Jets and BioFuel

So, Virgin Atlantic flew a short flight on biofuel. What remarkable about this is Sir Branson pointed out that Algae based biofuels are targeted to produce their Jet Fuel.

Stroke of common sense, brilliant.

Plant-oil is People! Er, petro-oil...

CBC is carrying something today few people know about: that plastic doesn't need to come from crude (aka. petroleum oil) oil. Orignally plastics were made from Soy bean.

Infact, just about any plant oil can be be used as raw matirial for creating plastics. If only there was a plant that could be grown in sufficant quantity to make a significant dent in the plastics industry...

Delay to our furnace

Installation of our geoexchange furnace has been delayed untill the spring.

We had hoped to get it in for Christmas, but the 150cm of snow we got really but a wrench in the plans. Add to that the Ontario ground water Regulation 903 (aka. the Walkerton regulation) you get more delays as the company investigates better ways to grout the bore hole. And to top it off, the company is going though a change of ownership (for the better in my opinion).

But all is not lost. We'll get our furnace in the spring when the ground is soft, and the snow is gone. Less of a point getting it now when the coldest parts of winter are done.

A MP3 podcast audio feature from CBC's Quirks and Quarks on the technology of our new furnace.

M's Generator is getting closer

So M's generator is getting closer to being operational.

Todo:

1. install cooling system (205L steel barrel filled with water/coolant, convection cooling)
2. install veggie fuel lines (currently only using diesel)
3. install exhaust system!

Today we got woodnstuff's man John to come over with the new fly-wheel and between 3 of us we took turns cranking the sucker. With the help of break cleaner from CdnTire (ether is so last century) we got a few successful power strokes. The -10C overnight temperatures made the engine quite cold. M will need to install some glow plugs for winter starting.

The problem with biofuel

The problem is the people who make biofuel are chemical companies and not agricultural companies.


Fundamentally, a company will focus its efforts on the things it does best. Why would a chemical company making fuel ever want to grow the crops used to make the fuel? It makes about as much sense as a bank getting into the business of real estate.



So why is this a problem? Because as a chemical producer, you care only about price and availability.

Result - biofuels are mass produced using human food crops. Why would BiofuelCompany grow its own crops when they can get soy or canola cheap prices? The return on investment isn't there for BiofuelCompany.

So now - as I'm sure you know - we're in a state where biofuels are trendy (ignoring ethenol, rightfully so) and food prices are going up because there are two markets buying the product.

Solution - grow crops specifically designed for fuel. What would this crop look like?

No intellectual property concerns
Anyone can grow it without fear of litigation. After all, more competition means more product. It's very very hard to conceive of supply outstripping demand for any cheap energy source.

Inexpensive to grow
The raw materials needed to grow the crop have to be cheap. Little to no pesticides is a bonus. Less work the better.

High fuel content
The crop needs to produce very high amounts of fuel per acre.

What would my solution be? Algae. Algae will grow in just about any body water (ask anyone who owns a chlorinated pool). All it needs is CO2, some nitrogen, 25C temperatures and lots of sunlight. You don't even need to displace prime food crops to grow it. Deserts have lots of sunlight, a water-tight greenhouses will conserve almost all the water.

As for fuel content? Corn - 145kg of oil per hectare. Soybean - 375kg/ha. Canola (rapeseed) - 1,000 kg/ha. Algae - 6,894kg/ha (theoretical 39,916kg/ha).

Staggering? Not if you answer these questions:

• What produced 99% of the oxygen present in our atmosphere during the primordial years of our planet?
• What is the base of the food chain for most of the world's ecosystems?
  
• Algae has been harvesting power from the sun for billions of years, humans have been at it (photovoltaic/solarcell technology) for 40 years. Who would you expect is better at it?
• Why is photosynthesis almost 100% efficient while photovoltaic research has only gotten 42.8% with super-expensive Gallium-Arsenide triple-junction semiconductor crystals?
  

