Our car is on 50% Biodiesel
Sun May 01, 2005 at 05:01:36 AM PDT
Today we went for a typical Sunday drive... stopped off at the sushi bar for a nice lunch. Drove through bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic to a computer shop to buy our son a new hard drive since his self-destructed a couple of days ago, and ended up detouring to a second computer store some distance away. We covered about 50 km. on this drive, and noticed nothing unusual. Nothing strange. Except the exhaust didn't smell so bad like it used to when we first bought the car! And it ran smoother, more quietly. Is that our imagination?
Backtrack to December 2003. The family was wrapping up another glorious Christmas in Hawaii, sitting around a cafe, sipping on some cool drinks when our son began to grill us about possible alternative fuels. Like many kids his age, he's concerned about what kind of environment he is going to have to deal with when he grows up, or what's going to be available to pass on to his own kids. So he wanted to talk about all these ideas... What about water? Can we split it and use the hydrogen? What about solar powered cars? Or electric cars? How can we create some fuel that doesn't pollute, that interacts naturally with the environment? We kept trying to answer his questions, and tried to think of what we had heard about the drawbacks or difficulties of a particular method, and finally I said, "There isn't any alternative fuel we could easily switch to, not the way society is set up now. Somebody has to invent something new that we haven't heard of. If there was something else that we could really use today in place of gasoline, we would have heard of it already."
The reason I remember that particular conversation so clearly is about three days later we were on the flight back to Oahu to catch our homeward flight back to Japan, and my husband was thumbing through the Hawaiian Airlines flight magazine when he came across this article: Clean Getaway. This story described the Maui Bio-Beetle, a rental car that was fueled one hundred percent by recycled vegetable oil. He turned to my son and showed him the article. "There's your alternative fuel," he said.
One of the first things my husband did when he got home was to Google bio-diesel. So it didn't take long for us to realize that there was an alternative fuel which could recycle oil - waste oil that was already part of the carbon cycle - to power cars that were already a part of the existing infrastructure - diesel cars. This is something we could visualize as a transition between fossil fuels and whatever is going to come next - improved public transportation certainly, and possibly those alternative fuels that haven't been invented yet. One of the references my husband found was this book From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, written by Josh Tickell. We ordered the book, read it, and figured biodiesel was something we'd be able to do when we returned to the West and could have our own garage. So we tabled the idea for awhile.
A few months later I was riding my bike past a small marine engine garage near our house, and I noticed that the business was gone and the garage was up for rent. This building was of a type which would be familiar to anyone who has driven through the American south, a ramshackle structure that was missing a goodly portion of the roof, with dust blowing through the gaps in the walls and bits and pieces of junk still littering the parking area from the previous business. I stopped for awhile and studied this abandoned building, because while I was looking at it, the beginnings of a plan were beginning to form in my mind... Economic times have been hard around here, and this wasn't the only garage that was standing empty. Maybe we would rent this garage - or some other garage. Why wouldn't someone want to rent to us? Well, for one thing - we were foreign. And the idea of brewing biodiesel was bound to sound weird. But we would try to get this garage, and if we couldn't get it, we would keep trying until we got one.
Well, those people didn't rent to us. We were foreign. And biodiesel was bound to sound weird. But that's okay; we got our garage the way just about anything happens in Japan. You get a friend to ask around, and after a while, the pieces come together. In our case, our friend knew an elderly man who was a retired carpenter, willing to rent out a portion of his garage to us. In a way, this was far better than getting our own place. It was invaluable having a carpenter around who - as it turns out - is acutely interested in the project, and always is ready to jump in and lend a helping hand, or help us troubleshoot some practical difficulty or other.
While we were looking for the garage, we were getting ready in other ways. We had to learn more about brewing biodiesel itself; it was going to be more than just collecting waste oil. During our research, we found that several companies had started manufacturing biodiesel stills. Now, we could have scoured junk yards and probably found most everything we needed to build one ourselves, but after much debate, we decided to buy one ready-made. It would be hard enough to be doing something weird in Japan without having the right look. At least if we had some professional-looking machinery, we might just convince people we knew what we were doing.
So the garage was set up - and boy did our new landlord work hard to fix up our cold and drafty and dirty portion of the garage. He found an old kitchen sink with cupboards and put in the piping so that we would have running water. Our friends contributed a kerosene stove, and helped us source an oil heater (in Tokyo). We ordered and set up our biodiesel still and acquired some cannisters for holding waste oil and our final product biodiesel. We found out about buying lye and methanol (both controlled substances here), and started sourcing waste oil. One afternoon my son and his Japanese teacher rode around on bikes visiting different fast food and obento (boxed lunch) shops. He learned that donut shops don't have good waste oil, that hamburger chains aren't allowed to give away their waste oil - but that the local obento shop was happy to donate! A good afternoon's Japanese lesson.
So we had our oil, our lye, our methanol. We had our biodiesel still set up in a garage that seemed to average about 5 degrees centigrade on a winter's day (it seems summer is the ideal time for brewing biodiesel). But we still had a lot to learn. One of the first things we learned that if water gets in your waste oil, you're screwed. This has been about the rainiest winter since we moved down here to Nagasaki, and - unfortunately - at least one of our waste oil donations was contaminated with water. Quite a bit of water. So we learned all about heating oil and drying oil and pumping out water that has fallen to the bottom of your tank, and then doing the whole thing again about five times, until finally you have a decent sample of oil and can produce a good mini-batch.
It wasn't real easy getting this far, but it was never exactly hard either. It isn't the same as going to your local gas station and filling up the tank, but it's a nice family project to work on together (we send our son out of the garage when we're adding the lye to the methanol!), with the further benefit that we've been able to show our son some important things that we wanted him to know: first, that we are doers, not just talkers (or, complainers, if you will), and that if major corporations set up a virtual monopoly on the way things have to be, you still don't have to support their monopoly. You might just have to look for a creative way around it. I hope he will remember these days with us, and he will remember these things we have tried to teach him.
I have developed a system at home for filtering biodiesel before we add it to the tank ( a final precaution to make sure no food particles survived the previous filtering and washing stages), which involves pumping it through a coffee filter into four-liter pickled plum jars. Today we added enough of this filtered biodiesel to our Nissan Terrano* to bring us up to 50% - the current stage on our way to 100%. My husband took the car for a little spin around the neighborhood, and as he drove off, I thought to myself, "Didn't that car used to stink real bad? Now there is just a faint whiff of dino-diesel in the air, along with something else..."
*In the U.S., this would be a Pathfinder, but in Japan, these are available in diesel. We purchased this car secondhand when we started looking to replace the gas-powered Toyota my husband uses for work.
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