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E.& O.E. & Without Prejudice
This is Graham's News Page
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Old news page
Bio-Diesel
with Graham Pressman
This article is intended to address the thinking, politics, advantages and dis-advantages of the use of Bio-Diesel as an automotive fuel and the Diesel engine. Within the article I will discuss some of the history of compression ignition and Diesel engines. I will also light, if only briefly on the reason the word Diesel always begins with a capital D. I will try to keep it fairly light-hearted, but will also try to ensure that what I say is of more than a little value to the reader. I hope that this will be of some use to people making or thinking that they may make their own Bio-Diesel.
Why Use Oil At All?
A compression ignition engine will burn pretty-well anything which is combustable. The trick is only to find a fuel which is easily transportable to the engine and which contains sufficient potential energy to be practical. For instance, in a vehicle, it would be a bit daft to use use something like straw, which, whilst an adequate provider of heat (energy) is bulky and not that easy to shift from storage to engine. Gas, on the other end of the scale, needs to be compressed so as not to take up too much space and employs heavy containers to retain the pressure. The alternative to compressing the gas is the old gas-bag-on-the-roof idea, last used commonly in WWII. So a fuel which is liquid at normal out-door temperature is easiest to actually apply to vehicular use. That is why we use petrol and DERV today, in our road vehicles. Bio-Diesel would be just as good in this respect, if only it were commonly available and at a suitable price, and subject to other very important provisons, which I will discuss later in this article.
History of the Compression Ignition Engine
To start with, the noun Diesel is probably not as well earned as one might like. On the other hand, the man is believed to have given his very life for his engine at a very difficult time in history. The first compression ignition engine to be succesfully marketed was designed by Herbert Akroyd Stuart. You can read all about this engine at http://www.enginemuseum.org/eoe.html. Diesel first described his invention in 1893 and more details about that can be found at http://www.tiscali.co.uk/motoring/diesel/history.html.
Whoever invented it first, the compression ignition engine can work on a variety of fuels, although the common use of mineral oils was certainly not invisaged from the earliest days of the inception of these engines.
The Cost of Fuels in the UK
It is a fact that a very high proportion of the cost of road fuels in the UK is tax. Effective duty rate per litre (£) from 1 October 2007 is set to be 50.35pence per litre. Bio-Fuels will enjoy a reduced rate of 30.35 pence per litre. In rough terms, that's 50% tax. THEN there is V.A.T. on fuels, so the 50.35 pence per litre for dino-diesel comes up to 59.16 pence per litre for dino-ULSD or 35.83 pence per litre for bio-Diesel. With dino-Diesel costing over £1 a litre (just tax and tax on tax, without tax on the actual cost of the fuel), that's about 67% tax on your fuel. But hold up! According to new Government regulations, we are all now allowed to make up to 2500 litres of fuel per year for our own, personal use. The potential saving, in tax alone, is, therefore £1479.00. Did you get that? - Make it ourselves for our own personal use. If, however, we employ someone else to make our bio-diesel for us, then we still pay £758.75 in tax.
Under the latest Government directive (Follow up to Revenue & Customs Brief 37/07 on Biofuels Simplification
Revenue & Customs Brief 37/07 issued on 19 April 2007 confirmed that the following changes applying to biofuel producers were to be introduced:
A production threshold of 2,500 litres per annum below which producers will not need to enter premises, submit returns or pay duty,
and A reduction in the frequency of returns for all but the largest producers (defined as those producing over 450,000 litres per annum) from monthly to quarterly. We can now confirm that these measures will be introduced on 30 June 2007.))
we are now allowed to make up to 2500 litre for our own use, tax free.
Will Using Bio-Diesel Invalidate my makers' Warrantee?
Yes it will, if you have one, unless you are driving a VW (Bless them)!
If you do not have a warrantee or if your warrantee has expired, then, NO, it cannot invalidate something you do not have!
Will Bio-Diesel Damage My Engine?
If you have RUBBER in your engine's fuel system, then IT WILL DAMAGE THAT RUBBER (why do engine manufacturers use it, we wonder?).
You MAY have rubber seals in your injector pump and some other fuel-system components. If so, have them changed for Viton (which are a few pence each), or some other non-rubber kind. They are better, anyway. We have chosen to buy a used pump and change the seals ourselves, then fit the replacement pump ourselves. No real problem there then!
You MAY have rubber pipes and tubes in your fuel system. IT WILL DAMAGE THE RUBBER. We have chosen to replace the rubber pipes ourselves in our own car. No problem there either, then!
