Saving Energy for Practical People — 6
First of all, let me state this is not a picture of our "dirty kitchen" here in the Philippines. But it might be someday,
though. Probably not, but one of the things my lovely wife and I have discussed at some length is smarter ways to make ourselves more energy independent. The idea of making our own fuel from what is otherwise going to waste is attractive. Diesel fuel from waste cooking oil is a very "trendy" item in these days of $4 gas.
In addition to using waste oil diesel for automotive use, we’ve talked already a few times here about people who want to live off grid and of course one possible solution for that kind of lifestyle would be to simply have your own diesel powered home generator … be your own power company.
If you buy your diesel fuel for a setup like that in today’s environment here in the Philippines you’ll find the numbers don’t work out at all … in other words if I replaced my 500 or 600 Kwh per month of commercial power with power from my own diesel gen set (a diesel engine and an alternator that puts out 220V 60 hz power) I would spend about five time my current bill to Meralco. If I used a cheaper, lighter gasoline gen set it would be closer to six or seven times as expensive,so I think that idea is pretty much a non-starter.
But if my fuel costs were zero … wow, it suddenly becomes a very practical sounding proposition, doesn’t it? Truth be told, it can certainly be done, and for some people it might be something worth pursuing. However, first I’d suggest you read this Wired.com article on the state of the current cooking oil diesel fuel community. This article covers the nuts and bolts of how the technology works and does a much more through job than I can. After you’ve read it I’ll summarize what I feel are some important points about this home brewed biodiesel here in the Philippines.
Pros:
- In spite of the messiness factors involved, this will work.
- It’s simpler than it may appear once you get things set up
- It’s likely to be simpler and work better here because many of the tricky problems in making a good quality fuel are related to the climate … here it’s always hot so glycerine, waxiness problems and such are minimized
- There is a lot less regulation in semi-urban and rural areas. If you want to, just do it (YMMV)
- Labor is cheap
- "junk" is big business here. There are "bote boys" passing multiple times per day, asking for glass bottles, plastic trash, metal cans, scrap, newspapers, etc. They earn their living selling their daily finds to "junk shops". It would be very simple to have a number of these guys collecting waste cooking oil and delivering it to your processing plant.
Cons:
- Of course, comma, what people say is "free" now has the price they paid to the origin plus their markup that you paid for their work, plus containers, and so on added in … still cheap, but virtually nothing is "free". And prices go up and down rapidly depending on supply and demand. Right now, in my area, no one collects. A soon as there is any demand, expect a price to develop. Remember, a hundred years ago, refineries could not give gasoline away.
- The physical plant is simple, but again not free. And the process takes time. It has to be worked, day in and day out.
- This is stinky, slimy, and poses a significant fire hazard in a country where most neighborhoods have virtually zero fire protection. Is saving money worth burning up your house and maybe your children? Look at the flammable slime on the floor and walls in the picture.
- You need a lot of caustic soda (lye) … Drano for example. Where does the excess of that get disposed of? Where I live, almost all houses are on septic tanks. Do you know how much lye you can let into your tank before the digestion process stops and you become very good friends with the "Poso Negro" man (Septic tank sucker-outer)?
- If you have make more than you need, what will you do with it. Can you sell fuel legally without a license, regulations, taxes, etc.?
- Motor fuel is highly taxed and regulated. Make your own and you are legally stealing from the government. (don’t bother me with your"live free or die" type arguments, I am talking here about life’s realities, not philosophy). Do they care? Will they come after you? Something to consider.
- There just is no where near enough cooking oil used to support and significant amount of production. Onesy-twosey operations like you always see in magazines are great stories … but can a town sustain 5 such operations, or 10, or 20? This a big fallacy to me, I have seen biodiesel experiments for more than 20 years now, but all the McDonalds, Jollibee’s and KFC’s in the country don’t use that much oil.
Interesting, isn’t it. especially how US media is suddenly "rediscovering" a lot of technology us "hippy types" of the ’60’s were trying to ’sell’ 50 years ago. Let me know what else you want to know about in the energy department.
