Veggie Oil Theft on CBC

Here's an interesting podcast from CBC on 2008-05-08.

Description from CBC.ca:

Grease Bandits: Contractor

Grease is the word, as they say. For greasers in the movie and musical Grease that word meant slick hair goo and a whole way of life, but grease has become a coveted fuel source. So much so, there's a black market for grease.

This raw grease can be refined into yellow grease, which can be used to make biofuel, and as the world's appetite for biofuel increases, so goes the demand for grease.

Restaurants, with their bubbling deep fryers, have always had lots of grease to dispose of, and sometimes companies pick it up for them. But increasingly, grease collectors complain that thieves are pilfering restaurant grease.

Our producer Michael O'Halloran visited a restaurant in Calgary to see what they do with their grease.

You might say that yellow grease is a new black gold, a hot commodity whose price has tripled. And with that rapid rise in value, grease banditry is rampant in some U.S. states. That bothers people like Christopher Griffin, director of legal affairs for Griffin Industries, a company that's been collecting restaurant grease since 1943. He joined us from Cold Spring, Kentucky.

Grease Bandits - Lawyer

Some might say that catching one of these thieves is like catching greased lightning, but others argue that these cases aren't really theft at all.

Jon Jaworski is an attorney in Texas who has represented dozens of clients accused of stealing the often stinky stuff. His work has earned him a reputation as the "grease lawyer," and we reached him at his office in Houston.

Grease Bandits - Canada

Grease theft may be a growing problem in the U.S., but for some perspective on the situation in Canada, we were joined in Toronto by Stu Porter, the biodiesel technical advisor to the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association.

Hydrogenated or non-H Veggie Oil?

I only use non-hydrogenated veggie oil when I filter or in my car. In short, hydrogenated oil is not commonly called veggie oil, but veggie shortening or veggie lard (ie. Crisco).

My pumping hot hydrogen gas under pressure and in the presence of a catalyst - veggie oil will cease being liquid at room temperature. This is what McDonald's and KFC use for cooking. This is also how margarine is made. Still think it's healthy?

So when you collect veggie oil for your car - be sure to ask that it's in fact veggie oil and not veggie shortening. Then ask again - "is it liquid at room temperature?" - some people need that last bit of clarification.

Washing waste veggie oil and why I don't do it.

I've read around that it's a good idea to wash waste veggie oil (WVO) - I wasn't convinced.

I know one must wash biodiesel to get methanol, glycerin and Sodium-hydroxide by products out. But to wash straight-up WVO?

There are two common ways to wash BioDiesel (which some people recommend for WVO as well):

1. Mist washing
2. Bubble washing

Both methods can cause emulsification of the water and oil (aka. salad dressing) so heating the water and oil is important to inhibit this behaviour. 50C will do fine if you're gentle - higher temperatures will be needed if you really agitate the two fluids.

I tried to wash 10L of my 10 micron filtered oil (my car fuel) with 10L of tap water in a small 30L glass aquarium. I bought an aquarium air pump, a 30cm wand bubbler (to make a bubble curtain), and a 150W aquarium heater. I hooked it all up, poured it all in and let it all go for 48 hours.



Result? No much changed in the colour or clarity of the oil. There isn't an other way to know if the quality improved without getting scientific testing equipment. The water got smokey - but that might just be oil suspended in the water. Plus I'd have to spend more time and mess dewatering now.

As it stands, I will not add any washing stage to my filtering operation until I can see more evidence.

Vids of my GreaseCar

Video 1: Under the hood


Video 2: In the cabin, on the dashboard


Video 3: In the trunk, the tank itself


Bonus Video: Changing veggie fuel filter

My daddy's car is greener than yours!

Ahh. Children are so competitive. But so are green-o nut jobs. And I guess I'm one of them.

Someone on one of my YouTube videos commented a better use of my the 1,000 Watts over 12 hours to dewater my veggie oil would have been to charge an electric car. A very cutting and popular view. But utterly wrong.

In my attempt to fill the blogosphere with cluons, I will tear his statement down with objective analysis and not rude language.