Your injector pump and injectors need lubrication. THIS IS VITAL! Bio-Diesel is a BETTER lubricant than dino-Diesel. No problem here then!
Some people are saying that you burn more bio-Diesel than you would burn Dino-Diesel on the same jourmeys. Nonesence! Just a plain lie or falsehood born of not knowing!
Poorly made Bio-Diesel AND Straight Vegetible Oil can BOTH coat your equipment in iodine oxides (which is very bad). IF done properly, Bio-Diesel will NOT coat your equipment. If you make your own BD, make sure you keep the oxygen out. Any decent processor will do that. Any commercially bought BD should be free of iodene oxides, so you will be OK with that as well.
Bio-Fuels are being tarred with a poor reputation by people who really do not know much about it! Whilst you need to be careful, you need to be no more careful than you need to be when buying mineral based fuels. The whole point here is that it is possible to make bad bio-fuels, just as it is possible to make bad mineral fuels. Whilst it is virtually impossible to make your own mineral fuels, and if you do they are illegal for tax purposes (unless you pay the full rate of tax on it), it IS easy to make you own Bio-Diesel and perfectly easy to make it properly; WITH NO TAX ON IT up to 2500 litres per annum.
How Does Using Bio-Diesel Save on Polution?
Millions of years ago man could not have existed on Earth because there was too much carbon about. the place was horrible by our standards. Forests and early animal life grew and was made, mainly, of carbon. You know, the famous phrase "carbon based life form"! Squillions of them died and got buried. All the carbon of which they were made was buried. Some of it was compressed and aged till it became coal, oil and gas. This oil is the stuff we call mineral oil (oh! and by the way, the gas is what we call LPG!). It has been locked up down there in the rocks for billions of years and being there, it is not in the atmsophere. If it was in the atmosphere, the planet would be too horrid to live on for us delicate humans.
Then man goes and digs up a load of this stuff, burns of the carbons and pokes them back into the atmosphere! Woops! Slight phopah there, perhaps!
On the other hand
YES! We have an alternative! IF we were to burn some of the crops grown in the past year (instead of the natural growth bound up safely in the rock billions of years ago), the growing of those crops sucked carbon out of the air whilst they were being grown (that's what they are made of). Then there's less carbon in the atmospher. It has become crops. THEN we burns the crops we grew last year and pop's the carbon BACK where we got it, last year. In the atmosphere! How much extra carbon is in the air? None!
Then the con-artists say "what about the carbon-cost (that's the carbon released by the fuel used to sow, harvest and process the bio-fuels) of growing and processing that fuel?" Silly so and so's! All we have to do is to run our generators, tractors and combines on bio-fuels and there's still no extra! Don't go away with the idea that I know something they don't know. Oh non of it! Of course they understand the carbon cycle. that's supposed to be their jobs. So why are they lying to us? I don't know the answer to that, but I bet they do! Call me a conspiricy theorist if you like, but the simple facts (and, believe me, for me to grasp it, they are simple) are there for anybody to work out for themselves, as you are now.
Something which has been troubling me at the back of my mind since I wrote this a few days ago is the question of the efficacy of SVO (Straight Vegitable Oil and Bio-Diesel derived from SVO. It is not such a good thing to be using NEW oil (Oil which has not been used) either direct in your car or having first processed it) because we really do not want to be dedicating vast areas of land to the exclusine growth of vehicle fuels and not growing food as a result. To an extent this goes for Bio-Mass, used in power stations to make electricity. To dedicate growing land in this way could never be a solution to the problems we live with right now.
I am encouraging people to collect a few drops of WVO (waste oil) here and there and to convert that into Bio-Diesel for this very reason. My Grandmother used to collect milk bottle tops, old newspapers and who knows what else for a variety of charities. People used to get her to drop things of at places like the local scout hut whenever she was passing with her shopping trolly (No extra fuel-miles) which were collected and sorted by voluteers at the collection centre. Traders in used paper and alluminium (for re-cycling) would collect from these centres, pay the charities and process it. What we aught to be doing now, in my opinion, it to have a can at the garden gate inviting neighbours to pop their waste oil in whilst walking the dog or taking their morning constiutional, on the way by (no extra fuel miles). That way every drop of waste oil gets collected and is turned into Bio-Diesel, having first had it's full usage as cooking oil. Most people change the oil in their fryers fairly often, but no-one makes enough waste on their own to drive their car. Not many people are going to go to the trouble of making their own fuel. When people go to their local chippie, they should ask for a can of old oil if there is one there. Fist come, first served. If there is a can there when a customer who makes BD asks, that should be the person who gets it. A chippie or restaurante should never have to worry that it might not be collected. Such wind-falls should be especially vaued by the grateful, small producer.
