGERIA 	1,134
IRAQ 		666

source: US EIA

This may be a simplistic POV, but the US government is aggressively meddling with the internal affairs of just about each of these countries (not sure about Canada, though I would not be surprised), especially where the powers-that-be start talking about regulation and public ownership of natural resources (Venezuela, Saddam in Iraq). If the US government spent half the effort on energy conservation, fuel efficiency and alternative energy sources, as it spends on meddling with the internal affairs of these countries - let alone occupying them - this country would be a healthier place in many ways, and the world would be a much more peaceful place.

President Bush is visiting (de) Angela Merkel’s home district in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The cute, historic town of Stralsund is under siege: all cars had to be removed to lots outside the town, gutters are welded shut, mailboxes sealed, stores cannot open, and residents are even prohibited from opening their WINDOWS in July! (Remember very few German houses have A/C). And to top it off, no one knows who will foot the 20-million-Euro bill for the visit.

Way to win the “hearts and minds” of the folks in Stralsund …

The German Football Federation announced (de) that assistant coach Joachim Löw got a 2-year contract as national trainer, after Jürgen Klinsmann elected not to renew his contract after the Worldcup. Löw hails from Schönau (de) in the Black Forest, and I find it intriguing to see a fellow Badenser and former player at SC Freiburg (our regional football “powerhouse”) take the reins of the national team. It appears that Löw will provide good continuity of Klinsmann’s style and leadership - hopefully also of Klinsmann’s success.

Germany’s biggest loss of this Worldcup came today - two days after the closing ceremony, as the German Football Federation (DFB) confirms Jürgen Klinsmann’s decision to quit. Considering his commute and the amount of abuse he had to suffer before the Worldcup, his decision does not come as a total shock - just as a major disappointment. Thank you, Herr Klinsmann, for your courage to make hard decisions, and for pulling together a fantastic team that played some of the best football in this tournament and that put the spunk back into German football.

On the positive side, however, 90 percent of the foreign Worldcup tourists say that they would recommend Germany as a tourist destination (according to a poll conducted by the German tourism association DZT). The images from Germany during the last month have been very positive: cheerful enthusiasm and hospitality, combined with a new flag-waving self-confidence that seems to be generally well-received.

Personally, I find all this flag-waving a bit silly, but on the other hand it appears to be a sign of a cheerful, self-confident flavor of patriotism that is hardly threatening. And after all, they are waving the banner of the German Märzrevolution (de) (en) of 1848, which was a perfectly respectable (if ill-fated) Democratic revolution. Of all the flags Germans might be waving, we like this one best …

Busy, hot day today at the Eno Festival - but lots of fun! The festival was well attended and we had a constant stream of people with questions about biodiesel: “Can I use it in my car?” - “Where can I get it?” - “How is it made?” - What do you do with the glycerol?” - How does it compare to Ethanol?” - ” How much does it cost?” … All perfectly reasonable questions, and we were excited to see all this interest.

The BBC’s Newsnight published an interviw with Joseph Kony (left), the leader of the so-called “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA), which is responsible for the genocide on the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. This is the first-ever interview with Kony, who is wanted by a UN court for war crimes. The BBC also posted an interview with one of the LRA’s victims, the 25-year-old Ugandan Ochola John (right) (warning - the contents of the interview are quite graphic).

The importance of this interview is probably not so much in what Kony said (which is not much), but merely in the fact that it took place at all. Maybe it’s a sign that the LRA is truly interested in peace talks with Museveni’s government.

See Uganda-CAN for frequent updates on the situation in Uganda.