 The Future of Automobiles Smells Like...French Fries!  by Andrew Kerr February 2007 I spoke with Heritage High School chemistry teacher Erin Gawron on February 8, 2007 about her GIFT summer experiences at the University of Georgia, wherein she studied biodiesel fuels. Erin's students successfully converted the diesel engine of a Mercedes so that it could run on vegetable oil. Gawron's gang was also featured on Fox 5 news, and as publicity begets more publicity, I thought it worth tracking her down to write-up an interview! Erin has traveled the country researching biofuels, visiting such places as the National Renewable Energy Lab, ethanol and biodiesel plants, and Iowa State University. She has presented at numerous educational conferences, including GSTA and the Southeastern Biodiesel Workshop. She and her students will host a biofuels expo on April 21st at Heritage High School, from 11 AM - 1 PM (details on their website). So come on out! Q - You transformed a gas guzzler into a biofuel guzzler. How did that whole project come about? A - Last year I got a service learning grant from the state government. Since it was a service learning grant the students had to actually do a service or the teaching. I decided to get a biofuels expo going on Earth Day last year so the students could share their knowledge with the community. I got an English teacher involved; her students wrote persuasive and informational brochures on biofuels. I had our drama teacher put together a skit on why you need to use biofuels; they performed it at the expo. I had video production students documenting the whole thing and put it on DVD. I had my chemistry students actually making biodiesel and testing properties of biodiesel. We had a 1972 Mercedes donated to us. A few of the students decided to stay after school and help convert that to run on straight vegetable oil, so all of this was kind of occurring in conjunction with our biofuels expo. I was able to bring a couple of third year chemistry students up to UGA to use the equipment in the labs there so that they could really analyze their biodiesel samples. This year I'm planning on doing some titrations so that they can determine quality of fuel as far as glycerine content and things like that. We're going to try to do more with ethanol this year as well.  Q - The Mercedes was just donated to you by some kind-hearted soul who heard about what you were doing?A - There's a gentleman who lives near our school, and one of my students is his neighbor. When I was talking about this in class, he said that he thought this man, who happens to have quite a few Mercedes in his yard, thought that one of them was probably a diesel. The car was not drivable, but the engine ran perfectly, and that's really all we needed. One of the local mechanics was kind enough to have our car towed to his shop. We went there to work on the car after school. So we had tools and we had a safe place to work and he helped us out with his car expertise. But the students did the majority of the work. He and I stood back and let them problem-solve it out and put it together. It was just amazing to see some of these girls who have their expensive manicures, they're getting in there and they're using the tools and they were having a good time with it! Q - Do you think biofuels are a viable option in the future? Are things really headed that way? A - Some of the petroleum companies are buying into it now. A lot of people use biodiesel. I believe that the miliary is actually requiring a small percentage of the fuel they use to be biodiesel. So it's out there. I know that there's a little bit of problem in getting enough feed stock to do it but there are plenty of people doing it. Q - It does seem like it could potentially be a beautiful win-win situation for beleagored farmers. I grew up in the 1980's and have relatives in the rural midwest, so I remember the whole Farm Aid stuff, and farmers being paid not to grow crops, and so on. This would seem to increase demand for their crops. A - I think some of the issue right now has to deal with the feed stock crops that we do grow are actually being used for food, so you kinda have to compete with the food market for some of the oil crop. But when I was working with the engineers at UGA that's one of the things they're looking at, using Georgia crops for feed stock. We were looking at peanuts in particular and I think right now they're starting to look at cotton seed oil. But one of the things that struck me we went to go talk to the National Peanut Research Lab is that if there's any trace of disease in the peanut or fungus in the peanut they can't sell that for food. But that's perfectly great to use for fuel. So things like that may be another thing for farmers, to be able to fetch a decent price for their crops that cannot be used be for food. Q - Walk me through the process of creating biodiesel fuel out of, say, a peanut. A - The first thing you need is oil, so you need to crush the oil seeds to get the oil out of them. We usually do a quick titration to find out how much catalyst we need for our reaction. Then we mix up methanol, or you could use ethanol, and our catalyst which is either sodium or potassium hydroxide. Typically we use methanol and potassium hydroxide; those things dissolve easiest together. You mix the oil and this hydroxide together and let it react. And then it settles. The bottom layer is waste called glycerine. The top layer is methyl esters which is your fuel. In order to put the fuel in your engine without damage, you would need to wash the fuel with water to make sure you get the pH down to an appropriate level, and get all the catalyst out of it. Then you can test it, and find out if it meets what the [American Standards of Testing and Measurement] ASTM standards are for the fuel. Q - Recently the guys on "Mythbusters" demonstrated that you could run a car on straight-from-the-bottle vegetable oil. I also saw this discussed on "Popular Mechanics for Kids." But apparently, while that works in the short run, it could damage your car in the long run not to go through the multi-step process you described. A - Rudolph Diesel's original engine design was to be able to use vegetable oil as fuel. Then the petroleum industry found out that his engine would also burn byproducts of gasoline