Last weekend I got my latest batch of homebrew ready and I made some modifications to the reactor. I added a intake valve, so that I can easily use the pump as a transfer pump from the washtank to the drying tank and from the drying tank to the storage tank (on the right). I also moved the the temperature gauge up a bit; in front of the intake for he methoxide, so that I get better temperature readings while I am adding the methoxide to the process.

The additional intake valve was called for because the oil intake is gravity fed from the oil storage and the intake is at the lowest point, so I cannot easily unhook it to use that intake for transfer. So instead, I leave it alone and plug another hose into the new one and conveniently pump from one tank to the other. I can also use it to completely drain the entire plumbing, which is useful.

One of my fellow biodieselers started calling this setup the “apple turnover” design, when I described it. That is because it is an appleseed reactor with the water heater installed upside down to facilitate better, more complete draining of the reactor.

Click on the image for a closer look at the plumbing.

Looks like I found a good source of methanol for my fuel production. Last Thursday I drove out to the Roxboro Motorsports Dragway and procured a 55-gallon drum of this critical ingredient for biodiesel. Racetracks have methanol supplies because they use it as a racing fuel – “racing alky.”

So this German guy and this African guy show up at this drag strip way out in the country in a Volkswagen Jetta, load a drum of “racing alky” on their trailer and talk about making diesel fuel out of used fryer grease. I bet that was the cross-cultural experience of the month for the guy who sold us the methanol. However he did mention that they do use quite a bit of fryer oil at their concessions, and that we could have it if we wanted it. Next time I go there, maybe I’ll drop off a plastic drum for them to collect the fryer oil.

One thing that worked great for transporting the 55-gallon drum was laying down a crate upside-down, and then dropping the drum sideways into one of the two openings at the bottom of the crate. Secured with a couple of straps, this was a great way to transport the methanol.

So that night I worked from 8 to 11 to start a new batch of biodiesel, which I am washing right now.
Praise the lard!

Liebes Deutschland РIch hoffe Du hattest einen sch̦nen Tag der Deutschen Einheit!

On October 3, 1990, the states of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany) adopted the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and thusly Germany was reunited after 41 years, and the GDR ceased to exist. That day was proclaimed German Unity Day.

Photos of the former Iron Curtain in Germany by Marco Bertram
Bundesministerium des Innern

Computers are not a green product. Their production, use and disposal consume huge amounts of energy and involve toxic chemicals. At work, I buy and decommission dozens of computers every year, and I worry a lot about the impact of my decisions on our environment. So I find the Greenpeace “Guide to Green Electronics” very helpful, indeed.

One of the areas where I have some influence is purchasing, and for a variety of reasons, I mostly buy Dell computers. So I am really happy to see that Greenpeace rates Dell as one of the best – not really good, but better than most.

I was really surprised when I read that Apple, the brand of the oh-so-hip and huggable, is still pretty toxic, especially the laptops. And even the Greenpeacenics are Apple-fans, but they sure do wish those Apples were greener.

Thanks to intense activism by Greenpeace , the ship involved in the Abidjan toxic waste scandal, the Probo Koala, was impounded by Estonian police and a criminal investigation appears to be under way.

For three days, the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise blocked the Probo Koala in the Estonian harbor of Paldiski. The activists painted the words EU TOXIC CRIME SCENE on the Probo Koala in order to draw attention to the fact that this ship is implicated in a toxic waste scandal that has killed eight people and injured thousands.

The Probo Koala, a Korean-built, Greek-managed, Panamanian-flagged and Dutch-chartered tanker, unloaded several hundred tons of toxic waste which were dumped in the sewers and open dumps of the city of Abidjan in Côte D’Ivoire, West Africa. The charter company, of course, “had no idea” that the waste was going to be illegally disposed of.

Yeah, they dock in Abidjan and in the middle of the night they unload their toxic sludge on trucks that disappear into the African night. No, they suspected nothing. Seemed all perfectly normal. Some fat envelopes change hands. No problemo. Seemed all perfectly legal. Yeah.

Anyway, maybe for once the crooks won’t get away with it. Maybe.

Last week we drove up to Michigan for a visit with Laura’s mom. We did the entire 850 miles north on homebrew, and I had already been feeding my Jetta homebrew for over 700 miles. So the first part of the trip marked the first 1,500 miles straight on homebrew!

