Soon I will be in a position to receive 750 Gallons of oil per day to turn into BD. What method should I use to remove excess methanol from the BD to meet standards?

Taking into account I have a limited budget of say $2000us dollars for this stage.

Washing with water will remove the excess methanol.

One water wash using about 40% by volume of water to volume of biodiesel to be washed should do nicely.

washing with water will work, but then you will have water to remove. heating to 180-220 dag F. while air bubbling you can remove any methanol and water and collect it thru a condensor. any residual soaps or impurities should not be held in solution with no methanol in your BD, and can be settled and/or filtered out, leaving you very clean and dry fuei.

I think water washing is out of the question due to the time factor of processing 750 Gallons BD in an 8 hour period.

I think a flash evaporator might work!?
Now, if this is the case, how do I make one big enough for this job?

How many days/week will you be able to collect 750 gallons of oil?
This sounds like a very tall order for a $2000 budget.
DD

You should get the oil and resell it for a few weeks if not months, take the money you earn from the oil and start looking for some serious equipment. For that quantity $2,000 is not gonna come close.

Andy,

I don't mean to be a pessimist but is it possible to produce totally clean and dry biodiesel in an 8 hour time period? On a $2,000 budget?? Safely and lawfully???

I can't imagine how long it would take to heat a 750 gallon batch. By some people's measure, this would be considered a commercial-sized operation. The scale of such an operation would have to be LARGE. I would think that this operation would have to be professionally engineered and designed. If you live anywhere near civilization, you will need authorization from local municipalities because of the MASSIVE amounts of hazardous chemicals and waste involved.

The math:
There's 260 working days a year with 10% downtime = 234 days per year of productivity. 750 gallons a day x 234 = 175,500 gallons per year. That means that you will need 38,610 gallons of methanol per year. That's 3,200 gallons per month. At even a reduced rate of $3.00 per gallon, that's almost $10,000 a month in methanol alone. Last time I purchased methanol, it was $4.00/gallon. You still have to purchase LYE and electricity.

A $2,000 budget sounds a bit under-capitalized to me. Maybe you've got investors or pre-existing equipment that I don't know about.

Other large-scale oil recyclers are having enough trouble separating the water and trash from the oil.

Sounds fun though. I wish I had big bucks to build a facility like that!

Vaccuum pump and condensor to remove methanol from bio. Also means you don't have to heat it up quite as much.

Although you need the proper vessel to handle the vaccuum and equipment.

I think $2000 is not enough budget to do it properly.