The oil from algae can be used to produce plastics (1950's plastics were made from soy bean oil until the farmers couldn't keep up with demand and Tupperware started using slag from oil refinement).

The oil from algae can be blended (say, 50%) with home heating fuel which doesn't need the same level of refinement as transportation. Or better yet, displace large amounts of petroleum oil used in electrical generation.

Addi tonal energy can be spent to convert the oil into BioDiesel for transportation.

Hurry up and wait

The geothermal contractor we've made arrangements with has had a rough December with all the snow.

Drilling though snow isn't the problem. Operating a drill rig with exposed machine parts in blowing snow - that's the problem. With luck, I'll have a firm date soon on when the drill can start.

A neighbour emailed me today explaining a new local temple is having construction difficulties because bedrock is so close to the surface. That's great news. Hydraulic conductivity of fractured sandstone (the geological formation our house is most likely on) is very high.

Split rock == good water flow. Good water flow == good heat transfer. Good heat transfer + geothermal furnace == excellent heating.

Justifying the cost of a MADNESS

$25,000 is a lot of money for a furnace. If you won $25k, you'd be dancing. If you misplaced $25k you'd be depressed.

In spite of my tone in this blog, my wife and I took this decision seriously and here's how we came to it.

1. Assume we're replacing our furnace and air conditioner

That's $7,000 of assumed cost right there. Our furnace was mid-efficiency (by today's standards low-efficiency) natural gas. Our air conditioner is a piece of junk and we've never used it. With a baby on the way, it's a good plan to have one for emergencies. And resale of a home is quite difficult with no summer cooling.

2. Assume we'll get rebates

• $3,500 from the Ontario Provincial Government,
• $3,500 from the Canadian Federal Government, and
• $800 from the Ontario Power Authority

Total: $8,000

3. Assume we save $1,500 per year

• No natural gas bill (no delivery charges, debt reduction, or cost per cubic meter).
• Increase in hydro usage will only occur in low electricity demand months (electricity demand is always highest in the summer months as cooling systems operate)

Items 1 to 3 puts our pay-back period at about 5-7 years.

4. Assume there are no environmentally friendly investment mechanisms that make money

We wanted to save some of our money in "ethical" or "green" investments. My (and a few other) financial planners basically told us "don't bother".

The problem it seems is "green funds" are managed by people whose primary motives are not to make you money but to invest in green technology and historical performance (as short as it has been) is poor. Like losing money poor.

And companies who qualify as "green" are often run by people whose primary motives are not to increase shareholder value but to be the best green company they can be. Not a bad thing, just not money making for investors.

So, we decided if we're going to invest, we'll do it on our terms. Our veggie fueled car, our heat pump, super insulating the house, etc.

This blog doesn't just chronicle our "greeny" whims. These are our green investments and we treat each decision as such.

The Grease Car Mod

The GreaseCar modification to my car doesn't change anything with the engine - it's a 2nd fuel tank that's heated from the waste heat of the engine (coolant).

The GreaseCar website has an excellent flash animation explaining everything.

Here's what the modification looked like once I got it back from Young Street Garage.

1) Under the hood.
The red hoses contain coolant to heat up the fuel filter assembly on the right. At the bottom, you see the two solenoids to switch diesel/veggie/diesel-backflush. You can see the VW engine cover is still there, I eventually remove it.



2) The dashboard.
An aluminium plate holding the fuel gauge and 3-way illuminated rocker switch is attached quite snugly to the bottom of the standard centre dash. Below, the ash tray is removed (we don't smoke) and the GreaseCar temperature gauge is installed.



3) In the trunk.
The spare wheel is removed, and we now carry cans of RideFlat wheel sealant in our emergency kit. I've tried to insulate the tank with foil bubble wrap. Fiberglass would just get nasty and loses its insulating properties if compressed. Notice how we don't lose any trunk space with the modification. I suggest using a end of a roll of masking tape to protect the fuel-level leads from weight of trunk items (hidden by a block of white foam in the picture below).





