Lots of space in the plant building

This week, with a sizable amount of teamwork, we extracted the other two 6400 gallon tanks from the tank farm building to make room for the biodiesel equipment from Piedmont Biofuels. It is amazing what you can accomplish with a forklift and some folks with ingenuity. Many thanks to Adam, Nick and Takuro for all the guidance and help in the process of extracting the tanks. Here are some pictures from the process.

This was the first tank we removed this week and placed it in front of an old guard house.

... and here you can see the spot it occupied for many years. In its place will be some catwalk and equipment for "finishing" the biodiesel fuel. There is a lot of space in there now!

Today, we removed another tank to make room for the used fryer oil containers. You can see below some pictures during that extraction. Here is the tank being pulled through the 12x12 door. Nick manages STARworks Glass Studio and maneuvered the forklift and tank. Takuro and Adam helped out considerably in the process, but I didn't get a chance to catch a picture of them as we were prepping the tank and doing some fluid extraction earlier in the day.

I should have some pictures of equipment installation in a couple weeks. Nancy Gottovi, Central Park NC's Executive Director, and I spoke with Shane Reese at the Biofuels Center of NC today for a podcast on our project. BCNC provided significant funding for our project and many others around the state, working towards the goal of replacing 10% of the liquid fuels we purchase in this state with biofuels made here in North Carolina by 2017. We will be posting a link to the interview in a couple weeks here and on our website at http://www.starworksnc.org/biofuels .