Great Conference!

The 2008
Collective Biodiesel Conference in Golden, Colorado was a lot of fun with many great presentations and wonderful people. I especially enjoyed the students from Dickenson College and their presentations about glycerin composting and methanol recovery. One of the pics here shows Andrew with a slide of their reflux column on top of their Appleseed. They pack the 30 inch pipe with copper scrubbing pads for the water contaminating the methanol vapor to condense on, thus creating higher purity methanol. I love simple technology like that! Heating up to 260 deg F, they're still able to get 95% + purity. Their glycerin composting experiments were carefully done, and show that adding glycerin (with methanol removed) stimulates plant growth in their initial experiments. They've already published some of these results in Biodiesel Smarter magazine, a great new publication for and by biodiesel homebrewers. Plus I really had fun hanging out with these bright young folks, and look forward to hearing about their future projects. Click here for more info..
It was also great to hear from folks talking about their biodiesel coops and hearing how they work and deal with many of the same issues Dirty Hands has dealt with.

All of the presentations plus video will eventually be posted on the website, so stay tuned. Many thanks to organizers John Bush and Jonathon Meuser- they really worked hard and brought an amazing group of people together.