Related posts:
- Saving Energy for Practical People — Part 1
- Saving Energy for Practical People — Part 2
- Saving Energy for Practical People — Part 5
- Saving Energy for Practical People — Part 4
- Saving Energy for Practical People
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September 18th, 2008 at 5:09 am
Hi Dave - nice to see you covering some of the less known alternatives. Don’t think it’s a route I’ll take but interesting none the less.
Found the part about your monthly kwh usage useful, because I didn’t really have anything to relate that to over there. How often do you run the aircon, and how many rooms?
September 19th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Hi Dave: That’s what my brother said - that biodiesel is old news - always resurface here when oil prices go up.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:36 am
@Randy C: Hi Randy. Yes it does seem hard to nail anything down regarding prices at times, doesn’t it? I’ll try to do better. I’ve addresses this in a separate post in some detail but the short answer (what, me give a short answer? *LoL*) is for the last 12 months, average monthly KWh = 377, average daily cost over last 12 months, PhP 115. 3 bedroom, 1 bath single story house, ~1,000 sq ft, 2 aircons, typically 1 or the other aircon is running 20 hours per day. Seldom are both ever on.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:58 am
@Ellen: Yep, the technology is easy, but the supply is not there and the legal and distribution issues are the hard parts. One thing I want to write more about to make clear is, “biodiesel” is too loose or ill-defined of a term.
Biodiesel from waste oil is a simple process. Slightly more complicated is making biodiesel from scratch using oil-rich plants like certain palms or … big potential … jojoba. The Philippines could actually become a hugely profitable source considering the vacant or under utilized agricultural land and the labor force, but no one is on board to ’sell’ the idea to the public.
In the Philippines every day’s media content is yet another bribery accusation or another version of the “cha cha” beat while all the money that flows in from OFW’s in Saudi just flows back out to Saudi to pay for oil. Why not just pay the OFW’s with drums of oil and let them ship those home … save a lot on all the middlemen. Hmm, we could start a “Balikbayan Barrel” company … hurry, special Christmas promo, every 6th barrel ships free ;-).
In the US nothing makes the news unless it involves off shore drilling, which is only a band aid to get the current leadership far enough along in age so that the grandchildren will have to clean up the mess. (before anyone flames me, BOTH party’s energy policy is close to non-existent … just get me to the end of my term is about as far as either thinks ..) Meanwhile the answer to both country’s energy needs lies fallow in the fields and orbits virtually unnoticed overhead each day. Sayang.
Biodiesel is certainly a very ‘real’ fuel that could be developed right now, today. We don’t need to invent low cost fusion or adapt cars to wind power or any of the other ‘maybe someday’ schemes … but biodiesel from “free” waste oil products is just too tiny a sliver of the market I think.
September 20th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Well Dave, I seem to recall giving Randy a link to a solar energy plant somewhere here in the PI, and this company also going into biodiesel or bio-something. “BIO-” is a new old catch phrase nowadays with high fuel costs. Recalled also an article in Vancouver Sun - “BIOgas from human waste” - which caught my eye because it sounded like “utot” to me.
Mindanao is big in agriculture, but with the downturn of copra, a lot of these lands were converted to bananas. Also with illegal forestry, we can’t find good wood anymore. Sayang, as you said. I actually worry now because lumber nowadays are from coconut trees (coco lumber). If this goes on, the coconut trees will disappear too! Yikes. Maybe the saving grace will be a switch to biodiesel from coco oil. My father still believes in copra (that’s how he started here). I still smile when he calls the shots on when to sell from his wheelchair - he is 94 now. BUT I read somewhere that in some countries (maybe the Philippines too) the switch of farm lands from rice to sources for biodiesel caused the short supply of rice. So, can’t really win, huh? I think I will stick to solar … just don’t tell me how they make those solar panels
September 20th, 2008 at 2:12 am
@Ellen: Bio is indeed a hard term to pin down. Years ago when I lived in Colorado Springs the city undertook a project where they laid porous plastic pipes and then built a landfu\il on top of them. After they had a pretty respectable size “Mount Trashmore” built up they covered everything with soil and built a little processing station which collected the methane gas from the decomposing trash (the active ingredient in utot as well ;-)) andfed the methane into the city operated natural gas system. It worked dandy but they abandonded it becuase nataral gas piped in from texas was cheaper than what they were producing from the trqash. How short-sighted to make decisons on the prices f the day versus what any thinking person knows is coming in the future. Natural gas prices today are 5 or 6 times what they were then and that bio gas project would be a handsome little money maker … not to mention it’s main value in protecting the environment from even more methane pollution. Sayang. If we had leadership in the US rather thna oil speculators running the country we would place large air supported domes over the hundreds of thousands of cattle feedlots that pour out thousands and thousands of tons of methane intothe atmosphere each day … animal flatulence is one of the largest contributors to global warming, yet it would be profitable to capture it rather than a net expense. You could also build very simple methane generators to capture the methane from decomposing manure. There are several Indian cities supplying their electrical needs from methane digestion … but in the US our well developed arrogance blinds us to anything developed in “third world” countries … what could _they_ possibly know?
