–chuck

Glycerin is basically free fatty acids from veggie oil…
OUCH! Here’s the scoop: A lipid (fat for solid at room temperature, oil for liquid at room temperature) consists of three fatty acids bound to glycerol. Refer to Wikipedia for the graphics. When you make biodiesel, you basically replace the glycerol (an alcohol with three -OH groups) with three units of methanol (one -OH per unit). Hence you consume methanol and produce glycerol as a byproduct.

The best thing to do with waste glyceride (or glycerol) and waste oil, is to dump it in an anaerobic digester where it gets almost fully converted into biogas, which in turn can be converted into green (but not so clean) electricity. See your local wastewater treatment plant for more on that.

Glycerin is not vegetable oil, nor is it an alcohol. I suspect the “Glycerin an alcohol” above should have been “Glycerin AND alcohol” (emphasis mine) since those two things (along with food waste if the source is used fryer oil) are the byproducts of BioDiesel production. Glycerin is basically free fatty acids from veggie oil, bonded to the base element (either lye or potassium hydroxide.) The elements used in BioDiesel reaction are rather toxic in their original form, methanol and the strong base catalysts, but once combined chemically with the veggie oil feedstock to make Glycerin they are rather benign in the larger scheme of things. In fact, you could eat them. Your local car wash or dry cleaner is FAR more chemically toxic than a BioDiesel producer.

However dumping any of this stuff into the water supply is just plain stupid. Especially since there are ways of safely disposing of these items. BioDiesel producers perform methanol recovery to extract as much of the methanol (by far the most expensive element of BioDiesel production) out of the byproduct for re-use. Glycerine can be safely composted.

But, like any industry, greed and ignorance can make people take shortcuts. Those who do should be prosecuted, and if need be, shut down.

Overall though, given the choice of living near a petroleum refinery or a BioDiesel plant, I’d pick the latter by a wide margin. Just because a couple of idiots did something stupid doesn’t mean the whole industry is equally bad.

–chuck
http://chuck.goolsbee.org

As all the byproducts of the process to create the fuels creates an ever growing plume at the mouth of the Mississippi and other rivers, the state of NIMBY Florida will relent and choose off shore oil wells over brown water.

But anyhow, I just recently decided to sell an old Toyota Paseo for my daily commuting and use a 1998 Jetta Diesel. The Jetta cost about $2000 more ($2750 vs. $650), but Atlanta is surprisingly diesel and biodiesel friendly for an east coast city and the opportunity to pick up my first non-Benz diesel (87 350SDL, 95 E300, 96 E300) was simply too great.

I will use biodiesel, but chances are it won’t be straight bio (about 25%). There’s a distribution center only a mile away from one of my sales and I’ll most likely have a sample evaluated before putting it in my tank. I’ll have to be stocking up on fuel filters as well.