BIODIESEL TESTING:
--A boon or a barrier?
By Jim Miller
August 9, 2006

The specification for biodiesel varies from refinery to refinery, but all of them pass the ASTM D 6751 battery of tests. The problem is all of those tests are for petrodiesel, not for biodiesel. This undifferentiated test has led State of California, via the California Air Quality Resources Board to accommodate home-brew biodiesel producers to produced and sell “demonstration” biodiesel under the specified conditions, thus avoiding the ASTM testing. The large, multi-million dollar companies can afford to produce batches of 20,000 gallons or more of biodiesel and thus the cost of the tests is a small percentage.

In the home brew industry, the cost of the tests if run by a commercial lab completely stops the home brew industry. This is not a trivial issue. In my discussions of this point with Dr. Charles Peterson during June, 2003, he stated that the home brewers should create a cooperative testing lab. That would be like herding 100 cats down an alley. During 2003, I joined several biodiesel discussion boards and tried to interest home brewers in establishing a co-op. I got some rather disgusting suggestions as to what I could do with my idea. The idea of a cooperative lab is thus still born.

The only hope is to find a suitable and affordable near infra-red testing equipment. Even this is a chicken and egg problem. Until we have biodiesel production which is of sufficient volume to sell to the public, there is no need for any ASTM or other testing. The costs will probably be in the $15,000 to $20,000 range for the NIR instruments. I understand that ASTM has formed a committee to study this issue and will, hopefully, come up with a test specification which is specific to biodiesel. No telling when this could happen. Even if such tests is published, it would still take time for the test to be adopted by all of the government agencies which get involved in biodiesel production and use.

Again the chicken and egg. Until there is a strong base of biodiesel producers, including small plants such as I advocate, governments will typically drag their heels. The question is How Does One Begin to Begin? The solution is to encourage home brewers, small producers and other stakeholders to produce and use the production for themselves. When this layer of biodiesel producers has populated the cities and towns and rural areas, then we can take the next step, which is to have several different organizations (e.g. ISO) specify what constitutes good biodiesel and the protocol for testing such.

There is no reason why ASTM should be the exclusive author of testing protocols. There is no reason why a government agency, e.g. MT DEQ could not publish a complete testing protocol rather than simply adopt the ASTM panel of tests. It costs $30 to buy each test protocol from ASTM. ($30 x 14 = $420) The buyer is required to adhere to a very strict intellectual property contract, which basically is a very severe non-disclosure document. Basically, all levels of government have combined to grant a monopoly to ASTM on the testing issue. ASTM is sitting in the cat bird seat, reaping the profits and keeping the home brewer at bay with the high cost of not only buying the test protocols but in creating the $100,000 lab necessary to run the about 14 of the panel of tests.

When I ran the pH test as part of my Chem Engineering lab course, ( Test for Relative Acidity, ASTM D 664-04e1), I discussed the level of difficulty with Dr. Dallas Johnson, then the head of the Chemistry Department of MSU. He chuckled at my situation. He said that the ASTM test I was running was designed for use by analytical chemists with advance degrees and years of experience in running lab tests. I also discussed some of these issue with the creator of the MicroLab instrumentation which I was using. He also stated that the MicroLab instrumentation was intended for general purpose chem lab work, and was not specialized for biodiesel testing.

For instance, in doing the titration, I was to add one-half of a ML of reactant until I reached the end point. The glass titration equipment available to me did not allow for such a small increment and I used 5 ml per dose. The effect of this change was to blur the end point so that my pH range increased. Since the scale is exponential, this change creating a problem in finding the true end point. The end point scales to the numeric pH. So the lesson learned is that a novice chemist such as myself simply does not have the background to do each of the included ASTM tests. Even using one of the chem labs under the supervison of Dr. Duffy, Dr. Johnson and with the help of the creator of MicroLab, I was barely able to complete the test. Home brew producers simply do not have access I had to MSU chem lab and staff and cannot be expected to test each batch.

Fuelmeister makes 40 gallon batches. Running the battery of tests specified by D6751 is simply not feasible. Neither is incurring the $500 to $850 expense per batch.

So the solution is to do nothing, and allow the mega-million/billion dollar corporations to become the exclusive suppliers of biodiesel. The consequences are large factories and huge transportation costs (using mostly fossil fuel). They can set prices at or above petrodiesel prices. The consumer thus would have no way to fight big oil. Given that Montana has long distances to haul stuff, but has great ag potential for growing oil seed crops, we need to prevent the oligopolies from getting a strangle hold on biodiesel.

The best way is to have biofuel plants in every town, city and ecovillage in Montana which uses local WVO and second and third presses from oil seed presses. I understand that Montana has only one oil seed pressing plant, near Sunburst. This lack of pressing facilities is sad.

Gov. Schweitzer has touted biodiesel, yet his words seem to lie on the hard, baked ground and have not sprouted any biodiesel "plants". The loan will change this situation. As part of the deal, I am quite willing use the website for Montana Synergy to offer to the public, free of charge, all of the technology, designs and marketing ideas I will have developed. By using a WikiWeb site, anyone with a browser can upload their comments, articles and hyper links to other resources. They can edit what I or anyone else write and publish on the website. All articles will be royalty free and can be used and copied by anyone on a 7/24/365 basis. Montana Synergy's current WikiWeb is at: http://montanasynergy.wetpaint.com/page/BUSINESS+PLAN+FOR+SPIRULINA+CULTURE+AND+PRODUCTION

This approach is to kick-start the home brew and small producer industry in Montana, with the hope it will propagate itself to other parts of the nation. I am willing to be the pioneer, in the spirit of early Montana pioneers who braved the forces of nature to make Montana what it is today. This loan is only for Layer One. I am in the process of designing Layer Two which focuses on the use of algae for food and fuel.

Best regards,
Jim Miller, Managing Partner
Montana Synergy, LLP
P. O. Box 1172 Belgrade, MT 59714
jimmiller5417@yahoo.com