The same goes for bio-mass. What a shame that farmers used to burn off waste straw! What a shame that hundreds of acres every years still catch fire by surprise and vandalism is blamed. Fire engines have to rush out to extinguish the fires to prevent smoke damage. Why on earth don't our power stations beg local farmers to drop off any good, dry bio-mass for burning in the furnaces? Perhaps even pay them for dropping it over? Every horse field creates excess grass and weed! if it were cut and dried it could be used to make enough power to supply the owners' home with electricity for a while. Now THERE is a possible use for "carbon credits". Get credits for dropping off combustables at the power station and use them to pay towards the electricity bill! Not TRADING the silly things on some kind of fictitious MARKET! .... Enough!
How do I make Bio-Diesel?
That's a big one! Try surfing to Journey to Forever web site. Not only do they tell you there, but they tell you how not to do it, as well.
Mark and I are have already made a test batch or Bio-Diesel and used a ton of the stuff (1000 litres), which we bought from a reputable manufacturer, in our last Diesel car (a Ford Orion). We are now developing our own Bio-Deisel processor for our own use, which I will tell you about when we get it running. It is unique and takes the new laws in the UK into account and will produce BD of very good quality, without iodine oxides. I would like to think we could all have something like it in our garage, next to our frezzer, and much smaller in size.
It's my view that we are looking for a number of important elements to a processor.
1. Safety
2. Capacity
3. Compactness
4. Simplicity of operation
5. Ease of installation
6. Appearance
There's nothing I like less than a steel 45 gallon drum and a number of coned plastic mixing vessels all connected together with miles of pipework, taking up about 700 - 1000mm square standing on the garage floor, dripping goo! Ergh!
Why Should I Not Just Burn Fresh Vegetible Oil Instead of Going to all The Trouble of Making Bio-Diesel?
That's another very big one! Suffice to say that I have tried it and it can be an issue if you cut corners, as we did. Whichever route you take, don't cut corners is the best advice I can give you. Try surfing to this page on Journey to Forever web site. Not only do they tell you there, but they tell you how not to do it, as well.
Burning veggie oil straight from the bottle is not as easy or as good as it might seem. It is always too thick for your fuel system when the weather is not of the high summer variety. As soon as it gets down to the temperatures we have had this summer, it get's too thick to flow easily through your system. Then the lift pump has to suck harder and will find any leaks you have in the pipe work, which you would not have known about before. That's a real problem. The only solutions are to, eithr, heat the fuel quite early in the system or process your oil into Bio-Diesel. Frankly, my view is that it is best to make your food oil into fuel oil if you are going to use it as a fuel. The other thing is that there is little point in burning the stuff that processing takes out as it is not really very good fuel.
How Much does it cost to make?
OK! Let's do it on an annual basis, because that's most accurate.
We know we are making 2500 litres a year (as allowed to be made tax free)
Most of these are recent e-bay prices
Caustic Soda £98
Methanol £158.45
Water £5 (oh yes!, you have to pay for water these days, one way or another).
Waste Oil collected from your local chippy. FREE or you charge them.
Electricity £15.
Ethanol for titration £59.00 from
http://www.biodieselwarehouse.co.uk/index.php?cat=New_Section
Total for 2500 litres = £335 = 13.4 pence per litre (60 pence per gallon)
Capital cost of processor, probably about £890 (according to BBC Radio2 the other day). Your processor will have paid for itself after 5 months if you pay around that price. We expect to have our home-made model paid for in about 2 months. But then Mark can weld anything - even plastic and he makes plumbing seem a doddle! My skill is learning how to do it and drawing up the design in a way that Mark can interpret. My design excludes oxygen, which prevents the formation of iodene oxides, is compact, doesn't make you wait toll you have a thumping great drum-full before you make it, is simple to operate, cheap to make, quick in it's cycle and many more things which are all very good. I see it as being like the washing machine, as compared with the copper, of the bio-diesel making world. I have to admit to being tempted to make these for re-sale, but I am not set up as a a manufacturer and have little interest in doing so. Let's just see how the thing works when I have the first one made, and then have a batch test at a lab to make sure I am right about the quality of the product produced. Then I may publish how to make one, perhaps. or maybe I can give my ideas about improvements to the quality to someone else so they can make something for sale at a reasonable price.
Thereafter, your saving is £181 per month or about £42.00 a week (provided of course that you actually use 48 litres of fuel a week).
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