I recently got two totes of oil from a guy who threw in the towel, the problem is he was into blending and both totes have an unknown quantity of dino in them, he thinks it was no more than 10-15 gallons per tote, I can smell it just slightly, my question is what happens if I try to make bio out of this oil?

Fab,

I'm not sure about your question but I can tell you that I washed some dino with a small batch of bio.

I just dumped the dino into the bio and proceeded with my regular wash and dry. Seemed ok.

Wasn't a huge amount...probably about 1/4 gallon or less in 25 gallons of bio.

Do a Dr Pepper, see how it goes. Post pics.

The diesel won't convert so it will remain unchanged.
It shouldn't mix with the glyc but may mix with the bio or for a separate layer between the two until the Bio is dried.
Just to a test batch on this oil and see what happens and how it happens so you know what to look for. At worst it sounds like you might lose 10-15 gal per tote but the rest should be fine.

Thanks Guys, DCS that was basically what I was thinking.

Be afraid. Be very very afraid. You could reconstitute a dinosaur.

If you convert the oil to biodiesel the dino is liable to come out with the glycerol, and hence will be lost. I experimented with oil contaminated with waste engine oil, and thats what happened, so I wouldnt be surprised if the same thing happened with the diesel.

Possibly if you did the 5% prewash (I'd up it to 7% in this case) the diesel will come out of the glycerol.

Try this experiment: add some diesel to some de-meth'd glycerol and see if they dissolve. If they do, then you'll permanently lose diesel to the glycerol layer in processing. If the diesel floats on the glycerol, then it's recoverable. Diesel will readily dissolve into biodiesel - we know that. What isn't certain is its solubility in glycerin with, and without methanol.

I'll try this myself, if I can find some glycerin around here, and some diesel.

Cheers,
JohnO

I made a couple batches that had approx 10 gal of petrodiesel in a 40 gallon batch. I didn't get unusually more byproduct, and the finished biodiesel blend was about the volume I expected. I could smell the petro in there and everything worked out fine.

Drying the biodiesel from that batch was a bit smelly.

HTH,

troy

Thanks all, I really don't care about the dino at all, if it ends up in the glyc that's fine with me, I just didn't want to waste 500 gallons of perfectly good oil if the dino was gonna totally mess up the transestrification.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: fabricator,

i had a similar experience. Got a barrel of veg oil that turned out to have been worked up for fuel thinning along the lines of the diesel secret; the oils owner did not owned up to this till i got the barrel home.

i thought i would just add a little of the diesel, RUG, naptha, cetane mix to finished bio in a 90% bio to 10% DS mix and run it through my old VW IDI engine. As it turned out, however, there was also some waste motor oil in the mix which was reacting with something in the witches brew to form a filter plugging sludge in oil that had been pre-filtered to 1 micron.

so i made a 5 gallon batch of bio out of the DS/motor oil. It made a dark bio that had a slight RUG smell, with a glycerine layer that really smelled like naptha. Trying to water wash the bio turned out to make an impossibly thick emulsion that would only break at around 160 degrees F and then there was still a residual emulsion that was drained off and set aside for sawdust logs this winter.

So i am now using apple wood chips to dry wash a second 5 gallon batch. This seems to be working. But I think that a 27/3 test isn't going to work because of the unreacted WMO in the Bio "solution".

As far as the glycerine goes i think it will make a useful garage floor type grease cutting soap after being demethed...hope so. Might get a military multi-fuel heater to burn up the Bio solution cause i hate to waste the stuff and have no idea how to otherwise semi-responsibly dispose of the DS/oil mix...even old IDI engines have there limits on what to run them on.

So, finally the lesson of the story (sorry for the long post).

beware of fuel thinners bearing gifts