Anyone ordered methanol recently? Even my cheap distributor now wants 330$ for a barrel of the stuff. Holy cow.. that just about doubled since november.
Natural gas prices look like theyve risen but not that much.
Anyone in the petro industry care to offer a theory?
Maybe well be lucky and it will drop again in a month or two. In the meantime I guess Im running #2 until it gets warm enough to run SVO.

 

Pure speculation, but now that MTBE is no longer in use maybe methanol production has gone down enough that it demands more of a premium as a specialty item?

 

I just ordered a barrel at $348. This time last year it was $220. Sucks... but using it at 17%, it's still less than 1/3 the price of #2.
I spoke to a rep at Downs Fuel in Corona, she said the commercial biodiesel producers are using about as much as the factories can make.

 

those dang biodiesel feinds

 

The high cost of methanol must be why they are doing research in to using Alcohol to make Bio.

 

yeah, you can use ethanol and an acid process, but its not good for most home brewers. its more critical to get the water out of the oil and alcohol before you react.
In my case I made a 55gal batch with my normal base process and it reacted great. I washed it clean and left it in a barrel for two weeks and did a heat / spray in the barrel.
just for grins I put it back in the water heater and heated it to 160 and ran compressed air up through the methoxide feed on my reactor. I retrieved a full glass of water and a half-glass when i did it again last night!
Very difficult to get the water out. I did purchase a hydrometer like the brewers use just in case I move to an acid process though
good results with this drying method. better than spraying or mist spraying for me. and it works good at containing the oil mist that develops from a mist process.
Oh yeah.. I also priced ethanol and the prices are all out in space.
looks like its WVO for me. bio has its place but its not going to be cost effective.

 

Meth is up because they don't have the processing plants for it. Plus everyone wants it to make biodiesel out of. Supply and demand.

 

yeah.. i think the problem is the majority is made from natural gas (water gas) and coke methods. So heating drives prices up in the off-season.
No biggie for me since Im finding even WVO gels less easily than bio. I had a plugged filter at 20% bio but the WVO tanks were ok and I had to use them for a couple days while I got sorted out.