01/23/09 Imporving Efficiencies

Improving Efficiencies. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. The Harvesting Clean Energy Conference gets underway this Sunday in Billings, Montana and promises to have a wealth of information regarding biotechnologies. One of the many topics will be a discussion on improving efficiencies. Rudy Pruszko is with Northeast Iowa Community College and will address some of that topic. PRUSZKO: Production efficiencies and some of the ways you can improve the efficiencies of a biodiesel plant, especially on a small scale. Some of the advantages of small scale production in today's climate. He defines small scale as anyone who wants to produce anything from 500 to 2 million gallons a year. And of course there are challenges to be met with that kind of small scale production. PRUSZKO: Some of the challenges  one of the important ones is to do it safely and also to meet all the requirements for the fuel so that you are making quality fuel that's going to run correctly in the engine. Now obviously if it's for your own use the problems that you might incur due to having out of spec fuel, you are going to incur them yourself but when you start selling it or using it for commercial purposes it definitely has to meet ASTM quality. Pruszko talks about differences in small and larger operations. PRUSZKO: One of the efficiencies is cost. Obviously a smaller plant tends to cost less than the larger plants because you are sacrificing time for equipment. For example you are going to use less piece of equipment but you are going to have to wash them out between processes and you're going to have to run them for longer periods of time. Also you have the ability to pick and choose feedstocks and take advantages of some lower cost feedstocks that may come along. But how realistic is it for someone to produce small batches of fuel in something like a garage or small business? PRUSZKO: It is a viable method. Of course most of the cost of making biodiesel is the feedstock cost and so when feedstock costs go skyrocketing up in price, it obviously raises the price the biodiesel costs to make and therefore sell and if petroleum diesel is low enough in price there's a disincentive to buy biodiesel other than the environmental impacts. For additional information on clean energy and this weekends Harvesting Clean Energy conference, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.