Economics and Practicalities of Installing Listeroids at Catering Pubs

[Ancient Brewer]

My company currently has approximately 800 pubs orientated towards food although with a firm footing in the beer camp too.

Typically the average pub produces 15-25 litres of waste oil providing they operate strict filtering and cascading of oils.

Following on from Mespilus's comments on the EV thread I am generally interesting in investigating this possibility as a way of generating electricity, heat, and most critically back up power for refrigeration systems. Our insurance excesses mean that in most cases refrigeration break down losses are not covered.

I am currently sitting on a working group looking at the whole issue of efficiency savings, renewables and energy security from a company perspective. Obviously if we can profitably utilise a waste product then all the better.

So for starters

How much for a new Listeroid (i believe these are Indian Imports) or equivalent installed with Grid tie and link into heating / HW system?

What pre treatment does the oil need?

Can it be operated by your average pub employee (we ain't typically talking MENSA candidates )?

From say 20 litres of waste oil what yield could we expect in terms of electricity and heat?

I am assuming these units need no specific EPA authorisation. I vaguely remember that threshold is 50KW.

Cheers

[mespilus]

I think you should tell your firm they need to
buy 2 Listeroids for proving trials.

If it doesn't work out at least we've got one each.

I do not currently run a Listeroid,
but uco to Renault Espace is:

filtering, gross, to remove obvious food particles/lumps
settling, (could easily be omitted for daily use)
heating, to split out water,

pump off, or,  gravity flow of top of settling drum contents

then through filters: 20/10/5 1 micron filters

Ready to use.

Cleaned uco best stored in full, airtight, containers to prevent
oxidation, and/or polymerisation.

If choosing oil source:
sunflower > canola >> soya >> palm/palm kernel

Reasons:
Sunflower/ canola remain liquid even after heating abuse in deep fat fryers.

Soya has a preponderance of doubly unsaturated fatty acids that make it prone to
oxidation and/or polymerisation.

Palm/palm kernel, (the current acceptable alternative to hardened vegetable oils),
is the veg equivalent of Frotters lard and will be solid at 15C, so not easily handled by your
firms' employees.

One follow on benefit for your PUBco:
no paper trail of Waste Transfer Notes, (WTN), required to show local
Environmental Health Officers that uco has been disposed  of correctly.

[Amy]

Whats the treatment and storeage for raw rape seed oil?

With the cost of dino diesel rocketing, im seriously wondering about the viability of buying a load of rape seed and milling it.

[mespilus]

Milling your own presents different problems:

edible oil goes through many processes, and then
you have to be able to prove its edible.

Remember the Spanish vegetable oil deaths a few years back?
Some idiot milled some oil seed and sold it as is/was.

Most important part for diesel substitution is 'de-gumming',
as the seeds also contain many other materials/chemicals that are expressed
by the pressure of milling, and some of those, will untreated, result in a sticky unuseable mess.

You are probably better off trying to use uco, at least it has served its principal purpose,
as a foodstuff, and better it be used as a fuel than going to landfill or blocking the drains
when illiciily disposed of, by an indentured slave, in some fast food outlet.

[Ancient Brewer]

I think you should tell your firm they need to
buy 2 Listeroids for proving trials.

If it doesn't work out at least we've got one each.

I do not currently run a Listeroid,
but uco to Renault Espace is:

filtering, gross, to remove obvious food particles/lumps
settling, (could easily be omitted for daily use)
heating, to split out water,

pump off, or,  gravity flow of top of settling drum contents

then through filters: 20/10/5 1 micron filters

Ready to use.

Cleaned uco best stored in full, airtight, containers to prevent
oxidation, and/or polymerisation.

If choosing oil source:
sunflower > canola >> soya >> palm/palm kernel

Reasons:
Sunflower/ canola remain liquid even after heating abuse in deep fat fryers.

Soya has a preponderance of doubly unsaturated fatty acids that make it prone to
oxidation and/or polymerisation.

Palm/palm kernel, (the current acceptable alternative to hardened vegetable oils),
is the veg equivalent of Frotters lard and will be solid at 15C, so not easily handled by your
firms' employees.