refining, what we call "middle distillates." And then, somehow, Rudolph ended up dead in a river! Nobody really knows what happened to him! You can speculate...and the students find that fact interesting. Q - Sort of a more literal version of Who Killed the Electric Car? Who Killed Rudolph Diesel? A - Everyone thinks it's such a novel idea that we're using vegetable oil in the engine, but that's what the engine was designed for. And that's why a lot of people are trying to go back and convert the modern engines to run on straight vegetable oil. But you can only run your engine [on straight vegetable oil] for maybe a hundred thousand miles max because you get such great carbon build up that you're going to have to strip the engine and clean it all. So it's better if you make biodiesel out of it. You do have to make sure that it is clean, pure, biodiesel if you're going to run it. And that's where the ASTM specifications come in. You have to make sure there's no glycerine in there, no catalyst, it has to be the right PH, or you will ruin the engine. Q - So for everyday people in 2007 I presume this is not really economically feasible at the moment. A - There are plenty of people doing it and plenty of people doing it for pretty cheaply. Q - The price they put into it is lower than the price per gallon of gasoline? A - Yes. The main thing that they're doing is they're getting the oil from restaurants. They're getting used oil and they're cleaning it up by filtering, and they're getting biofuel from that. Now you assume the risk of not having fuel that meets specifications, so if you're gonna make it you're running the risk of ruining your engine. So it's not something I recommend if you have no knowlege of chemistry. And technically I think it's illegal because they can't tax it. I put biodiesel in my car and it originates from the biodiesel plant in Rome. So I know in order for them to sell it it has to be good fuel. I would rather just have somebody else take care of it. The price is going to fluctuate based on the price of soybeans, but it's still going to hover right around the price of diesel fuel. So I'm not going to get it quite as cheaply as if I had to make it myself, but I also know the taxes have been paid on it and all that stuff too. So the fuel that goes in my personal vehicle is legal and well produced. Q - "Popular Mechanics for Kids" said that the exhaust coming from vegetable oil cars smells like french fries, which sounds a lot more pleasant than sniffing gas fumes. Is there any environmental hazard posed by biodiesel fuel? A - No, not really. There's this big switch coming over to this ultra low sulfur diesel. They're trying to reduce the amount of sulfur in the fuel so that we're not causing acid rain and smog and all of that. So, first off, biodiesel doesn't have sulfur in it. And also carbon dioxide emissions are lower, I think, by half; other organic molecules, other hydrocarbons are cut. There is a question now about nitrogen oxide. Some say it produces more nitrogen oxide than regular diesel, some say it's less. Really, it depends on your engine. Certain engines will cut the nitrogen oxides and some won't. So that's really the only harm. And really clean, pure biodiesel is less toxic than table salt. You can drink it! I don't think you'd want to, but if you spill it on the ground you're not going to have a problem there. How many times do you pull up to a gas or a diesel pump and see fuel spilled all over the ground? So you're not going to have that run-off that gets into the water. Q - There'll be little birds drinking it! Little birds playing happily in puddles of spilled biodiesel fuel! A - Only if it's clean, though! Q - What was your GIFT experience like? A - The first summer I was there they were just starting a project to look at using peanuts as fuel. So they had me doing some of the initial literature searches, they had me in the lab making a little bit of the biodiesel. This past summer they put me right to work. They actually had different oil samples from different cultivars of peanuts that they had done from the National Peanut Research Lab. They put me to work making biodiesel samples from those different cultivars of peanuts so that they could compare those. They were doing some engine testing, looking at carbon buildup on injectors, and so I was helping them run the engines and pull injectors and take pictures of the injectors, and I started to get some things set up. I couldn't quite get it finished before I left, but we were starting to set up some of the titration equipment so that we could look at the percent glycerine in the biodiesel, things like that. Q - It seems the world of your GIFT experience and that of your teaching is especially seamless. A - That's what I'm trying to point out to teachers. Every time I talk to teachers about doing this stuff in the classroom they're like, "I don't have time. I have to get through the content and [Georgia Performance Standards] GPS's." But I'm trying to get them to understand that instead of the typical heat of combustion lab you would do, for example, why not look at the combustion of biodiesel fuel for that? I wrote up a series of five activities as part of my GIFT action plan this last summer. I give the standards and I tell exactly where they will fit in. My eventual goal will be to write a companion manual to any standard high school chemistry book because I can find a way to fit biofuels into almost every single chapter that I teach. I would like to get something put together so that teachers can see that you don't have to take extra time to do it, just put this in instead. I've had great students who are capable of actually carrying out the same lab research that I was doing up there at UGA. I have four students who are interested in doing a little bit more with the straight vegetable oil. They want to look at emissions on that, because we can't find anywhere where anybody's done that. Q - Anything else I should have asked about and failed to cover? A - If other people are going to read this, make sure that they know that we're going to have another expo on April 21st from 11 to 1. I certainly hope that other people do read this, and that those of you who can make it to Rockdale County's Heritage High School will do so on April 21st! Web Resources (-- Show --) |