Biodiesel Featured Articles
Central Peace Conservation Society Biodiesel Project
By the Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development. This document is part of the Capturing Feed Grain & Forage Opportunities 2007 Proceedings - "Farming for Feed, Forage and Fuel".- What is the relationship between the environment, zero till and biodiesel production? It all has to do with carbon!
- CPCS has conducted field scale, replicated trials between different seeding systems since 1994; currently we have data from 51 site years of data spanning 13 years.
- CPCS also maintains two sites that we have used continuously for 13 years, these are the oldest, field scale conservation seeding plots in Alberta.
- The increase in profit margin for zero till over the 51 site years is about $12/ac, however, if we only look at only the two 13 year old sites, they now both average over $22.00 per acre per year in favour of zero till!
- Organic matter increases after 10 years at the two long term sites were 6.1% to 6.6% and 4.5% to 4.7%. So ZT is removing carbon from the air to make this additional organic matter!
| Crop | # Sites | ZT Yield advantage bu/ac |
|---|---|---|
| Wheat | 12 | 3.7 |
| Barley | 13 | 4.9 |
| Pea | 3 | 2.2 |
| Oat | 2 | 16.8 |
| Canola | 21 | 2.0 |
My definition of biodiesel, is canola oil crushed from canola seed that goes through the transesterification process to remove the glycerin.
- Sustainability is an issue – I’m not sure if we’ll ever produce enough biodiesel to replace all the fossil diesel used in Canada, but I would want to see if we could make enough biodiesel to cover what producers use on their farms.
- Environmental – biodiesel is a more carbon (CO2) neutral fuel source than crude oil, and in terms of other emissions (except nitrous oxides) biodiesel is highly superior to fossil diesel. Biodiesel is more of a closed loop system for using carbon – out of the air, into the canola plant, made into biodiesel, burned and back into the air. Carbon from fossil fuel by comparison, is removed from the ground and burned but never returned to the ground.
- Performance – biodiesel is a superior product compared to fossil diesel in terms of lubricity. Currently fossil diesel gets its lubricity from the sulfur, but sulfur levels are going from the current 500 ppm (LSD) to 15 ppm (ULSD) soon and this will worsen an existing problem with premature engine component wear. (lubricity values, higher is better, Biodiesel #1 seed-1.3, Fossil Diesel-0.84, Biodiesel green seed-0.84, WVO-0.76)
BioDiesel In The News
- Currently, the US is producing 700 million gallons compared to Canada’s 21 million gallons biodiesel capacity.
- In 2006, Suncor agreed to supply the Toronto Transit Commission with over 26.4 million gallons of biodiesel for its bus fleet, but the fuel had to be brought from producers in Texas and Florida (and made from soybeans too).
- How this this helping Canadian agricultural producers?
- We have not only missed the boat on biofuel production in Canada, but it appears that we didn’t even know the ship was in port!
- In 2005, Minnesota became the first state to require that every gallon of diesel fuel sold have 2 percent biodiesel blended into it.
- Hurray! Quick geography lesson – Minnesota is south of Ontario
More biodiesel news
- They placed a deadline date for diesel fuel sold in the state to meet the B2 standard and they had to scramble to make enough biodiesel.
- Everything was going just fine, until they encountered an unexpected weather problem – unseasonably cold temperatures arrived.
- Diesel powered vehicles stopped running!
- The problem was traced to too much glycerin contamination, a substance that turns waxy in cold weather, clogging fuel filters.
- I wonder just how cold it got that day.
- A cold snap came through –20 Celsius!
- While the main problem was traced to the biodiesel being used in the blends still contained too high levels of glycerin. Quality control is critical!
- There are two different schools of thought on using canola oil in diesel engines
Use canola oil without modification. The problems with using straight canola oil as a fuel are:
- Glycerin has a higher density, it means that the glycerin, being heavier than diesel, moves faster in your engine cylinder and will hit your engine cylinder walls before undergoing combustion and will damage and pit the cylinder walls!
- Due to its relatively high viscosity, glycerin leads to poor atomization of the fuel, incomplete combustion, coking of the fuel injectors, ring carbonization and accumulation of unburned fuel in the lubricating oil.
- Mono-glycerides also attract water (allows a faster rate of biological activity to occur in your biodiesel fuel and causes more corrosion) and saturated mono-glycerides will precipitate out over time and form solid white flakes in your canola oil fuel tank causing damage to your injection and filtering system.
- Using straight canola oil requires you to modify every diesel engine on your farm to first heat the oil before it is used!
- From a John Deere Press Release on Biodiesel Use in Their Equipment Engines
“NOTE: Raw pressed canola oil is NOT acceptable for use for (as a) fuel in any concentration. This will cause engine failure by leaving (glycerin) deposits on injectors and in the combustion chamber.”
Remove the glycerin from the canola oil first. By removing glycerin from canola oil, we make a better quality biodiesel by lowering the boiling point, lowering the flash point and lowering the pour point of the biodiesel. That is the road down which CPCS has gone, on-farm, biodiesel made from the transesterification of canola oil.
| Density gm/cc | Viscosity mm2/s | |
|---|---|---|
| Glyercin | 1.26 | >200! |
| Diesel | 0.84 | 1.9-4.1 |
| BioDiesel | 0.86 | 1.9-6.0 |
The higher density (50%) and viscosity (50 to 100 times!) of glycerin will result in fuel flow problems, especially at lower temperatures (northern Alberta!). The best method for solving these problems is the transesterification of the oil.