Going north, the Jetta was loaded with two adults and two kids, plus baggage, and we were travelling at an average 70 Miles (112KM) per hour. The car used about 17 gallons for the trip north, which comes out to 50 miles per gallon. I calculated that my cost for the ingredients for a gallon of homebrew is abut 75 cents, plus 26 cents road tax, that’s $1.01 per gallon so the fuel cost for the 850-mile trip to Michigan was $17.17 :).

Since the temperatures in Michigan at night already dipped below 40 F, I added four gallons of kerosene to the remaining biodiesel in the tank. I also found a local biodiesel distributor (D&L Fuels) where I bought 15 gallons for the trip back to North Carolina. (Note: D&L Fuels only sells B20 retail at the pump, but they will fill containers with B99) However, on the trip south our car was towing a 4-foot x 8-foot U-Haul trailer (1.2 M x 2.4 M), which changed the fuel mileage of my 4-cyl TDI Jetta a bit.

Going south, with a 1000-pound trailer in tow (600 pounds tare plus 400 pounds in antique furniture), the Jetta used 27 gallons on 850 miles, which comes out to 32.5 miles per gallon. The biodiesel (or “soy”) I bought in Michigan cost $40 and I bought 4 gallons of kero ($11) and topped off with 2 gallons of diesel (to make it home). Plus 6 gallons of homebrew to start with (@ $1.01), I end up with a total fuel bill of $62 for the return trip.

Altogether, I spent just under $80 for the fuel for the 1,700-mile round trip. Not too bad!
Read the rest of this entry »

There are days when the human race just disgusts me … people venting their grief over Irwin’s death by killing stingrays!?

The reason why many crave to know the truth is that without some level of truth, there can be no freedom and dignity. A people blinded by lies becomes a weak people, exploited by its elites, and ultimately doomed as a society.

Truth is an elusive mistress and a tough teacher. Truth is not a singular entity, that can be captured, boxed and marketed. It is an ideal, a concept that requires constant work, care and attention. So beware of all who proclaim to be in possession of THE TRUTH!

I think that the truth about what happened on this day five years ago in New York, Washington and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania lies buried in the rubble of Ground Zero. The official government narrative leaves too many questions unanswered. Most critics are too quick at proclaiming The Truth, as well. However, some of those who offer alternative narratives, do ask very pertinent questions and point to some compelling answers.

But if you are content with the government version of what happened five years ago, if you have no doubts and trust that the US government and its media told you the honest truth, then click here.

If you are looking for more information and if you are prepared to ask questions that probe the official government narrative of the events of September 11, 2001, then check out some of these websites:

The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll – A New Generation of Conspiracy Theorists are at Work on the Secret History of 9/11 — New York Magazine

Loose Change 9/11

Pentagon Strike

Wikipedia: 9/11 Truth Movement

Complete 9/11 Timeline

Or just google for “9/11 Truth” …

The Probo Koala, infamous now for the deadly toxic waste it unloaded in Côte D’Ivoire, is now in Latvia, en route to Estonia, Deutsche Presse reports. The tanker’s arrival is causing some concern in Estonia:

“The Probo Koala will be under very special treatment when it comes into (the Estonian port of) Paldiski,” Allan Gromov of the Estonian Environment Ministry told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
DPA report via The raw Story, Sept. 8, 2006

This DPA report also talks about a story (ne) in the Dutch daily de Volkskrant, that reports that the Probo Koala tried to unload its toxic waste in Amsterdam in July. When they began pumping the stuff to a facility operated by the Amsterdam Port Services (APS), the resulting smell led to the operation being halted. The ship was allowed to leave, supposedly for Estonia. On August 20, the Probo Koala unloaded several hundred tons of toxic waste in Côte D’Ivoire, where since 3 people died and 1,500 have fallen ill from the illegal and unsafe disposal of the waste in neighborhoods of the city of Abidjan.

Yet again, another genocide is under way. In Darfur, the Sudanese government has begun indiscriminate bombings of civilians and supposed rebels Human Rights Watch reports. The Sudanese government is committing these war crimes in blatant defiance of international law and plain human decency. And it very much looks like they are moving into what Bill at Jewels in the Jungle calls “the end game, the final solution to their problem with the black Africans occupying the valuable land over the oil and gas fields of western Sudan, in Darfur. ”

But what to do?

Jewels in the Jungle has an interesting discussion of the problem. Bill calls for a blogathon to raise awareness of the ongoing genocide.