To his defense - he's kinda right. Electric cars would be the best way to go. Centralized energy generation (generating plants) and unified energy distribution (the electrical grid). But to say that 12 kilowatt-hours to charge a car is better use than 200 litres of veggie oil shows how the poster was talking out of their butt. But that assumes a lot about the efficient generation, distribution and storage of said energy. Hint: lead acid is very heavy and isn't the answer.

Some things to know about the SI (Systeme Internationale) units:

• 1 Watt is the instantaneous energy required to push 1 Ampare of current through 1 Ohm of impedance (resistance x inductance).
  
• 1 Joule is the quantity of energy required to run 1 Watt for 1 second
  
• 1 kilowatt-hour is the energy to push 1,000 Watts for 1 hour.
• For 1000 Watts for 12 hours (or 43,200 seconds) that would total 43.2 megajoules
  

Now. Look at these sources:

• http://www.green-trust.org/2005/09/uk-based-veggie-fueled-co-gen-chp.html
  
• http://www.southwestbiodiesel.co.uk/oil.html
  
• http://vegburner.co.uk/oils.htm
  
• and many others on google

You can see that 1 litre of veggie oil has about 35 kilojoules per litre. So my 205L barrel (rounded down to 200L to account for the fact I don't fill it to the top) has about 7.0 gigajoules of energy (7,000 megajoules).



That means I'm spending one 160^th the energy in the fuel to refine it. I find that perfectly acceptable.

Yeah yeah, I didn't account for the energy it took to make the heating element, or the barrel, or the containers, or the filter bags. But he didn't account for the energy it took to manufacture the transmission lines, lead acid batteries, electric motors, etc.

More photos of Mark's Generator

Here are some pictures of the recent videos of Mark's Generator.


Picture 1:
- 12HP 2cyl engine, 8KW 220V AC alternator ESA approved
- currently unused water tower for cooling


Picture 2:
- Flexible Aluminum exhaust pipe
- 2 piston exhaust joined in a Y-joint
- Copper fuel line is wrapped around exhaust for pre-heating (better burn, better flow)


Picture 3:
- 3 fuel tanks (Veg-1, Diesel, Veg-2)
- Flexible Aluminum exhaust pipe
- Copper fuel line is wrapped around exhaust for pre-heating (better burn, better flow)
- Exhaust going out the fron door for now.

Mark's Lister in operation

Here are two videos of Mark's generator in operation.

Added since last post:
1. exhaust pipes vent to outside (flex pipe on left)
2. glow plugs added for easier starting (battery powered - right)
3. 3 40L fuel jugs hung from cieling
4. 3-to-1 fuel valve to select fuel (diesel or veggie)

Still to-do:
1. cooling system
2. muffler
3. sound-proof the shed
4. install electrical cables to his house

With any luck, he'll have a generator working for this spring's thaw-and-melt-and-flood-your-basement season.


Video 1: Single cylinder firing.


Video 2: Both cylinders firing.

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.

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.

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
   

BioDiesel vs. Streight Veggie Oil

One Tuesday night in September 2005 the Arbour Environmental Shoppe had a guest speaker present after store hours; his name was Steve Anderson and he made is own BioDiesel.

He would collect waste cooking oil (canola typically) from the local chip waggons in Arnprior outside of Ottawa and process it in to fuel for his diesel pick-up truck. The process which he demonstrated for the audience that night was very simple.

1. Filter the used oil - he suggested ladies' pantyhose
2. Mix Lye (aka. NaOH) and Methanol (aka. Wood Alcohol) in solution (100g of Lye, 1/4 oil volume of Methanol, I'm skipping a big part here so don't use this recipe)
3. Heat oil to 60C
4. Mix "MethOxide" solution with Oil and continue mixing
   
5. Wait for the mixture to separate into (top to bottom)
1. BioDiesel
2. a thin water/soap interface
3. Glycerine / Glycol
   

This is important:

BioDiesel is not Veggie Oil. It's made from vegetable oil, but it's entirely different.
The lower viscosity is the prime difference - this is why they sell BioDiesel not VeggieOil at the pumps. Thick veggie oil will kill your injector pump. BioDiesel is thin - your injector pump doesn't know the difference.

