Escalating fuel prices…a growing dependence on foreign oil…saving our environment from harmful emissions. These are very real concerns that demand very immediate solutions. But so often we sit powerless as the oil companies and the government wrestle over the solutions. But what if one of the solutions existed right around the corner. What if converting common cooking oil from your neighborhood diner or fast food restaurant into useable, high-quality diesel fuel was as easy as mowing your lawn, changing your oil or detailing your pick-up truck. The answer is that it can be, it should be, and it is.
Today you can make quality biodiesel in your home for as little as $0.70/gallon. If you own a diesel vehicle and buy 50 gallons or more each month at current prices, that would result in annual savings of more than $1,400 a year. If you drive more than that or own a small fleet of diesel vehicles you could be saving thousands. All in the comfort of your garage, shed or shop. Making your own biodiesel is now fast, easy and safe.
What is Biodiesel?
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. Glycerol will represent about 12%-15% of the total mix volume. Industry Overview
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.
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.
In Europe, where there is a thriving biodiesel industry, the fuel is made from rapeseed oil, which is produced from a plant that is in the mustard and turnip families. The European variety of rapeseed is not grown in the United States due to the climate it needs to thrive, however the canola variety of this plant is grown in some parts of the country.
The market for diesel/distillate fuels is growing at a rate faster than other fuel segments (EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2006, referenced above). The impetus to switch to a renewable replacement to meet a portion of this demand is influenced by many factors such as concerns about U.S. energy security, consumer awareness of environmental and economic issues, and other regulations/mandates that promote use.
According to the National Biodiesel Board, production of biodiesel increased approximately 36 times between 2001 and 2006.. Biodiesel is increasingly being offered at retail locations, with stations prevalent in the Midwest, Northeast, Southwest and Northwest. Some of the biodiesel pumps are located at conventional gas stations, while others are located at marinas and at agricultural locations. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s premier laboratory for renewable energy research and development, estimates that biodiesel could one day replace 10 percent of the petroleum diesel currently used.