One follow on benefit for your PUBco:
no paper trail of Waste Transfer Notes, (WTN), required to show local
Environmental Health Officers that uco has been disposed  of correctly.

Thanks

Basically we would need an off the shelf easy to use product. Waste oil tipped in one end with an on and off button. Any more complicated and it is a non starter.

The problem is its easy enough for the collective intelligence of Navitron (Even thickeratti like me have installed solar water heating systems, PV and wood stoves) bods to see the merit in these schemes but in most cases we are talking about joe public - micro renewables have to be dead easy to operate or they are a non starter.

If I was staying in position longer and moving to a more remote location I would definitely think about a home Listeroid like Ken B's set up. However all being well next week with my medical and I'm off to sunnier climes for a few years at least where petrol is 11p a litre

[mespilus]

@ Ancient Brewer
you have a message
sent before I read your last post.

[County 4x4]

You may need to be a bit careful about the lack of CE marking on the Indian engines with this being a business purchase. I know the engines supposedly cannot be legally sold by a business in Europe due to the lack of CE marking - though you can import them yourself for personal use. The whole thing is probably a legal minefield, but I'm guessing that your insurers and so on would take a pretty dim view of you asking employees to operate non-CE marked machinery.

It's probably also fair to say that Listeroids and the like are more of a tinkerers engine that will require adjustments and fiddling with to get the best out of them - even if you go for one of the better manufacturers in India. They all use castings from the same few foundries, but the actual assembly lines range from proper factories to kids sitting in the street with hand files!

Cheers,

Andy

[KenB]

AB,

As stated elsewhere in this thread, the single cylinder Listeroid is definately a tinkerer's engine, and unlikely to be appropriate for commercialisation as a CHP engine.

However, nearly 4 years ago I received an email from the commercial director of Lister-Petter, stating that they had done some experimentation with rapeseed oil in their modern Alpha series of engines - a much better starting point for a modern turn-key genset.

You are probably unaware of it, but we are currently able to provide bio-fuel production equipment and are testing our New Alpha products (the first engines in the market to meet Tier 4 and Stage 3a emissions requirements) to see how they will run on vegetable oils (prior to any bio-treatment).

 

However, it might be a better strategy for a pub chain with over 800 outlets to organise centralised collection and processing of their waste oil (probably via some specialist subcontractor), and sell it as bio-diesel at the full market price.  16,000 litres of biodiesel per week is a considerable amount.

Scale this up over a year and you are looking at in excess of 800,000 litres of biodiesel. I'm not currently sure of the profit achievable on this quantity of biodiesel production, but it might make a reasonable offset saving on the pub chain's energy bills.  Pubs are very energy intensive, heating, beer chilling, lighting, catering, TV, games machines etc. Wetherspoons recently released a handout in their monthly magazine stating that their group of 750 pubs uses £22 million in electricity each year - roughly £30,000 per outlet per year. That's a lot of juice - about 250,000kWh per year. Unfortunately a 6hp genset producing 40kWh a week is not going to make much of a dent in that.

To answer the question regarding coversion efficiencies of oil into electricity and heat,  1 litre of WVO will make aproximately 1.8 to 2.0kWh of electricity, and roughly 6kWh of recoverable heat.


Ken

[Ancient Brewer]

Thanks Ken, 4x4, Mespilus

Clearly per pub a CHP set up is not feasible, however having given this more thought I can see a potential opportunity utilising large premises for CHP with 'satelite' pubs feeding their WVO in. My immediate concern was transport costs. I then realised that we have spare capacity on our drays so the existing distribution fleet could be used in piggy back fashion to get the WVO to the large premises 'hubs.'

We own approx 40 medium sized hotels (typically 30-40 beds) connected to a Restaurant and pub. These locations have considerable demands for both hot water and electricity 24/7 and would be the ideal location for a CHP set up - even better if it uses WVO.