An op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by John Morlino (HT iAbolish) calls for the Darfur activists to “Take off the gloves” and demand urgent and decisive action in Darfur.

How about 50,000 blue helmets in Darfur with a clear unequivocal mandate to protect civilians? How about an enforced no-fly zone over Darfur? How about promising the Chinese access to oil in exchange for their cooperation in pressuring Khartoum to back off of Darfur?

The BBC reports that the government of Côte D’Ivoire has resigned over the toxic waste scandal.

The Ivorian Prime Minister, Charles Konan Banny has offered his government’s resignation after a scandal over toxic waste in Abidjan.

Two people have died and several hundred are ill after inhaling fumes from toxic waste apparently dumped at sites in the city two weeks ago.
Ivorian cabinet quits over waste, BBC News, 6 September 2006, 23:00 GMT

The report also states that 2 girls died Monday from the effects of the poisoning. AlJazeera reports that three people died and 1,500 are seriously ill.

Why, on earth, does the government resign at a time when the people need it to coordinate cleanups, and assess the public health impact of this terrible incident?? Le Patriote suspects a purely political maneuver to appease upset citizens and ensure political futures.

During the night of August 20, the Probo Koala, a tanker built in 1989 and owned by the Celtic Legend Shipping Inc., docked at the harbor of Abidjan. Its cargo – a volatile, toxic blend of a petroleum distillate and hydrogen sulphide was unloaded its onto 13 tanker trucks. Under cover of the night, these trucks proceeded to dump the noxious, dangerous cargo at several places around this city of over 3.6 Million. Now hundreds of residents have been poisoned and many are critically ill.

The Abidjan local daily Patriote suggests that local officials may be implicated in this scandal, and that they may have been paid off by whoever is responsible for this horrible crime. Clearly, they had to have had some local help to be able to unload and dump more than 500 cubic meters of this toxic brew.

The thing about this that gets me more than a few local officials taking bribes, is the gall of some chemical industry plant managers or executives somewhere, deciding to dump this stuff into the sewers of a city in Africa!!!
“Yeah buddy, we got a tanker load of this shit, whaddo we do with it?” – “Oh, ya know, let’s just ship it to Africa and dump it into the sewers of some city there … no one will notice … “

And they thought that that is a good idea, and that they would get away with it?

I hope the cops, Interpol, or the WHO …. someone is going to find out who is behind this and make them explain why they did this to the parents of the 10-year-old kid who is now in a coma because of this terrible crime. Right?

(I’ll post more stories to del.icio.us/yovo/toxic_waste)

350.092 MpH (529km/h) – that is the new land speed record for a diesel-powered vehicle. Andy Green, a British RAF officer set this new landmark this morning with the JCB DieselMax. The vehicle is powered by two 4-cylinder diesel engines that deliver a peak power of 750hp and torque of 1500Nm at 2000 RPM. The engines are based on JBCs 444 engine, an industrial, common-rail injection diesel engine, which usually powers backhoes and other equipment.

In comparison, the fastest piston-engine car is currently Tom Burkland’s Streamliner, at 417 MpH (the official FIA record is 409.978 – set Aug 21, 1991 by Speed0Motive (source). The curent holder of the overall land speed record is ThrustSSC a jet-propelled land vehicle, which achieved 763 mph, or 1227 km/h on October 15, 1997. This was the first time a land vehicle broke the sound barrier.

Yesterday I decided that the biodiesel I made last weekend looked good enough for a fill up. I spent last week washing the stuff in my washtank – first is sprinkled water on it and drained the soapy water from the bottom. Then I put a bubbler in the water below the biodiesel. The rising bubbles drag water through the biodiesel, then they pop and the water sinks back down to the bottom. Kind of like Spongebob and Patrick riding the fishing hooks -up and down and up and down … and every time they pick up the soap from the biodiesel. This process gets the soap out, but it leaves water dissolved in the biodiesel, and that needs to get removed in the next step.

There are several ways to dry washed biodiesel. I chose bubble drying. I just removed the water from the bottom of the washtank and fired up the bubbler, again. I also pointed a box fan at the surface of the biodiesel. Now the bubbles of air pick up the water, and drag it to the surface, where it evaporates. After a couple of days of bubble treatment, the biodiesel had turned from murky to clear.

