Our Free Guide To Biodiesel Centrifuges

Greg does a great job of explaining what biodiesel is, how/where it came about, and why it is a good additive to our current petrodiesel. He also writes about what other countries are doing with and how they are (currently) ahead of the US in utilizing it. He also discusses other forms of alternative/renewable sources of energy. I would recommend this book as good reading, but I would probably recommend ‘Biodiesel America’ first….as it has a bit more current info than Biodiesel: Growing A New Energy Economy. But good reading nontheless.

Pahl’s book on Biodiesel is a great introduction to the basics and some of the more thought-provoking possibilities of how to create this biofuel. Though biodiesel is given much media attention, it is barely in use at all in the US, and this book tells it like it is. I particularly liked the fact that it shows the efficiencies of different feedstocks, pointing out that plant oils might not be the best resource (particulary soybeans), much like corn is a terrible feedstock for ethanol. What I did find amazing is how great of a feedstock brown grease and algae are….the latter has tremendous possibilities, especially when coupled with carbon sequestration in applications such as coal plants. It’s a great book that will get you thinking, if not running out to get another book on how to apply some of these ideas at home or in the business world.

I didn’t purchase this book. I received it as a gift. In my review, I will list the pros and cons of Biodiesel Basics and Beyond. Before making comments, I would like to point out an observation of the other reviews. Most, if not all of the reviewers, except for me, haven’t made a drop of biodiesel. I hope Biodiesel Basics and Beyond didn’t scare anyone from attempting to make biodiesel.

First the pros:
The best information; reacted biodiesel contains methanol. The methanol should be removed from the biodiesel before washing. Kemp suggests to drain the glycerin from the reacted biodiesel and to burn off the remaining methanol by reheating the biodiesel. Normally the methanol would mix in the wash water and be disposed into a drain field. Kemp also stresses that raw glycerin should be decontaminated. Glycerin contains a lot of methanol and it can be recovered. Kemp explains how to remove methanol from glycerin and goes one step further. Vinegar can been added to the glycerin to bring the pH to neutral levels. The glycerin can then be used as a humectant or dust suppressant.

I can say some are taking glycerin byproduct to sewage treatment facilities. Call your local plant and see if they can process leftover glycerin. Be aware that it’s a good idea to keep methanol from polluting wells and it is highly toxic if ingested. However, since methanol is readily biodegradable in both aerobic (oxygen present) and anaerobic (oxygen absent) environments, methanol will not persist in the environment. The “half-life” for methanol in groundwater is just one to seven days, while many common gasoline components have half-lives in the hundreds of days (such as benzene at 10-730 days). Since methanol is infinitely soluble in water and biodegradable, methanol is unlikely to accumulate in groundwater, surface water, air or soil. (Reference: Evaluation of the Fate and Transport of Methanol in the Environment, Malcolm Pirnie, January 1999). In short methanol should be handled with care and it’s a good idea to read an MSDS when handling any chemical.

Now the cons.
If you were baking a cake would you need to know the molecular structure of the flour? The book is filled with incredible amounts of graphs, charts, and other information that would be useful for a chemical engineer. For most readers, it only serves to make one’s eyes glaze over. Biodiesel Basics and Beyond is a mix of college textbook chemistry and “how to”. Echoing a complaint from another reviewer-too wordy.

Kemp was too often a “turn off” with an obvious disdain for the home brewer. Steve Anderson is made an example of in the book. Kemp forces the reader to go through all of Steve’s production procedures, several pages, only to criticize Mr. Anderson. His biodiesel did not pass ASTM standards, his processing was too dangerous, etc.,etc… This book has too much misplaced criticism aimed at the home brewer. I found Kemp’s reactor design to have major flaws.

First, Kemp suggests using a particle strainer to extract WVO from a collection bucket. After the particle strainer it goes through a 15 micron oil filter and then into a de-watering vessel. I’d like to see this method in action on You Tube. Many of us use a 400 micro strainer over a 55 gallon drum and it can take a few days to strain the WVO. The temperature of the WVO has a big part in the filtering process. I believe that Kemp’s method would clog instantly.

Kemp uses a closed system to de-water the WVO and washed biodiesel. I do not like his design. It’s too complicated and unnecessary. Kemp uses lots of power to get rid of water. All one has to do is wait a few days or sometimes a few weeks and the water-laden oil will settle. Solar heaters can speed the process. You can also heat WVO to 140F and within 24 hours the water will settle and be safe for processing. Using all this electricity is unnecessary, unless all of us have a generator powered by biodiesel.