 The dray deliveries to the hotels could in the space of a few weeks over lap with 30-40 other pubs in the area. This network would lend itself very well to piggy backing wvo to the hotel site using spare capacity on the dray trucks with minimaladditional labour and transport costs. The oil is normally in 15 litre containers so manual handling is not a major issue. Given the amount of time the draymen spend kicking footballs around the depots they appear to have the time

40 pubs could supply the hotel with 700-800 litres of WVO per week on average. From Kens figures that could be converted into 1600 kwh of electricity and 4800kwh of heat

This works out at 9.5kw continous Electricity and 28.5kw of heat. Obviously the hotel would still need to be grid connected so rather than run uniformly throughout the day it would be better to crank output up between 7am and 11pm and utilise Ec 7 over night when electricity and heat demand is low.

So the design spec would be something in the region of 15KW (E) 45KW (H). It would also need to be something that with some rudimentary instruction / training hotel employee pours in WVO - the unit filters it and what ever else is needed and feeds the oil into the CHP unit as required.

Ideally the unit can act as a back up generator to run refrigeration and lighting in the event of a power cut. At the figures given above I don't think grid export arrangements would be worth pursuing (unless there is some FIT scam available ) and it would be better to tailor output throughout the day to mirror demand variations.


Anyone know of any commerical products that might meet the above spec? Certainly an interesting project for an engineering bod with an interest in renewables!

[County 4x4]

Having been involved with a WVO collection company in the past, I know what a mucky job it can be - so not entirely sure that having the waste on a vehicle delivering drinks would be a great idea. The stuff really does get everywhere no matter how hard you try to be careful - and seems to have the capacity to contaminate everything within ten yards of whatever it's contained in. I had an IBC in the workshop that we used for bulk storage and after a month or two it seemed that everything in the building was 'orrible and sticky.

It seems that most things to do with WVO tend to be pretty hands on. The raw oil will need to be filtered, and heated and settled to allow water and rubbish to settle out of it. This means of course that there will be filters to keep an eye on and change, filter elements to dispose of etc and it's probably wise to have someone with the vessel all the time if oil is being heated. When we got out of the game we were about to install a purpose designed centrifuge from Simple Centrifuge in the States to process our WVO.

As far as bio production goes - any commercial operation is subject to a huge amount of regulation - even if only producing a few thousand litres. Many small and medium bio producers have got out of the market over the past couple of years as the government has put so many hurdles in their way that it's simply not worth the effort. I forget the actual figures - though they can be found on the vegetableoildiesel forum easily enough, but someone had worked out that an operation would have to be producing in excess of 10,000 litres per day (or week - I forget) to even break even. It's not a good place to be by the sounds of it.

Although my post sounds pretty negative - I personally think it's a great idea - it's just a pity our forward thinking government who want us all to go green and so on, are actually making things incredibly difficult for anyone with a half decent idea.

Andy

[billi]

My company currently has approximately 800 pubs orientated towards food although with a firm footing in the beer camp too.

Typically the average pub produces 15-25 litres of waste oil providing they operate strict filtering and cascading of oils.

In the meantime , is there a collection idea  for that waste oil ?

Billi

[Ancient Brewer]

The VO supplier takes it away. I assume they do something with it rather than landfill (i hope!) even if it is just used for space heating.

[County 4x4]

Chances are they'll be selling it on to a specialist concern who will be making biodiesel, or processing oil for re-sale to bio producers.

I was involved with a small company who originally got the ball rolling with WVO collections from local pubs and restaurants etc, and we'd "sold" the idea to them on the basis that it was small, local, green, and intended for local use for local people. We provided the collection service for free - all registered and above board, and they all seemed to thnk it was a fantastic idea and a good service. It wasn't too long though before a big firm from miles away were running a big wagon into our area and offering to pay a few pence per litre for the waste - and most of our customers saw pound signs at that point and went off with the big boys unfortunately.

This was at the height of the "bio-bubble" - whether that firm are still paying, or even collecting I couldn't say - though I did find it interesting that one local outlet we spoke to a few weeks ago had said that he was currently paying to get rid of his oil. It may be that things have come round full circle - I know that a lot of small/medium scale producers have closed up shop in the past couple of years.

Andy