Upgrades

I found the heat of the oil to suffer in the winter. So after reading InfoPop a lot, two upgrades that should solve my problems of winter vegoil fuel heating were discovered.

1) Brazed Plate Heat Exchanger


Click to animate.

Brazed plates have more surface area than flat plates, so they can transfer heat from the coolant to the vegoil fuel better. This is the "heavy lifter" for vegoil temp. The thermal energy transferred is much greater than the GreaseCar thermal filter assembly or the PlantDrive VegTherm. But it is limited by how hot the coolant is.



The engine cover doesn't fit anymore with all the extra hoses. I didn't like it anyways.

2) PlantDrive.ca's VegTherm Mega

30cm long, 32Amp at 12V of electrical resistance heating. This sucker burns skin on contact. After the oil is heated in the trunk tank, after it's insulated in the hose-in-hose line under the car, after it's warmed up a bit by the GreaseCar thermal filter assembly, after it's raised to the same temp as the coolant by the BPHE - the VegThermMega does it's thing.



I also stopped using foil bubble wrap for insulation and moved to copper pipe foamies - they insulate way better.

As you can see, things are getting very tight. But it's still manageable, even for me.

Yesterday, my BFHE was showing temperatures of 50C (it was likely warmer, temperature sensor heat loss to ambient air temp) I turned on the VegTherm and the oil temp out the other side was 68C.

Time will tell how it does in -30C.

Veggie Oil Performance

There are three questions I'm always asked when I tell people about the veggie oil conversion I did to our car.

1. Are you pulling my leg?
2. What's the fuel economy of veggie oil vs diesel?
3. Is there any loss in power / acceleration?

The fuel economy is hard to measure as accurately as diesel since I don't have the fuel station's 0.001 Litre accuracy in my plastic jugs.

The power question I can never answer definitively since you need special equipment to perform the test. That and my 2001 JettaTDI sedan is spec'd at 90 hp - not exactly a hot rod.

So when the local Ottawa Volkswagen enthusiasts group had their annual dynamometer day (wiki), I paid for two runs on the device. One diesel, one veggie.



The Test
For both runs the engine was hot for ideal performance (20min driving at 80km/h). For the veggie run, I made sure I was running on veggie for at least 10min before the test started - 100% veggie no diesel on the side. The oil temp was over 70C.

The Videos

1) Calibration. Dynos need to know what wheel speed your car has in relation to the RPM of your engine. With that, they can graph torque and horsepower against engine speed. They say it was tricky because they rarely test automatic transmissions.



2) The first run.



3) Under the hood. See all my foamy fuel-line insulation? See my foil bubble wrap FPHE and GreaseCar fuel filter insulation?



4) Computer display. Wheel speed in kilometre per hour at bottom left. Engine speed in rotations per minute converted from wheel speed at bottom right.



5) Up close. Look at that monster (cough) engine heave under the hood. Seriously, I didn't realize they do that.



The Results (drum roll)


Click to enlarge

Veggie (in green) - 192 ft-lb Torque, 107 hp
Diesel (in red) - 172 ft-lb Torque, 102 hp

Wet Oil Sucks

Not many first time veggie oil users are aware that cooking oil absorbs water when food is cooked in it.

Potatoes are mostly water, so is fish, shrimp, chicken, and just about everything else you cook in a deep fryer. What's how it cooks in fact - the oil instantly vaporises the water at the surface of the food. That vapour appears as bubbles in the oil. Some fraction of the vapour doesn't make it to the surface and you in to the air; it is absorbed by the oil.

Filtering, and settling of the oil will help separate the water from the oil (fuel). But how do we know when it's done? In short - it'll never get done. See: Chemical Equilibrium.

