Von Wedel Discusses Biodiesel Fuel Quality Issues at California Show

by Erin Voegele (Biodiesel Magazine) Although the biodiesel industry is maturing, fuel quality is still a central issue. Randall von Wedel, principal biochemist with BioSolar Group and CytoCulture International Inc., closed the California Biodiesel & Renewable Diesel Conference in San Francisco with a discussion of fuel quality and its importance to expanding use of the fuel by fleets.

Von Wedel spoke about a negative experience he had several years ago where poor quality biodiesel resulted in the loss of nearly half a dozen trucks that were part of the Berkeley, Calif., fleet. That experience, along with personal experiences he had with subpar fuel, led von Wedel to develop a simple tool he describes as a visual firewall to help fleet managers identify low quality biodiesel. That led to the idea to develop a simple testing program, that when combined with the visual testing mechanism, would allow fleets to better monitor their fuel.

...Over the past seven years, von Wedel has compiled nearly 200 fuel quality reports, and a full 25 percent of them have failures. “About have of the failures turned out to be oxidation,” he said, which is a generally relatively easy problem to correct with antioxidants. “The good news is about half of the problems have been solved by diligence and by using additives,” he added. The remainder of the quality issues was generally the result of problems made at the plant level. READ MORE