What does CPCS want to accomplish?
- CPCS wants to demonstrate how complicated biodiesel is to produce, on a farm scale, using canola seed grown in this area.
- CPCS wants to use the biodiesel we make for operating our equipment in our test plot program.
- CPCS wants to look at using different canola seed grades and look at the quality and volume of oil produced – differences between #1, sample green, sample heated,. (mm2 size of wear area Biodiesel #1 seed-0.2, Fossil Diesel-0.3, Biodiesel green seed-0.3, WVO-0.33)
- CPCS wants to look at the economics that are involved to see just how profitable this enterprise could be for producers.
Now, what have we been doing to make biodiesel?
Equipment
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There are two ways to look at this – what is it going to cost and how easy it is it to operate?
This prefabricated plant will produce 1600 liters of biodiesel per hour! All the bells and whistles right! It only costs $480,000! Plus it has to be shipped from Holland, and it doesn’t even come with a oilseed press (this equipment would need a 110 tonne press)! And of course the equipment does get fancier and prices go up from there. But is this practical for us?
CPCS took a simpler route. We wanted something that could produce 500 to 1000 liters per day without too much difficulty. A company in Calgary just happens to provide the scale of equipment that we are looking for.
- The CPCS plant consists of three main components:
- The screw expeller, cold oil press, 10 tonne capacity – 440 bu of canola in 24 hours ($10,000) made in China.
- A 800 liter pre-heater – starts to warm the raw oil to 50’ Celsius, making the oil easier to filter ($7,500).
- A 400 liter reactor tank – where the warmed oil is mixed with methanol and lye, the solution is heated to 90’ Celsius and here the transesterification process will occur (precipitation and removal of glycerin) ($16,000).
So $33,500 so far.......
What do you need to run a biodiesel plant?
- Indoor, heated location. After all, you might be making the biodiesel during the winter time when field activites won’t distract you.
- Power – the press has a 20 hp 3-phase motor, the pre-heater 2 heater units and the reactor tank 3 heater units, in total, if all of this units are operating at capacity, you will need about 42.5 KVA. This is going to be a problem for producers who only have 15 or 25 KVA transformers!
Fortunately, Silverwood Oat and Grain at Wanham had just what we were looking for so that is where the plant is current located.
There are some additional needs, wiring, hoses (corrosion proof!), augers, bins, bag filtering system and so forth, so now we are up to about $40,000 in total.
So let’s make some biodiesel!
The magic day arrived and we finally got to crush our first canola seed! And out came………. this horrible, black-brown goop and more canola meal than we expected!
So what went wrong?
- Well, we first tried using some heated canola since Silverwood Oat and Grain was so excited about this project they ran out and cleaned 4000 bu for us!
- So, maybe we had to try making some adjustments to the press as well as trying some different canola seed.
- So we got some #1 seed and then looked at the press itself.
- On the press you can only make three adjustments
- How fast you feed the seed into the press.
- The pressure that you squeeze the discs together with
- The position of the screw relative to the discs
So we started to make some adjustments, intuitively, and things didn’t get much better, so like all males, we had to resort to looking at the manual!
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So on we went, adjusting, waiting to see the results, more adjusting, and eventually we saw some improvements! Unfortunately, when you looked at a raw sample of oil, it was not very clean. At this stage our moral was starting to suffer. But we took some samples of the raw oil with us to show people and left the project for about a week.....one week later when I returned to the office I looked at the oil sample and saw....
This leads to the problem of how do we get this, very fine, dust like sediment out of the raw oil. The common practice is to use a settling tank, but I wanted to get the oil out of the sludge too. We came up with the idea of using a centrifuge and I found some, but they cost between $40 and $50,000 so that did not seem too likely a route for producers to take. The reason I didn’t want to use the bag filter system with cloth filters is that the amount of sediment we had to remove would plug the filter before any appreciable volume of raw oil could be cleaned. So I sat there wondering and scratching my head. Then I thought of a solution from my early zero till days!
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One of the most interesting things about this Belarus tractor was that it used a centrifugal engine oil filter system rather than the elemental type you normally find.
So off to the internet and I found a company that makes after-market engine centrifugal oil filters and the cost is only about $2,000, much more reasonable.
Anything else?
By products.
- We’ve given some samples of the canola meal to cattle and sheep producers to use as a livestock ration protein supplement. The animals, after some hesitation, ate it and even developed a taste for it! However, the oil content of our meal is still too high for them to eat it straight and it should be mixed with something else first.
- Gylcerin. Soap, cosmetics, possibly mixed back in with canola meal or used as a fuel source.
- Other uses might include pelletizing the meal for use in pellet burning furnaces (high ash content) or maybe mixing the gylcerin in with the fuel pellets if it increases the energy content and if could be sold for more money.
- This may be a better $ generator than the biodiesel itself!
- Other technical issues to be looked at – heating seed and seed moisture content.
