Biodiesel
December 01, 1996
By Harry Eagar
Maui News
PUUNENE--Some technologies take awhile to move from the laboratory to the marketplace. Say, 120 years. When Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine, he envisioned running it on oil derived from plants. He was thinking of peanuts. Wednesday, a trio of Maui businessmen held a blessing for a diesel refinery at the Central Maui landfill. They are using discarded cooking oil from local restaurants. Unlike some other attempts to create alternative energy sources in Maui County, Pacific Biodiesel Inc. has received no government subsidies. (The technology was developed under Department of Energy auspices, however, mainly at the University of Idaho.) “It warms my heart,” said John Sheehan, a program manager for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, to have “a real life plant” for biodiesel that he can actually “kick the tires on.” Biodiesel fuel can be purchased at the pump in Europe, where the plant source is usually rapeseed oil. But until now, there has not been a working biodiesel refinery on the Pacific rim. The only other one in the United States is NOPEC (No OPEC, get it?) in Lakeland, Fla. The real key to this kind of recycling venture, says Sheehan, is supply. NOPEC’s founder locked up the Florida used french fry oil supply first thing. Now he is producing up to 22 million gallons a year of biodiesel.Pacific Biodiesel is a hundred times smaller, but Bob King, a Cummins diesel distributor and one of the partners, says his company also was able to corral most of the island’s used cooking oil. The plant at the landfill has a capacity of 200,000 gallons per year, though actual production probably will run about 150,000 gallons, King says. The diesel fuel will sell for $1.95 a gallon. “We’re not going to get rich,” says King, “but it will pay for itself.” The plant can handle other types of oil and grease, including the gunk pumped out of cesspools and collected at sewage treatment plants. But for now, Pacific Biodiesel is interested only in what Larry Zolezzi, another partner, calls “nice, clean cooking oil.” Although it takes some care to keep the oil from becoming contaminated by bacteria, used french fry oil can be made into fuel by a fairly simple process. A catalyst is mixed from wood alcohol and lye, then added to the filtered, warmed cooking oil and agitated for about four hours.Daryl Reece, another partner and a biodiesel researcher at Idaho, explains that this leads to “transesterification,” a chemical reaction known since 1879. “Stearo” is a Greek root referring to fat, and transesterification removes three triglycerides (fatty acids) and glycerol from the oil’s ester base. The esters are the fuel. The residue of glycerol and triglycerides makes a good additive to encourage the composting of green waste next door.In fact, says Hana Steel, the county’s recycling coordinator, it was regulations forbidding additional dumping of used cooking oil in the landfill that helped drive the green waste project originally. In theory, cooking oil should have digested along with the plant matter, but in practice it didn’t work out very well. The step of intercepting the oil and making fuel first, then adding the residue to the composting project turned out to be another way of addressing the problem. “It’s an excellent example of a public-private partnership,” says Steel.After the esters are separated, they are cleaned by repeated washing in 1,000-gallon stainless steel tanks. The wash water also goes to feed the compost windrows.(Pacific Biodiesel makes no demands on county infrastructure; its location has no water, no electricity, no telephone service and no paved road. The company has a generator soon to be fueled with biodiesel, water is trucked in, and the staff, Carl Nagata, uses a cellular phone. “We are totally self-sufficient,” says King.) Biodiesel can be burned in diesel engines straight and with no modifications, although most users probably will blend it with petroleum diesel. (King is using it neat in his Dodge truck with a Cummins engine.) In tests in Honolulu, some people wondered whether diesel trucks would smell like the exhaust at a McDonald’s. No, according to the Cummins people.Craig Chase, who is with the regional renewable fuels program of the Department of Energy, based in Cody, Wyo., says biodiesel has several advantages. The biggest, perhaps, is that it can satisfy stricter environmental standards that start coming into effect in May and get progressively tougher to meet. The new standards are designed to cut way down on the kinds of poisons that internal combustion engines produce.Neat biodiesel fuel works very well in this respect. Blends are not quite as good but have some benefits.Also, the fuel is biodegradable and not poisonous. Spills are comparatively innocuous. In a test, biodiesel was compared for toxicity with sugar water. There was virtually no difference, says Chase. But any new fuel must satisfy engine manufacturers and users, too. The Energy Department is now running biodiesels on testbeds. A 1992 Dodge with a Cummins diesel was run 100,000 miles, and then the engine was torn down. “We didn’t even take the crosshatching off the cylinders,” says Chase, meaning there wasn’t enough engine wear to remove the marks left by the machine tool that bored out the cylinders. Other testbeds haven’t been driven that many miles yet, but indications are that the machines perform well either with straight biodiesel or blends.Maui County and the City and County of Honolulu made a joint application to the Energy Department for a grant to try out biodiesel. Maui will be given money for a biodiesel fueling station and seven diesel vehicles. “We don’t see this as something for everybody,” says Chase, but biodiesel fuel can answer several problems.The supply of used french fry oil is limited, but there are other plant oils. On the Mainland, soybean oil is the prime candidate. But in Pacific island nations that have no fossil fuel resources, there are lots of coconut palms. The Idaho process will work with copra, says King. Though the maximum business that the Maui plant can do is limited, King and his partners see opportunities in using their practical expertise to transfer biodiesel technology to other islands.
A large fraction of the income on remote island nations is spent on imported fuel. Being able to generate fuel form local products could go a long way toward helping stabilize their export-import currency balance, says King.