Techno-economical Aspects of Biodiesel Production Alternatives

J.M. MARCHETTI; V.U. MIGUEL; A.F. ERRAZU

St. Louis, USA

Congreso; 97th AOCS Annual Meeting; 2006

AOCS

Biodiesel is becoming the newest attraction to substitute the diesel fuel due to its environmental advantages and because it is produced from a renewable source such as a vegetable oils or animal fats. High production cost remains as the main problem to market penetration for biodiesel in blends or as a neat fuel. More than 60% of the production cost is associated with the raw material used on this process and therefore efforts are involved in developing new technologies that employ used frying oils or waste acid oils of lower price, as feedstock. These raw materials have the inconvenient that high amounts of free fatty acid are found in them. Normal homogeneous basic catalyst are not suitable for a raw material with high percentage of free fatty acids because undesired reactions could take place and it will be more difficult the dowstreaming separation and purification of the Biodiesel. Homogeneous acidic catalysts are being used for processing high free fatty acid feedstocks, but it has the same inconvenient for the down streaming purification. Consequently, a lot of research is being done in order to use heterogeneous catalyst, such solid resins or immobilized lipases. This work addresses a conceptual design, a techno-economic analysis and comparison of these technological alternatives.A process simulator was used to propose, design and simulate the processes. With these models, we were able to analyze differents sceneries to evaluate productivity, energy consumption and economic competitiveness of each productive process