Making Biodiesel: An Adventure Itself

Early June

My first batch of bio-diesel from waste oil was really interesting but dangerous. I took some oil from Samurai Sushi in Whistler and I went with my friend Shawn in the day lot parking to experiment the humidity factor.
When we weighted the amount of lye we needed in a liter of oil we have to be quick because the humidity make the lye stick together and it burns the plastic container that we put it in. I was surprise about it cause I taught the lye get hot only when it’s mixed with the methanol. So before I have time to mix both together the police show up to ask me a bunch of question about what I am cooking and because of the time I took to explain my project, my lye started taking the humidity and stick together so I had to wait and do other batch. But when I started to weight the other batch we realized that at the first time we had way too much lye for the methanol and if we had mixed both together I might have exploded! I was really lucky in my bad luck.

Kate

Note: This post is part of Hilltrip.com’s Carbon Offset Program, which helped Kathleen Marcotte convert her car to run on biodiesel to travel south of Whistler and than back to Quebec. While traveling Kate wrote stories about her biodiesel experience and they are now available here on TerraTrip.org’s blog for everyone to read.