How to test for water in oil

1. Pour your suspect oil in to a kitchen fry pan (get a cheap one from the dollar store)
2. Heat the oil on high on your kitchen range
3. If you see bubbles popping, then there's water in your oil

Methods to remove water from oil

1. Centrifuge
2. Evaporation
3. Evaporation under vacuum (uses less energy than #2)
4. Chemically (may leave impurities which will then need to be removed)

I use option #2 above because it's simple, and inexpensive for the volume of oil I dewater.
220 litres of filtered oil, $0.05 per kWh, 1kW element, 10 hours, equals less than 1/5 of a penny to dewater 1L of oil.

Insulation Math

Just for fun, I was reading this site deciding if I should replace all my old mouse-poop-filled blown pink insulation in my attic. [Can Rebate, Ont Rebate]

I have no room to add to the insulation in my attic, so I'll likely need to throw it all out or risk ice built up from lack of soffit venting.

6 inches of blown fiberglass: R-13.2
6 inches of fiberglass batts: R-18.84
16 inches of blown fiberglass: R-35.2
16 inches of fiberglass batts: R-50.24

Hollow Core Wood Door (1 + 3/4 inch): R-2.17
Metal Insulating Door (2 inch): R-15

We're getting a new furnace

This morning the rep from Earth Energy Solutions came by our home at 08:00 and we signed over the first 25% of $25,000 and signed a contract. They'll be installing the unit before Christmas.

Catch? DX systems aren't eligible for the $7,000 in rebates from the Ontario and Canadian governments because they don't meet CSA-448 standards. The other heat pumps cost well more than $7k so this is still the best deal. And the DX systems are apparently this close to getting rubber stamp approved for the rebates. So we may still get our money back.

Home inspection coming over 2007-12-03 to get a baseline.

M's Generator Coming Together

My long time friend M lives away from the city and when the power goes out - he's not in an area with a high priority for restoring power.

Without electricity his home is at risk of flood, freezing/bursting pipes and other damage. Not to mention his little girl would be stuck in the cold with no water (water well needs power to pump) or warm food (electric range and oven).

With his wife's blessing (I assume) he began building a shed to house a lister engine to power his home. His eventual goal is to sell power back to the grid through OPA RESOP at double the market rate.

Here is the engine mounted on the I-beam frame. The I-beam frame is rested on 2cm thick rubber padding - like this. Then the I-beam frame is anchored into about 1,000 kg (2,204.62262 pounds ...) of concrete.

We got the two fly wheels on (about 90kg each) after much grunting. We figure he's close to getting the engine started. We'll start with just diesel. There are still exhaust, cooling, veggie fuel considerations to prepare. Oh yeah, and the alternator, electrical cabling, throw switches in the house, etc. But for now, we're happy.

How to buy a heat pump

Tomorrow we're going to ask a contractor "ok, how do we pay you"?

It's taken 6 months to get to this point. We went through several stages to hunting:

Education

Upon contemplating producing copious amounts of our own electricity (not with dinky solar power) I started to wonder how much hydro we'd need to heat a home. The answer is about 50 kW (over 200 Amps at 220V). Insane. Then I tripped upon ground source heat pumps which are over 500% efficient(heat energy output is 5x the energy required to operate).

The EcoCite condos on Bank St were touting that they we going to be heating the building using this same technology.

What sealed the deal? My wife grew up in home that went from wood fire to GSHP and she didn't freeze. So I got the green light.

Shock

Calling around to a few Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) contractors who specialize in these systems we found the cost to start at $25,000 CAD. We spent less than that on our car.

Justification

$25,000 is a LOT of money for heat. The federal and Ontario government has paired up to provide $3,500 x2 in rebates for these heating systems. On top of this, the Ontario Power Authority offers $750 for GSHPs. Look at my links to the left for "show me the money" links.

If we were to replace our low efficacy gas furnace and air conditioner (which we never use) that would be another $8,000 without even thinking too hard. So we're down to $10,000. Assuming $2,000 per year in natural gas - that's a 5 year return on investment. Hydro costs will be higher with our higher usage, so stretch that to 7 year ROI to be safe.

Good deal.

