A Manitoba family with a background in marine diesel mechanics is helping bring biodiesel production a step closer to reality for the average farmer.
Celtic Power and Machining Ltd. of Rapid City has developed a portable biodiesel production system expected to sell for around $300,000.
“We’re building it geared towards the ag community,” said Gavin Reynolds, who handles the hands-on side of the business.
“If a farm, group or co-op is interested, they’ll be able to pick the modules they want, set them down on a skid, connect it up and go.”
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Before moving to Canada three years ago, the Reynolds operated a shipyard in Wales that employed 55 people. Gavin’s father Brian covers the office work while his mother Eileen does the accounting.
Although not designed to ride on the back of a flatbed truck due to electrical power load requirements, the skid-mounted unit, which includes large mixing tanks, a centrifuge, pumps and a screw press for crushing oilseed into oil, could be moved without much difficulty.
“The advantage is that there’s no need for a dedicated site. If in five years, the co-op disbands or they decide they don’t want to do biodiesel anymore, they can disconnect it and sell it. It’s not a tied-down asset.”
Production will start this summer once the company’s 24 x 15 metre workshop has been built.
Gavin Reynolds said Celtic Power has received more than a dozen written expressions of interest from potential buyers of the units, which can produce two 5,000 litre batches of biodiesel per day.
“We’ve specifically not taken orders because we didn’t want the pressure. We’ve had people arriving with cheque books, trying to make a down payment to make sure that they get one,” Reynolds said.
“But Canada’s just one market; there’s Europe and the U.S. We’ve even had the government of Pakistan wanting us to go there and put in a small unit.”
Operators will feed an oilseed, such as canola, into the unit’s crusher and collect pure biodiesel at the other end, along with the byproducts glycerin and leftover oilseed meal. The bare unit, without a screw press, will sell for around $260,000.
“We’re aiming towards keeping it as user-friendly as possible,” Reynolds said.
Celtic Power is building a biodiesel unit for the city of Brandon that could fit into a 16 metre shipping container. The self-contained unit will run on recycled deep-fryer fat from city restaurants and contains a small laboratory, processor and a storage anteroom. It is to be delivered by March.
Dietrich Schellenberg, an instructor for Assiniboine Community College’s ag equipment technician course, said dynamometer tests of Celtic Power’s B100, or pure biodiesel, showed only a marginal reduction in horsepower and torque levels on par with regular diesel. Exhaust analyzer tests showed higher nitrous oxide levels, but significantly less soot. The biodiesel rated a three on a zero-to-nine scale in which nine is the smokiest.
“With our Cummins at full load on regular fuel, it goes off the scale, probably a 10 or 11,” Schellenberg said. “But with biodiesel, the fumes smell like french fries.”
Making biodiesel from virgin oil is much simpler than from junk-filled recycled fryer fat leftovers, Reynolds said. The seeds are crushed, yielding about 39 percent oil by weight. Then the oil is cleaned of gummy material and tested for free-fatty acid content. From there, a certain amount of catalyst and reactant is added to “crack” the oil into biodiesel and glycerin. Methanol is generally used as the catalyst, at about 18 to 20 percent of total volume, along with 4.4 grams per litre of potassium hydroxide, which is the reactant.
“Yield is about 15 percent glycerin, with the remainder biodiesel. A significant chunk of the methanol used can be recycled back and used again,” he said.
Glycerin prices will likely plunge once biodiesel production becomes more commonplace. It is now a marketable commodity with uses in the food, medical and industrial sectors, but Reynolds said new uses will have to be found for the liquid, which is essentially a coarse sugar.
Recently awarded a $112,500 grant under the federal-provincial Agri-food Research and Development Initiative, Celtic Power is also exploring the potential of adding glycerin to anaerobic biogas digesters, which convert manure into methane gas for generating heat or electricity.
An experiment using a stainless steel tank containing 400 gallons of liquid hog manure produced gas that could run a large dual-fuel diesel generator converted to 96 percent biogas, which is mostly methane.
“We know that glycerin acts as a fuel for the microbes, offering faster, more complete digestion. It appears to be improving the quality of the gas coming out of the digester.”
Other projects include generating electricity from the gasification of wood chips at a lumberyard. In a project with a gasifier in La Salle, Man., a large dual-fuel converted diesel generator produced 150 kilowatts and burned less than two gallons of diesel in a day. To put it into perspective, a typical Canadian household produces a 10 kw load.
“Biodiesel is only a small part of what we are doing,” Reynolds said.
“We’re interested in seeing how much energy can be recovered from waste, basically.”
The Manitoba government’s biodiesel and ethanol office has been helpful, he said, but Manitoba Hydro doesn’t offer much support for small-scale operators wanting to sell power to the grid.
“They’ll give you significant support to take a load off the grid so that they can sell more to the U.S.,” he said. “But the grid in Manitoba is not really set up to receive loads.”