If you've ever made soap at home or in school you'll notice this almost identical. But instead of adding water, you add Methanol. Making soap bonds a water and oil molecule using Lye. This reaction bond oil (triglyceride) to the Methane ion after the lye is used to remove the glycerines from the oil.

The only major cost is the methanol - typically $1CAD / Litre. So little lye is used that it's a non factor ($30CAD/kg). Oh, and methanol is highly flammable, odourless, and carcinogenic. Nasty stuff. The cooking oil is free if you find the right restaurant - they pay for a special service to dispose of the oil. They typically restaurants will go through 60L per week - more if they're picky about flavour or get a lot of fried-food business.

So I went about to try to make some myself. It wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't a success. Using an electric hot water tank element found at any hardware store I cooked up some oil. A pub in Bell's Corners called The Cock & Bull had a head chef nice enough to let me have 20L for my first experiment. I bought methanol from Canadian Tire (labelled as cooking stove fuel) and my good friend M had got himself a 1kg pail of lye. Cooked up the oil in a HDPE plastic pail, added the methoxide, and poured it into a glass carboy used for making wine.

The result:

A big disgusting mess.

There are cleaner ways to make biodiesel in much larger quantities for the run-of-the-mill homebrewer. The hot water tank design seems to be the most popular and sensible.

But this is the point were I learned that making fuel for my car is tricky for a few reasons:

1. Methanol is dangerous
2. I'd need by 205L (50gal) barrels at a time to keep costs down
   
3. Cost per litre of fuel is generally $0.30CAD after accounting for bulk purchase of methanol
4. It makes a f'ing mess
5. If I mess this up, I could hurt my car and need to pump out my fuel tank
6. I have no real way of knowing if I messed this up until it's too late

I tried to get a biodiesel co-op going from the interested parties at Steve A's presentation. But basic human "what's in it for me" out-weighed "let's do something cool". Nice people and all, just not my kind of crazy and the whole thing fell apart. I was even going to put in $5,000 of my own money to get rental space and equipment.

I started to look what it would take to run on veggie oil - no biodiesel - just pure filtered veggie oil. I found happiness in simplicity and cost. More on that later.

Oh, and I did get a good batch of biodiesel made. Using fresh oil I bought at the grocery store I was able to make 1.5L of pretty biodiesel. Notice that I removed the glycol from the bottom of the batch except for a little bit more water and glycol at the bottom of the jar.



As messy as it was - I tried it and learned what I am not willing to tolerate in my adventure of mine.

Next - how to make a 2001 diesel VW Jetta run on used cooking oil.

How it started

Picture it ... Ottawa ... 2005.

My fiancée (currently promoted to wife) and I had a big blue Ford Taurus sedan whose exhaust system was going to cost $900 in repairs. The boat of a car had a book value of $500. We should have been wearing ear protection while driving in that thing - I'm sure some greasy bar-hopping men with well lubricated hair would have been very impressed.

As luck would have it, we were researching our next car that would be fuel friendly, stylish, and practical for a small family (we were planning to keep it for several years). Some resources that we used was the EPA of the US&A and trusty google.

Things we discovered:

1. Gasoline-Battery hybrids are damn expensive
2. Sub-compact cars have very little storage room
3. Diesel internal combustion engines will burn a whole family of non-fossil fuels
   

Number 3 intrigued us. It had excellent fuel consumption (1000km per 55L tank on the highway, 800km in the city). We knew of the Topia GreenStop selling biodiesel so we could use that as our main fill-up stop. Then we saw we could make our own BioDiesel. And if we were crazy enough we could convert our car to safely run on waste vegetable oil.

We had no developed plans for this kind of madness. But we'd get a sexy black VW Jetta 4-door automatic that has good fuel consumption. So we got this:

First post

This is a first for me. These fancy-shmancy blogs that all these trendy 'kids' have to talk about this and that. So why did I betray my stubbern mindset to avoid being trendy?

Because the stuff I'm doing to my car, my house, my friend's house is just too damn cool. I want to share what I've learned about using waste vegetable oil as car/home/power fuel, furnaces, and other misc things that happen to peak my interest.

There will be photos, videos, howtos, diagrams, and comedy. Let the fun begin.