I've heard a few other bad examples of "industry" putting out bad product. One of them was a story that the instructors at the Iowa State course told. They didn't want to name the company who was doing this, but it was a manufacturer who was selling blending stock (ie the B20 portion of a B20/ petrodiesel80 mix). That manufacturer apparently reacted their material just enough to drop the viscosity, and never actually retracted glycerine (so the guy had 10% more (monoglyceride soup) product to sell, quality be damned. Homebrewers on this list may be aware of this 'method' as Oil Can Harry's experimental (to say the least) "ethyl esters". Oil Can Harry knows it's experimental and he certainly doesn't sell product though!).
Let me say first that this story WAS NOT about World Energy or anything, this was some really shady operation it sounded like. I"m worried that something like this may become not all that uncommon in the unenforcable quality control climate we've got. The point of their story is that ASTM D-671 is not particularly enforcable at the moment, though it seems that in theory this producer could be shut down. It's an interesting story- we've been told before that small producers can get in all this legal trouble for not joining the NBB and selling onroad fuel, and yet here are five industry people telling me that there';s no real enforcement mechanism for ASTM, and that there's nothing anyone's going to do about this producer at the moment. As far as where to go from here? My feeling is that it's realy important to be honest with consumers about quality issues and what CAN actually go wrong with biodiesel. You have to educate people about what it should look like, and what can go wrong in storage, and simple quality tests that they can do. We actually had a small push for that locally, coming out of the Veggieavenger.com website, this winter- William Wrentmore, who runs that site, was trying to develop a few simple tests that consumers could do to check out any product that came their way (antigel and other additives REALLY throw off most homebrewer tests though). I think this is promising- and that teaching people the very basics of how BD is made would be useful (which most consumers find somewhat interesting at least once). Teaching people about the standards and the specifications, teaching them about the regulations (ie that we HAVE an ASTM standard that that they should ask producers for testing results, how often testing is done, etc.... to at least week out the "Re-Fine LLC's" of this business).. i'ts all part of what makes this an odd industry. I feel like the consumers are watching the industry, much more so than Industry is used to, and that's a really, really good trend. Again, check out the Biodieselnow thread about the bad quality world energy fuel- (I think that the thread is called "beware of bad biodiesel' and look at the attitudes of the angry guy who found glycerine in his fuel- HE certainly doesn't want to be doing this footwork of checking out his producers' credentials, thinks it's all the fault of 'yellow grease' as being an inferior product biodiesel, and keeps bringing up the fact that you don't need to do all this extra investigative work if you buy gasoline- in short he;s the irate consumer who feels 'ripped off' at finding this to not be a mature industry- but I think that he's in the minority among active BD consumers at the moment and that most of them are pretty excited about the novelty of being involved in their own enrgy choices right now. We just have to make sure that more of these incidents don't cause a backlash against biodiesel in this country. mark --- In biofuels-biz@yahoogroups.com, Keith Addison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Isn't it an NBB or EPA requirement to submit one sample a year? > > Keith > > > >that is a great document, but that QC recommendation is only a recommendation. > >There isn't particularly an enforcable law about how often companies run > >analysis, I dont' think... > > > >mark > > > >At 04:57 PM 6/4/2003 -0500, you wrote: > > > > >The most recent guideline that I have found for how often to QC biodiesel > > >is from NREL in September 2001. > > > > > >http://www.afdc.nrel.gov/pdfs/5845.pdf > > > > > >See page 6, paragraph 2. NREL recommends testing each batch of product. > > >For continuous processes, the commercial producers I have interviewed test > > >their product once per shift. > > > > > >KPS ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions. http://us.click.yahoo.com/Lj3uPC/Me7FAA/ySSFAA/9bTolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuels at Journey to Forever http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuel at WebConX http://webconx.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/biofuel.htm List messages are archived at the Info-Archive at NNYTech: http://archive.nnytech.net/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