His setup is new and expensive. I use, like most, a $15.00, 5 micron water filter from Lowe’s to filter biodiesel. Salvaged hot water heaters can be used to process and clean the biodiesel. I use stainless steel, store-bought thermometers that are accurate. All in all, I have made hundreds of gallons of biodiesel successfully using inexpensive equipment and recycled hot water heaters. My biodiesel passes a 3/27 Warnquist test every time.

I would have liked information on making WVO with high titration values more user friendly. By adding sulfuric acid to acidic oil, one can lower titration levels. This will yield a higher quality fuel, less catalyst, less chance of emulsion, and less glycerin production. Over-used cooking oil becomes very acidic and is a nuisance for home brewers.

The tone of Biodiesel Basics and Beyond is pessimistic. It mentions nothing of algae being on the cutting edge of biodiesel production. Please Google Silox, Sapphire Energy, and Valcent to learn more. Green Solution Inc. is making regular diesel, not biodiesel, from garbage in landfills.

Like Steve Anderson mentioned earlier in this review, it is the garage tinkerer/inventor that often comes up with a holy grail solution. Jim Sears of Silox discovered, in his garage, that algae could be made into biodiesel. Silox and others are hoping to create 25,000 to 100,000 gallons of biofuel per acre. To make algae more attractive it can be fertilized with massive amounts of CO2. A perfect fit for a coal fired power plant spewing it’s CO2 into the atmosphere. That means less sulphur dioxide creating acid rain and less green house emissions. Algae eliminates the controversy over making fuel or food with limited resources. Doug Mizzel is another example of the garage inventor. Doug is making ethanol from a noxious weed called kudzu at a cost of only $80.00/barrel. Alvert has a great homebrewing guide and is, I believe the inventor, of the Appleseed Reactor. This is like the one in Biodiesel Basics and Beyond. She can be added to the list of backyard tinkerers.

If people like Jim Sears, Doug Mizell, Maria Alovert, and a host of others had read Biodiel Basics and Beyond before making their amazing discoveries, would they have pursued the quest for making biofuel? My own interest in making biodiesel came from developing a paint stripper that contained FAME. At the time, I didn’t know that Fatty Acid Methyl Esters was biodisel. I got into making biodiesel by accident. Not everyone is into producing biodiesel to save a buck – which is the general attitude of the book. A book that champions the efforts of the “back yard” biodiesel producer, while charting a course that is safe and environmentally friendly is what’s needed. The book falls short of that goal.

Ken Fritz author of The United States Radio Directory: A Traveler’s Favorite Companion 2008-2009

Excellent book.Very comprehensive,a must read for anyone who is either making home brew biodiesel or intends to.

The instructions are clear for making your own diesel and home heating oil substitute, and the background chemistry is clear and precise. Now you not only know how to make it, but what that stuff is. Safety steps are simple and organized. This is a good one.

Very ilustrative and practical manual, also discuss the taxes and other problems different to production

In these days of over-priced fuel and the ever-growing reality that something larger than a recession is waiting just around the economic bend, more and more people are looking for ways to cut costs without having to sacrifice mobility or comfort. The previously mysterious art of brewing up homemade biodiesel has found a sage friend in the form of author Guy Purcella whose Do It Yourself Guide to Biodiesel can help any industrious soul turn waste vegetable oil into an inexpensive and environmentally friendly fuel that will work in most diesel automobiles and trucks with few modifications.

Purcella approaches biodiesel as an accessible and worthwhile way to fulfil both of those qualifications since you can make it for about $1 a gallon and since it’s not a petroleum-based product, it’s friendly for the environment when burned and is not toxic to Mother Earth if spilled. So let’s get started!

Purcella begins by laying out his own lengthy search for information on biodiesel production and relates that he had a heck of a time finding good, factual knowledge on the subject despite trolling all manner of websites, blogs and even more traditional media outlets. Out of this frustration was born an idea to write a DIY book that has all the necessary pieces of the puzzle to enable any would-be biodiesel producer to make up a batch without fear of error or danger. That biodiesel production can be a bit dangerous and is not for those who don’t follow checklists is worth noting before you dive in and start mixing up volatile chemicals in your broom closet at home!

The style of the book is straight-forward and easy to digest. Purcella lays out the biodiesel production process in a step-by-step format with sidebars to highlight areas of special interest, such as dangerous chemicals, definitions for technical terms, and process steps that require special attention to ensure the reaction that makes waste oil into biodiesel succeeds.

There is a good primer on how to gather waste vegetable oil from your local fast food vendors with Chinese restaurants being a favored place to harvest feed stock for your biodiesel plant. That’s because Chinese restaurants tend to turn over their oil more often to ensure better quality food and what’s good for the customer is good for the biodieseler: cleaner oil means a better reaction with less goop to deal with and ends up making the fuel cleaner, more stable and easier to make. There is some initial expense in setting up the arrangements necessary to gather oil, but with a little luck and an eye for salvageable barrels, the cost could be very low.