So Sunday evening, I drained five gallons from the tank and filtered it to 5 microns using a sock filter. Finally, I poured my first homebrew biodiesel into the fuel tank of my 2002 Jetta. I took it for a spin, and all was well. There were only about 1 1/2 gallons of commercial biodiesel left, so it is running on mostly homebrew at this point. I drove about 30 miles (50 KM) today, and I noticed no difference, compared to the commercial biodiesel.

This weekend I brewed my first 30-gallon/120 liters batch of biodiesel, using the modified appleseed reactor I built in the basement. I used fryer oil from a local restaurant that titrated at 1.6 with KOH, so it’s pretty decent quality feedstock. Saturday, Manfred came over and we did the titration, mixed the Methoxide and started the process. I had heated the oil to about 120 deg. F, and then I cut off the heater. When I started blending in the Methoxide, the temperature went down below 100 F (that’s as low as the thermometer goes) due to 6 gallons of the cooler fluid. Once all the Methoxide was blended in, and the pump was just blending the reactant, the temperature went back up to almost 120 F, which is great, as the reaction is an exothermic reaction.

I let the pump run for 6 hours, the I cut it off and let the reactant settle for about 20 hours. On Sunday evening I drained the glycerol and the I pumped the biodiesel into the wash tank. The product came out a tad soapy, and I turned up the spray washer too high at first. So when I held a light behind the wash drum I could not see a separation at all, and I thought the stuff had emulsified … pretty quickly, however, the water settled down, and I started draining the soap water out – 15 gallons so far. I could probably start bubble-washing now, but my bubble stone broke, and so I ordered new ones from Utah BD supply.

So I’ll be washing the stuff this week, and then drying it next week, and before long I should be able to feed my Jetta my first homebrew biodiesel.

For better or for worse – the Personal Computer turns 25 years today. In August 1981, IBM introduced the PC to the masses. Since then, the little beige box has changed the world and left quite a legacy.

Praise the Lard and celebrate the “Good Juice” today! It’s International Biodiesel Day – celebrate VEGPOWER!

Transesterification of a vegetable oil was conducted as early as 1853, by scientists E. Duffy and J. Patrick, many years before the first diesel engine became functional. Rudolf Diesel’s prime model, a single 10 ft (3 m) iron cylinder with a flywheel at its base, ran on its own power for the first time in Augsburg, Germany on August 10, 1893. In remembrance of this event, August 10 has been declared International Biodiesel Day. Diesel later demonstrated his engine and received the “Grand Prix” (highest prize) at the World Fair in Paris, France in 1900. This engine stood as an example of Diesel’s vision because it was powered by peanut oil—a biofuel, though not strictly biodiesel, since it was not transesterified. He believed that the utilization of a biomass fuel was the real future of his engine. In a 1912 speech, Rudolf Diesel said “the use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today, but such oils may become, in the course of time, as important as petroleum and the coal-tar products of the present time.”
Wikipedia: Biodiesel – Historical background

This weekend I plan on brewing my first big batch of biodiesel at home. I have all the ingredients – the only glitch is that my scale gave up the ghost :( but I’ll borrow one from a fellow biodieseler …

The use of biodiesel in Germany has increased by two-thirds compared to last year, according to press reports of the latest issue of the Wochenbericht des DIW Berlin. Germans overall drive a bit less, but the Germans who have to drive a lot, are switching to the more fuel-efficient diesel vehicles, which now represent 21 percent of the total passenger vehicle fleet in Germany. And I’d bet that more and more people switch to diesel vehicles planning to use biodiesel.

A major motivator for Germans are the fuel prices: a liter high-octane costs 1.398 Euros – that’s $6.76 per Gallon (US)! Considering those prices, I find the 3-percent reduction in average annual driving distance rather modest.

US gas price map by county
International Fuel Price comparison

Today’s Word of the Day was invented (I think) by my boss: picobuckets. We got a good chuckle out of this one during the staff meeting, when he tried to illustrate his consternation at some of the strange measurements of one of his fellow researchers.

Sixty one years ago 140,000 residents of the city of Hiroshima died when the United States Air Force dropped a nuclear bomb on the city. Three days later, the Americans bombed Nagasaki with another nuclear weapon, killing another 74,000 people. We may debate over the role of these bombings in WWII, but we shall never let these images fade away into history, because, despite of the end of the Cold War, we are still sitting on a huge pile of nuclear weapons. We cannot ever unleash this hellish technology again!