recent articles/ Bioneers conference/Mushrooms!

The Everett Herald did a nice little article about my class at the college there yesteday:

Also, National Geographic did a Biofuels piece, with some material on biodiesel from algae.. Sounds like it's still a ways off from commercial availability.

Heard Paul Staments speak at Seattle Bioneers conference yesterday- haven't been so blown away by a talk in a long time. He has found amazing things with mushrooms, from fractal patterns of their mycelium to wondrous healing powers of their extracts- powerful antiviral properties- got carpenter ants? no problem- he's developed an extract that will totally eliminate them for up to a decade, bioremediation of toxic waste- eg mushrooms cleaning up around Chernobyl by sequestering Cesium, Oyster mushrooms cleaning up toxic diesel-contaminated soil, etc, etc. Here's a good article about him, and he's got a new book out that I've gotta get: Mycelium Running: How mushrooms can help save the world. If you ever get a chance to hear this guy, don't miss it! His website: fungi.com

Teaching the Mayor to make bio!

A few weeks ago I had the honor of showing Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels how to make biodiesel! The event was part of the Mayor's initiative to address global warming, Seattle Climate Action NOW- see http://www.seattlecan.org/ and he did a few presentations in different neighborhoods throughout the day. The biodiesel presentation was organized by General/Standard Biodiesel in the Chinatown neighborhood, to demonstrate how the local restaurant oil can be (and is) converted to biodiesel.. After the Mayor shook up a pop bottle batch, he poured some finished bio into a generator that was powering a popcorn popper for visitors.

Biodiesel in Schools Forum and koh purity testing

There's a forum specifically for biodiesel in schools, so teachers and students can chat with each other about their projects.

To sign up, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/ and search for "biodiesel in schools"
You can set it so you get either individual messages, or a daily digest (I prefer).

One of the members made a great offer today- he will test your KOH for purity- he and others at the school developed a test, and he found that his 90% KOH is actually 97% pure! So he can use less than he thought and save money. He's willing to test others KOH, as he says here:
"We would like to offer our services and test samples of your incoming catalyst. Please send a 10g dry sample of KOH or NaOH to the address below. Please double or triple Zip-lock it and send it in a bubble mailer. To support the schools' program, you are also encouraged to send a donation of $4 to Bloom High School (check or money order) with your sample. This will help offset the cost of our lab time and consumables.

Please also include an email address with your sample so that we may get the results to you as soon as possible (1-2 days from receipt of sample), otherwise we will mail it to the return address.

Barry Latham, M.A.Ed., B.S.
Biodiesel Project Director
Bloom High School
101 West 10th Street
Chicago Heights, IL 60411

Happy biodieseling...

Lyle
http://biolyle.com

BioLyle now a dealer of BioPro 190 and 380

With my very positive experience using the BioPro for the Dirty Hands Coop, I was invited to become a dealer for these machines. The BioPro's are all stainless steel, and I love the small footprint, the ease of use, and the fact that it has a pump to pump the finished fuel into your car or storage, right out of the same compartment that you dumped oil into 48 hours before. See my quality page for test results showing that the machine makes great fuel!
See my BioPro pages and let me know if you'd like to order one for yourself or a burgeoning coop.
Lyle
BioLyle's Biodiesel Workshop, LLC
http://biolyle.com
biolyle@gmail.com

Dirty Hands Coop uses a BioPro 190

In June, my friends Harry, Judy, and I got together to brainstorm a way to organize a biodiesel coop. I had mentioned wanting to do less brewing at home, and wanting more community involvement- also, really wanting a BioPro, which converts yucky oil to biodiesel in 48 hours. I had seen the test results on fuel from a BioPro at a Girl Mark advanced bio workshop in Berkeley, where the inventor of the pHLip test, Randall von Weddell was present, and said he'd never seen homebrew test so well with his test.
The long and short of it is that we got a BioPro 190, and organized the coop so that folks would have to bring their own oil (BYOO!)- hence the name, the Dirty Hands Coop.. The whole thing has been made possible by neighbor and friend Tom who has generously allowed the use of his workshop to host the whole operation. Thank you Tom! It was easy to get a bunch of interested folks together from various listserves in the area, and somewhat to my surprise, they found restaurants nearby to get oil from. We all ask the restaurants to put their oil back into the 5 gallon cubes that had the fresh oil. This is a little bit of a pain for them, cuz the oil in the fryer is hot, and can't go directly into those carboys- it ususally goes into a big steel pot to cool, and then someone (or two) has to pour the oil into the carboy thru a funnel (it's nice when you provide them with a big wide one).
Anyway, coop members deliver their oil to the separate bathroom at our facility, where they put their name on the carboy and log about how much oil they think they brought. I measure it by comparing it to a carboy with gallon markers, and adjust their number if needed, then bring it inside the shop. When the BioPro is free, I dump the oil directly into it thru a screen from a clothes dryer which happens to fit perfectly over the machine's rectangular opening.
Before that actually, I titrate the oil if it's from a restaurant that we haven't gotten oil from yet, and also take a look to make sure there's not a water layer under the oil. The carboy system is good for seeing that water contamination, and also for ease of picking up the oil w/o messy pumping.
Add the chemicals, push the start button and away we go. 24 hrs later, drain the glycerin, fill the wash barrell, and push the wash button. 24 hrs after that, the fuel is finished, and ready to pump into our 70 gallon storage cubes.
We pump the bio into cars using a handpump from the storage cube, which is also kept in the bathroom where the oil is dropped off.
We even applied for and received our methanol permit!
We also had our fuel tested and the total glycerin was 0.12 - half the ASTM spec! And recently we had our fuel submitted for the full gamut of ASTM tests, and voila, we have commercial quality fuel!
We are supplying 20 people with this baby!!

BioLyle's Biodiesel Workshop
http://biolyle.com