Best source of WVO?

[stephen]

loads of little frots running around...lol.

Stephen

[Chug]

I've had a reply about yields

From rapeseed you will get 320 litres per ton cold pressing, 360 or so hot
pressing (heat the seed before it enters the press) BUT rapeseed is
currently well over 300 quid per ton ...... that's a quid a litre for the
oil in the seed before pressing it.  However you can get some cash for the
cake, 200 ish per ton (say 700kg for every ton of seed pressed)


peace n grease
Chug

PS I've just asked him about yield per acre too.

UPDATE:
For good land 2.5 tons/acre would be a good harvest, far less on marginal
land more like 1.5 tons/acre

[KenB]

Chug, List,

Perhaps we should look at WVO as a transitional fuel.

Such is the demand for rapeseed oil now in the UK, that many of the biodiesel/SVO forums are reporting that the supermarket shelves are often empty, and any new deliveries, of particularly the 3 litre bottles, are snapped up very quickly.

There is only so much rapeseed oil consumed in the catering trades, and with new oil becoming expensive, the biodiesel producers will be looking to use a higher fraction of waste oil - so that too is becoming scarce.

In my humble opinion, the sensible way to proceed is to use a fuel that very few others are able to use - namely wood chips and tree surgery waste, first gasified and then used in a Lister converted to spark ignition.

Wood gas needs to be filtered and cleaned to remove the tars first, but one possibility is to consume the tars to provide home heating, leaving the charcoal, which can then be used to make engine quality, tar free gas.

Woodchips can also be used for heating - here's an interesting DIY heating stove that has been researched in Vermont, capable of clean burning a wide variety of less than ideal wood wastes.

http://www.sredmond.com/vthr_index.htm




Ken

[renewablejohn]

Ken

I wish you would not tell everybody about the benefits of woodchip otherwise my price will start to go up.

If only you could harvest the resin of pine trees and turn it into oil using a similar method to rubber trees into latex.

[Ivan]

Ken,

Don't convert your lister to spark ignition, you'll then need to put in a throttle body, and you'll lose a lot of efficiency. You're better off retaining a small amount of compression-ignited fuel (20%) so that you can carry on using the diesel cycle efficiency.


Ivan

[Ivan]

Chug,

Interesting data. It might actually be economically viable to press your own rape seed. I know DIYers do it in Germany. One of the problems encountered is that the veg oil has quite a bit of water in it, so this needs to be removed before use (assuming it's intended for SVO use).

Any idea of the energy cost in terms of litres of fuel per acre? There's a fair bit of conflicting advice here - it would be good to work out how many litres of fuel (in terms of red diesel, fertiliser production, electricity in cold-pressing etc) is required in terms of a percentage of overall fuel produced. ie to work out how much of the benefit is sustainable, and how much is simply a tax advantage

Ivan

[northern installer]

Not many ideas on my suggestion of using tallow,are you all vegetarians?

[Ivan]

It's a good idea - I think it has been used quite a bit in the past. Problem is the relatively high melt point.

Another interesting idea is fish oil. Can be obtained cheaply from fish waste eg salmon heads. (What do you think? Cold Press or Hot Press?!)

[Chug]

were having a similar discussion on another forum and folks are asking this same question about how much fuel is used to plant, fertilise, harvest and then extract the oil but nobody has come up witht he figures as yet.

peace n grease
Chug

[renewablejohn]

Chug

It very much depends on what size tractors you use.My little 20 hp Jinma flat out uses about 5 litres per day.To rotavate 1 acre ready for planting would take 2 hours. planting half an hour.fertilizer half an hour.swathing 1 hour. thrashing 2 hours, pressing 1 hour. Total 7 hours so I reckon you could easily do 1 acre of rape on 5 litres of diesel. Problem with farmers is that they like there big tractors so do not use the most fuel efficient size tractor for the job.

[Ivan]

Good point, RenewableJohn. Farmers these days are persuaded to buy bigger and better tractors. Most wealthy farmers (is there such a thing?) are using 150 - 250hp tractors with aircon ec- that can't help the overall efficiency

[renewablejohn]

Ivan

Most farm machinery purchases including tractors are a tax avoidance vehicle not dependent on how profitable the farm is but dependent on how greedy the finance company is.

[Ian]

Over the last few days I have been working with a guy who has an interesting approach to obtaining WVO (thank you Martin, for the lead).

Whilst I have been whining and complaining about the shortage of WVO and how it is going to get worse, he has approached it from an entirely different angle.

Most pubs, restaurants and canteens have their oil delivered by a wholesaler or distributor. One would assume that there would be a reasonable markup on these delivered items in order to pay for the delivery. Well, he had the idea that he would become the local low price oil delivery company.

He buys oil from Macro (£15.40 for up to 9 drums this week, more than 9 drums and the cost goes up) or whoever is cheapest at the time and then delivers the oil to the end user. He charges about £0.50 per drum more than it cost him to buy. At the same time, he picks up the waste oil. He later bales the empty drums and sells them for scrap.

It is a condition of sale of new oil that he picks up all the old oil. He has cornered the market.

Currently he has about 200 litres of WVO per day but he reckons that he can ramp this up to 2 or 3 times this figure without blinking an eyelid. For the moment, he has all he needs.

He uses the oil to produce electricity that he sells to NPower. He has a cracking deal with them. He receives 12p per unit of exported power and he keeps the ROCs!. He has also negotiated that he could be paid for exactly half the GENERATED power if he also consumes power in his business and exports what he does not use (even if he were to consume all of it).

Maybe this is the route that I need to take.

Regards,
Ian

[northern installer]

Good point, RenewableJohn. Farmers these days are persuaded to buy bigger and better tractors. Most wealthy farmers (is there such a thing?) are using 150 - 250hp tractors with aircon ec- that can't help the overall efficiency

with respect Ivan,have you ever driven a tractor in midsummer powering a baler? you cant open the windows unless you want to choke on the dust;aircon is essential,not a luxury ! the hp is related to the implement ,and no one in his right mind spends excess money on a tractor that is too big for the work in hand;farmers may talk funny,but we aint fecking stupid
Can the farmer bashers lay off until they know what they are talking about please?

[KenB]

Ian, Martin, List,

An interesting approach.

If he is supplying 9 drums per week (180 litres) how does he have 200 litres a day to use as fuel?  Do you mean 9 drums per day?

I suspect that even the mighty Macro will not be able to keep the price fixed at  77p/litre.

The 200 litres will produce about  450 to 600kWh selling for 12p/kWh.   So if his engine is capable of burning 200 litres a day, he will earn perhaps £60 per day (plus ROCS) from the electricity sales.

In this case the engine would have to be around 40hp and driving a 20kW alternator 24/7, or a very much larger engine running for less hours per day.

From the earnings you would have to deduct the time and fuel needed to drive around collecting from his clutch of pubs.  I presume he lives on a large property, where this sort of energy conversion activity can go on without causing a nuisance.



Ken