Purcella recommends checking the waste vegetable oil by using a somewhat complex chemical reaction to make sure that the fuel stock you are gathering is even worth trying to convert into biodiesel. It is possible that the oil has been overused and will not make a high enough grade of biodiesel to be used in engines. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it in waste oil heaters or the like, but there’s no need to go through the whole conversion process to use the oil for simple space heating.

The plant one needs to make fuel from WVO (that’s waste vegetable oil) can be a bit expensive, especially if one wants to make large enough batches to reap the benefits of economy of scale. At least 2 of the chemicals used in the reaction, methanol and caustic lye, are very dangerous and even life-threatening if improperly handled/used, so Purcella takes extra care to make sure there’s absolutely no question that safety is paramount when adding them to the reaction in the proper quantities and in the right amounts. This is a very important and well-covered area in the DIY Guide to Biodiesel that should be carefully noted to ensure the life and limbs of the biodeiseler remain healthy and whole.

There are a number of options for making a biodeisel plant and Purcella offers his own version as a nice way for a fairly well-off DIYer to make a batch with no fuss and less muss. Not very DIy, actually, and a bit of a shill for his business, but to his credit, Purcella also discusses other companies that make competitive models and even offers honest-to-goodness instructions on how to build your own. Again, plenty of caveats to have an electrician hook up the circuits and make sure the sparky parts don’t end up providing any extra excitement or shocking results.

I found the process of turning WVO into good quality biodiesel to be quite complex and fraught with areas that could cause the whole batch to turn into “goop.” There’s filtering, heating, mixing chemicals, reacting, washing, drying, and at each step a small miscalculation or error in process would end in nothing more than a large mass of soapy oil muck.

One of the by-products of the process is glycerin, which Purcella says can be used to keep the dust down on dirt roads or in sports arenas without fear of harming the environment. The normal compounds used to bind the dirt into a dust-free coating are very toxic to flora and fauna and can cause great harm to aquatic life. As a sideline to help reduce the costs of biodiesel production, the glycerin dust reduction business seems like an easy and eco-friendly way to do good while doing well.

The book has a comprehensive list of resources for the potential biodieseler with lots of websites and forums. Also included is a fairly good glossary containing definitions of some of the more esoteric terms used when discussing the conversion process and materials used. As an added bonus, there are also short sections on using biodiesel in colder climates and what kind of fuel hoses and fittings are necessary to withstand biodiesel’s chemical attack on normal rubber and PVC used in diesel fuel systems.

With the exception of some grainy and not-so-clear photographs, Gary Purcella’s Do It Yourself Guide to Biodiesel is a good quality effort at helping people learn the ins and outs of the entire biodiesel process from waste oil to EPA-approved engine fuel. At $15.95 the price is within reach of almost any budget and the savings that will come in the form of successful batches of biodiesel right out of the chute will pay for the book many times over. If that price is too rich, it is available right now at Amazon.com for $10.85 or if you are lucky you might find one at your local library or cleantech coop. You can also visit Purcella’s website, http://www.ezbiodiesel.com/, and learn more about his on-going efforts to help convert the diesel world to a new and friendlier fuel with the additional aim of reducing American dependence on overseas petroleum-based fuel.

Got the book, read the book, now making my own fuel!!! Easy, concise, and thorough. Mr. Purcella has written a do it yourself manual that anyone can understand….and if you don’t there’s always the website. This book comes at a time when we have to find an alternative to highway robbery!! Thanks Guy!

Interest in alternative motor fuels has been rising even faster than the cost of gasoline. Biodiesel, a drop-in replacement for diesel fuel, is widely seen as one of the best renewable energy sources. Unfortunately, there is a good deal of misinformation and just plain nonsense out there. As a former big-oil-company research chemist with some experience in alternative fuels, I am often asked where good, reliable information can be found. I use and recommend Pahl’s book as a source for trustworthy information written for the non-technical reader. In addition, his information about Rudolph Diesel is a very interesting introduction.
Readers should know (and Pahl in fact tells them)that his book is not neutral: he is an unabashed biodiesel proponent. That’s not a problem; there is a lot to be excited about when discussing biodiesel. Another warning: if you want to make your own biodiesel (easy to do, actually), go to the Internet, as Pahl concentrates on larger-scale operations. The book’s biggest drawback is that the field is changing so rapidly that some of the information (particularly relating to political and commercial developments) is already out of date, even though it was published in 2005.
Nevertheless, Pahl has written what I consider to be the best primer on biodiesel available. Anyone interested in learning about biodiesel should own or have access to a copy.