Investigation

We started by talking to a contractor who had a lot of experience with GSHPs. Problem was, he was too busy with other work to get to us. His price was quite a bit lower than others we had contacted, so we waited. And waited. And waited. And gave up.

Contractor-2 was friendly and knowledgeable. His initial price for closed loop (our preferred option) was $50,000. Too rich for us. We asked for a different configuration (open loop) and he could to $25,000.

Contractor-3 equally nice, priced $30,000 closed-loop, $20,000 open-loop.

Contractor-4, $25,000 closed loop DX from Nordic. Price is right, smaller chance of ground water contamination than open-loop, and they were prepared to show us a contract.

References

We called references from all the contractors. Everyone was pleased (surprise, surprise) with the functioning of the units. Only complaints were unavoidable things like "it made a mess of our yard" and "I didn't have ventilation before, and that was a mess".

So tomorrow, I hand over 1/4 of the $25,000 to get things going. Let's hope we get it before Christmas so I can put up videos.

Powering a home on the fat of the land

No man is an island. I have a good friend M whom I feed my need to talk about crazy ideas like heating your home without gas, wood, or fuel. We also talk about running a car using waste oil.

We had an agreement - that I would get a ground source heat pump and he'll get a Lister generator powered by veggie oil.

Lister engines were made in Lister England in the 1930's and knock-offs are now made everywhere - especially in India. These engines are very primitive. Hand crank to start, no muffler or transmission. But primitive it good - it can run on veggie oil no problem.

If you strap a large alternator to it - you now have a waste oil to electricity device. Free power.

In this blog I will present how we setup M his very own grease sucking power plant.

Heat from the Earth

Now a little something about the furnace we're looking to get.

When we bought our home in 2005, the previous owner put in the cheapest furnace he could get - he was just flipping the house. At the time (nothing's changed I understand) the efficacy of a furnace did not have an effect on the value of a house.

One cold winter day the price of natural gas jumped in sympathy of high crude oil prices. Yay capitalism. The good old CBC morning radio was interviewing someone who heated their home using the stored heat in the ground. What bent my brain was this statement:

"The ground in Ottawa stays 10C year round and that's plenty to heat my house, yeehaw."

A house @ 10C just isn't comfy. I knew of geothermal heating using hot geysers in Iceland, but heating your house using something that's colder than what you would find comfortable didn't make sense.

Then a web site beat me with a clue stick (Images in this post are from that link, more info from CanRen, Wikipedia, and GeoExchange.org). Let me summarize it for you.

Air Conditioners
An air conditioner compresses a gas (refrigerant) to make it hotter by grace of thermodynamics. That hot gas is then cooled to air temperature using that big loud thing outside your house you identify as your air conditioner. The gas is then decompressed inside your ductwork - usually near a fan - where it cools down. The cold gas then cools the circulating air in your house and the cycle repeats. An air conditioner is moving heat out of your house - it doesn't "make cold" (I will not get started on how wrong that statement is). Your refrigerator and basement freezer operate on the same principal - cool down the inside while heating up the outside.

Air Sourced Head Pumps
One can reverse this and heat your house while cooling the outside air. This is commonly called an air source heat pump. Problem is the thermodynamics of refrigerants can't move much heat from -40C air to heat your house to +25C. That's 65C difference in temperature. In the summer you're only trying to cool your house by 10C (35C outside, 25C inside). Think about it.

Ground and Water Sourced Heat Pumps
A ground source heat pump tries to refrigerate the ground to keep your house warm. Consider that the density of air at STP is 1.2kg per cubic meter while rock averages 2,400kg per cubic meter. 2000x more dense. Not taking into account the greater specific heat capacity - you'll have a very very hard time freezing the ground over the course of a Canadian winter before the summer sun warms it up again. Now you're heating your home to 25C from ground that is 10C - a manageable 15C temperature differential.

And as a bonus - it's much easier to cool your home in the summer.
And as a second bonus - domestic hot water heating is taken care of as an after thought.

How does it work? Well, there are a few flavours of heat pumps.

