Biodiesel

Making your own biodiesel is now fast, easy and safe.

Biodiesel is known by the chemical name “Fatty-Acid Methyl Ester”. This fancy name just means that it’s a simple molecule made from vegetable oil. It is a fuel with high-energy content and proper viscosity to operate reliably in all diesel vehicles and equipment.

Because it’s made from a naturally-grown crop it is basically solar energy in liquid form!

The chemical reaction to make biodiesel is fairly straight forward.

Vegetable oil is a ‘triglyceride’ which means three hydrocarbon chains all attached to the same glycerol molecule. It takes a certain amount of catalyst (in our case, lye) to break off these hydrocarbon chains. In the case of used cooking oils, we must add yet more lye to the reaction to neutralize the “free fatty acids” that have been formed in waste oil. This catalyst is dissolved into methyl alcohol (methanol) with a volume representing 20% of the oil we want to convert.

This ‘premix’ is then blended vigorously with the oil to allow complete conversion of the oil. The blending allows the catalyst to break off each hydrocarbon chain, one by one, and bond with a floating methanol molecule to form biodiesel. The stripped glycerol molecules fall to the bottom of the reaction tank where they are removed.

Biodiesel is produced by chemically modifying renewable, biologically based (biomass) oil or fats by reacting them with methanol+catalyst and then separating/purifying the reaction products. This reaction also produces glycerol and fatty acids as co-products. Biodiesel can be used to displace petroleum-based fuel in diesel engines, which account for approximately 22% of the fuel consumed in the transportation sector (EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2006 – available: http://www.doe.eia.gov/aeo2006/). It can be also be used in other combustion equipment (e.g., boilers and heaters) as a replacement for petroleum distillate oil fuels. The current conventional feedstock sources for producing biodiesel are oil crops (e.g., soybean, canola), waste vegetable oils from restaurants and other food processing plants, or animal fats. Proposed unconventional (not yet commercially available) feedstock sources include oil extracted from wastewater, sludge, algae, and corn oil from ethanol processing.

Many oils can be used in the production of biodiesel

In the United States, biodiesel is made primarily from soybean oil and secondarily from a product called yellow grease, which is essentially used restaurant cooking oil. It can also be made from tallow, a hard fat that comes from cattle or sheep, which is frequently used to make soap and other products.

You don’t have to be a plumber, mechanic, or chemist to make your own biodiesel.

Systems are available as a complete system engineered with quality materials to produce quality biodiesel. Many are small enough to fit comfortably in the corner of a garage.

Biodiesel can power any diesel engine. There is no conversion necessary.