In the Philippines there are a number of successful “utot fuel” university-sponsored experimental farms … they work and the costs to get started are well within rural village budgetary levels … this stuff is easy to find on Google … but rather than publishing data and “cheerleading’ these kinds of efforts … you’re Filipino, you _know_ how much Filipinos love getting on a team … but you also know, they have to be invited, the leadership instead spend their time looking for even more foreign loans and insuring the tax structure lets Mr. Tan sell his cancer sticks for a peso each. Think what could be done with a 10 peso a pack tax on cigarettes … not to mention the health benefits.
There is, I think, plenty land, especially there in Mindanao, to increase rice production … it’s a sin that the Philippines should be a net rice importer … the rice that’s being imported today from Vietnam was developed, and the farmers trained by the IRRI in Los Banos … all gone to waste in another country whose only skill was to seize the opportunity … talk about a “brain drain” … and in addition raise lot of oil crops. I would hesitate to bet against your tatay, but I really think one big future potential is in jojoba (Simmondsia chinensis). It’s commercially viable, doesn’t have too many finicky growing requirements and can be used for everything from diesel fuel to fine cosmetics and medicines.
Wow, better get off my soap box, I actually have actual work to do here, rather than solving the world’s problems with a just a few keystrokes
Again, thanks for you continual support and valuable insights.
September 23rd, 2008 at 8:27 pm
Eventually ALL diesel will be biodiesel. The sooner we start the better. If the Philippines could make biodiesel from local resources that would be a big win compared to shipping pesos to Saudi Arabia for ever more expensive petroleum.
Another big win for the Philippines would be “net metering”. If customers of Meralco could put up a few solar photovoltaic panels on their roofs and feed the power into the grid when they weren’t using it, everybody would benefit. The customers would reduce their monthly power bills and everybody else gets access to clean power through the grid.
Solar panels are manufactured in the Philippines and nearly all are exported. What a shame! Without net metering, putting solar panels on your roof is impractical and ultra expensive. With net metering, there could be a local market for those panels and the factory could increase production and create more jobs.
September 24th, 2008 at 1:18 am
@pogidaga: Thanks so much for visiting and for your valauble comments. Depending on how you define ‘bio diesel’, all diesel engines today _are_ bio diesel compatible. It’s not the engines that need changing, it’s the source of the fuel. Since the US drives this market, and since the US government is virtually owned by Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations, good luck on getting national exposure and leadership to go against the Mobils, Shells and Totals of the world.
The ‘Net metering you are talking about is a proven technology that will easily pay for itself. But don’t look for it happening here any time soon. Meralco is ahugely profitable privately owned cash cow and the government regulators are ineffective, at best, in trying to guide any movements in the public interest. I wrote afew months back about the absurdity of the government inviting bidding for a new coal-fired power plant to increase capacity for Cebu … when Cebu today is largely supplied buy zero fuel, zero emissions geothermal energy (even better than solar, BTW) from one of the world’s most advanced geothermal plants on Leyte. This is so ludicrous it’s sinful, and even when the Philippines hits it right, as they have with the Leyte plant, they drag themselves down with the ‘woe is us, we’re just third world’ mindset.
Yep the Philippines is a center for low cost, high efficiency panels. The Chinese buy them because they see the future, Filipinos won’t buy them becuase they see only the past.