1. Air Source
2. Water Source
3. Ground Source

Air source I've mentioned above. Water source uses well water - or a lake, pond, spring, etc). Ground water itself comes in a few sub-flavours.

1. Closed loop horizontal
   
2. Closed loop vertical
3. Direct Expansion (DX) vertical

Horizontal is just as it sounds. Loops of plastic coil containing a water-ethanol anti-freeze solution circulate a few feet below the surface of your property. This requires you tear up at least a 1/2 acre of lawn.

Vertical requires drilling 30 to100 metres down into the ground far from the colder surface. In these bore holes, plastic piping containing water-ethanol is put in for heat exchange.

DX is a vertical system but copper piping containing refrigerant is put into 30 metre drilled holes. The copper piping is a better heat exchanger and the refrigerant is now circulated in the ground where the heat is. Heat exchange is amplified.

My Filtering

Filtering is important. Find out to the micron rating of your standard diesel fuel filter and filter below that.

My veggie fuel filter from GreaseCar (Fleetguard FF-5156) filters to 15 micron. I filter my oil to 10 micron using two bags - one in the other. Next season I'm going to 1 micron. You can never be too careful I figure.

I found gravity feed to be very easy and simple for the amount of fuel I process (1000-1500 Litres per year).
I get my filters from FilterBag.com.

Check out the video, it explains things better than I can with a keyboard.

Car Fuel Consuption Charts

Here are some historic charts of our fuel consumption in our cars. My wife is the daughter of an accountant - does it show?

Chart 1: Fuel Prices vs Time

• Red: Gas CAD per litre
• Purple: Diesel CAD per litre (post pump price jump)

Chart 2: Cumulative fuel volume purchased

• Pink: Gas (Ford Taurus)
• Black: Diesel (Jetta TDI)
  

Chart 3: Cumulative fuel volume purchased (just diesel)

Notice how fuel consumption per day does up when winter comes - efficiency goes down.

• Grey boxes: winter months
• Purple box: road trip from Ottawa to Florida
• Red box: summer
  

Chart 4: km per day

• Blue: Gas (Ford Taurus)
• Purple: Diesel (Jetta TDI)
  

Chart 5: km per day (just diesel)

Brown gold

Oil's density is about 0.9kg per liter. Making a 20L bucket of waste veggie oil worth about $18 (Diesel is about $1/L) after you account for dregs and cost of processing.

Gold's price is over $740CAD at the time of this posting. 32.15 Troy Ounces per kg.
18L of oil is about 16.2kg. 16.2kg of gold is worth $385,414.20.

Not quite gold - but money in your pocket just the same.

Here's a video intended to show you the ugly side of oil collection.

Things to note:

1. This is garbage
2. Don't use the oil that's left outside


1. Once water gets in and heat from the elements is applied - it starts to grow bacteria and ferment
2. If there was a dead animal at the bottom of the barrel / dumpster you couldn't tell - it's that bad
3. Provide your oil supplier with sealed metal buckets and be prompt in oil pickup
   
3. Use rubber gloves all the times - life's too short.

Here's the video:

A peek in my Garage

There are many great resources online describing how people have setup their oil processing plants. There are very few videos and pictures showing the details of how they process their oil on a daily basis.

Here's the first video of many to come describing how I solicit, collect, filter, dewater, store and use vegetable oil as fuel for my car. Here's a summary

You need 4 locations:

1. Pre-filter storage - store all the raw used oil before filtering
2. Filtering - gravity feed is easy, cheap and simple
3. Dewatering - removal of any water suspended in the oil is crucial for long term storage and the life of your car
4. Storage - storing the finished product

Things you need handy:

1. Kitchen gloves - keep your hands clean
2. Newsprint - cover the ground for easy clean up
3. Plastic vapour barrier - use when transporting oil in car and under dewatering setup
4. Toilet paper - handy to clean up small dips and spills; store it in a clean dry yogourt container to keep clean