I asked Elsbett's Alexander Noack for some comment on what he was
quoted as saying about soy oil, and got a very brief response from
him:
Hi Keith,
this all is nearly correct, but only for direct injection engines.
Mit freundlichen Gr٤en / Best regards
Alexander Noack
ELSBETT Technologie GmbH
Weissenburger Stra§e 15
D-91177 Thalmaessing
Internet: www.elsbett.com
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: +49 (0)9173 77940
Fax: +49 (0)9173 77942
This was the quote in question:
"Soybean oil is bad. Whether it is straight vegetable oil or soybean
based biodiesel. It is a no-go in diesel engines. Why? In diesel
engines you have slight mixing between fuel and lubricating oil.
There is a fuel property in soybean oil that makes it reactive when
in contact with engine lubricating oil. It supposedly has a
polymerizing action with the engine oil, which is detrimental to the
life of your lubricating system.
"What they do in Europe is use a vegetable-based lubricating oil for
the engine to prevent any problems with fuel-lubricating oil
intimacy. What else? They do not use soybean oil; They use rape seed
also known as canola."
Best wishes
Keith
Hello Jan
Hello Stephan.
The reason for Elsbett«s people (and several others) for rejecting soy bean
oil is its high iodine number. As the case with fish oil, corn oil and
several kinds of sunflower oil. A high iodine number is indicating that the
oil may be chemically unstable due to its unsaturation level and therefore
unsuitable as engine fuel both as SVO and BD.
In other words, it polymerises - to quote Phillip Calais: "Drying
results from the double bonds (and sometimes triple bonds) in the
unsaturated oil molecules being broken by atmospheric oxygen and
being converted to peroxides. Cross-linking at this site can then
occur and the oil irreversibly polymerises into a plastic-like
solid."
-- From "Waste Vegetable Oil as a Diesel Replacement Fuel" by
Phillip Calais, Environmental Science, Murdoch University, Perth,
Australia, and A.R. (Tony) Clark, Western Australian Renewable Fuels
Association Inc.
http://www.shortcircuit.com.au/warfa/paper/paper.htm
See:
Iodine Values
http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html#iodine
But that's not quite what Elsbett's Alexander Noack is quoted as
saying at the East Coast Region-United States Elsbett Workshop:
"Soybean oil is bad. Whether it is straight vegetable oil or soybean
based biodiesel. It is a no-go in diesel engines. Why? In diesel
engines you have slight mixing between fuel and lubricating oil.
There is a fuel property in soybean oil that makes it reactive when
in contact with engine lubricating oil. It supposedly has a
polymerizing action with the engine oil, which is detrimental to the
life of your lubricating system.
"What they do in Europe is use a vegetable-based lubricating oil for
the engine to prevent any problems with fuel-lubricating oil
intimacy. What else? They do not use soybean oil; They use rape seed
also known as canola."
So it would seem that Elsbett's reservations are not so much with
polymerisation per se because of the high iodine number as with
fuel-lubricating oil interactions.
Can you shed any light on this?
There are some companies producing me from oil with a high iodine number,
and there is no practical difference between those products and the BD:s
with a iodine number around or under 120 for the consumer.
Can you quote any research that supports the conclusion that there
is no practical difference? I've heard of drying problems with
sunflower oil biodiesel, and even with rapeseed oil biodiesel (I
don't have the reports, I was told they're in German) and I would
not want to use linseed oil or tung oil.
And may I add that
the American B100 standard allows soy bean oil as raw material.
Of course they do - how much do you think the soy councils and Big
Soy had to do with that? They were involved at every level. Whatever
the science may say, do you think it would have been possible for
them to develop standards that excluded soy?
Similarly, it's often said that the EU standard's stipulating a
maximum iodine # of 120 (115 in France and Germany, while the US
standard doesn't stipulate anything) is politically based, intended
to exclude soy and protect European rapeseed oil production, but is
that really all there is to it?
If you really wanted to exclude drying problems you'd probably have
to exclude rapeseed oil as well and stop at castor oil (85), but no
doubt that would be as politically impossible in Europe as excluding
soy would be in the US. In both, though less so in Europe perhaps,
biodiesel and biofuels are still seen more as agricultural
commodities issues than as energy issues.
There is a whole side to this that is not to be trusted. In the US,
it might not be a clever thing to do career-wise for a researcher to
start investigating polymerising problems with soy biodiesel.
Quality checks of commercial biodiesel seem to be far from
watertight, with one lab attesting ASTM quality and another - after
the fuel started causing problems - finding it was not ASTM quality.
One commercial produceare repeatedly produced off-spec fuel that
caused problems with users' cars, but the NBB didn't seem to be
aware of it and proudly presented that producer's plant for
delegates to the NBB's annual convention to tour. People at the
convention who raised the sub-spec fuel issue were told not to rock
the boat.
Like Stephan, I too would like some reliable information on this
issue. I'm not convinced that it's not a problem.
We have discussed this here before, Alexander's statement,
polymerisation, and oxidation - see:
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/34679/
and
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/34769/1
(Elsbett, by the way, is not anti-biodiesel.)
Best wishes
Keith
Best regards
Jan Warnqvist
AGERATEC AB
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
+ 46 554 201 89
+46 70 499 38 45
----- Original Message -----
From: "stephan torak" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 3:19 AM
Subject: [Biofuel] (Biofuel)[Fwd: Re: soybeanoil a bad choice for BD
making?]
>
>
> >Hi Everyone!
> >I am a recent addition to the biodiesel world, due to a malfunction
> >in my brain (age related no doubt) that caused me to go and buy a
> >190D.(I Love it just as I knew I would) . After I decided that
> >buying the conversion kit from Elsbett wasn't necessarily the best
> >option (due to local WVO quality concerns)....by the way, if you come to
> >Hawaii, where I live, and decide to eat in a restaurant, make sure
> >you have healthinsurance, the glop they are using here to fry stuff
> >in ......
> >
> >Seriously, though, the WVO I am getting here is is a mix of mostly
> >Soybean oil used 100 times over and other unidentified saturated and
unsaturated things.
> >So I deciided to make BD.
> >Now, Everything is running, I've done small batches, large batches,
> >learned a lot, I am using it....and now I just read that an
> >Elsbett engineer said to stay away from Soybean oil, regardless if
> >used straight or as feedstock for BD.
> >
> >Now, in my (brief) dealings with the Elsbett company I had the
> >distinctive feeling that they have a little bit of an anti- BD leaning
(maybe I got that because German is my native language)
> >
> But in studying the resources further, and considering the high IV
> >of soybean oil more questions as to its suitability seem to emerge....
> >
> >Here are some questions: As far as suitability as a long term
> >source for B100, how serious are the concerns in using BD made from
> >this sort of an oil?
> >
> What criteria in evaluating the finished product (beyond Mike Perry's
criteria of pH and aspect)
> >should serve as a go no go test?
> >
> does a two step process improve the situation with the high number of
double bonds
> (which leads to the high IV value, as I understand)
>
> >Thanks for your consideration, Aloha
_______________________________________________
Biofuel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://wwia.org/mailman/listinfo/biofuel
Biofuel at Journey to Forever:
http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html
Biofuel archives at Infoarchive.net (searchable):
http://infoarchive.net/sgroup/biofuel/
