http://www.concordmonitor.com/Keene-State-vegetable-fuel-oil-5178709
Granite Geek: Raw vegetable oil replaces heating oil at Keene State
By DAVID BROOKS
Monitor staff
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Keene State College has started to burn a lot of vegetables, and that’s
not a college-cafeteria joke.
The school has retooled one of the three boilers that heats the campus
so it can burn waste vegetable oil – not traditional biodiesel or
ethanol – made by a Massachusetts company using a secret process. The
school estimates the fuel will generate about 36 percent of the energy
for creating the steam that heats Keene State, replacing about 100,000
gallons of fuel oil.
KSC says it may even save money by switching from No. 6 or No. 2 heating
oil to this vegetable oil because operating cost per BTU will be about
the same, but using this waste fuel can earn some renewable energy credits.
The move also diversifies energy sources, helps the school cut its
greenhouse gas emissions and reduces some of the air pollution that
plagues Keene due to geography (it sits in a very big bowl where bad air
can collect).
There are even some really, really local pollution benefits, especially
compared with No. 6 heating oil.
“We had been receiving complains about No. 6 delivery, about the noxious
fumes. The heat plant guys talk about how much nicer this is,” said Cary
Gaunt, Keene State’s director of campus sustainability, in a recent
interview. “There’s less off-gassing, less headaches.”
The waste vegetable oil comes from a Marblehead, Mass., company called
Lifecycle Renewables, which makes it out of used cooking oil collected
from restaurants, cruise ships, hospitals and the like. Its process is
proprietary and the company declined to comment on the Keene State
contract, probably because even though it’s been around a decade, it’s
in a sort of “stealth mode” with this technology, trying to grow before
big competitors like oil companies take notice.
Turning organic material into liquid fuel carries a double benefit,
cutting waste as well as replacing fossil fuel, but it is harder to do
than it sounds. I’ve been writing about local biodiesel and cellulosic
ethanol companies for years, but the economics and/or technology has
always squashed them.
Lifecycle Renewables’ process seem to be quite different. Gaunt said she
believes it mostly involves filtration, which would be much cheaper and
simpler than the catalyst-driven process known as transesterification
that creates biodiesel fuel, or the distillation involved in turning
corn into ethanol for gasoline.
However it is made, at Keene it is acting as a “drop-in fuel,” an
industry term for a liquid fuel made from organic matter that can be
used as a replacement for liquid fossil fuels, with little or no
tweaking needed. The boiler being used had previously been changed to
burn lighter No. 2 fuel oil, a move to diversify from No. 6 fuel oil, so
the transition was easy.
“When it comes to us, it looks like a bottle of vegetable oil that you’d
buy at the store,” said Bill Rymes, the school’s plumbing and heating
supervisor.
Rymes said the school was cautious about this product because the wrong
fuel can really mess up equipment, as anybody who has mismeasured the
mixture for a two-stroke engine knows (who, me?).
“The boiler manufacturer wanted a fuel sample to be sent out to them, so
their R&D tested it, came back fine,” said Rymes.
Among other advantages, it needs to be heated to only 130 degrees when
injected into the boiler to liquefy it for atomization, compared with
210 degrees for No. 6 heating oil.
One drawback to this waste vegetable is its energy density. It contains
about 130,000 BTU (a measure of heating energy) per gallon, compared
with 152,000 BTU for No. 6 heating oil. So more volume is needed per
unit energy, adding to shipping and storage costs.
Gaunt said pricing varies but the oil’s price tends to follow the No. 6
oil market. A key financial point is that the school hopes to make as
much as $30,000 in renewable energy credits, paid as an incentive to
switch from fossil fuel.
“This is an experiment for us, with renewable energy credits. We have a
ceiling that we won’t go over,” she said. “The safe thing to say is that
it should be comparable to No. 6, plus (income from) credits.”
(By the way, the CEO of Lifecycle Renewables is also named Gaunt, but
the school says the two are not related.)
As for Rymes, he said he’s a convert. That’s not a trivial matter,
because in my experience plant managers tend to be suspicious of change
– understandably so, because they’re the ones who get yelled at and who
have to fix things if novelty goes wrong.
“I don’t see any drawbacks. It has burned without incident. Once we got
the final adjustments, it ran just fine,” he said. “We’re burning an
alternative fuel that nobody else is burning and creating less
(greenhouse) gases – that’s the most rewarding part.”
Gaunt put it a little more colorfully: “We’ve looked under the bed,
haven’t seen any dust bunnies. I think it’s the real deal.”
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