Biodiesel Production from Entirely Renewable Feedstocks

G. MENDOW; C.A. QUERINI; B. S. SÁNCHEZ

Kazan

Congreso; XII European Congress on Catalysis; 2015

Russian Catalysis Society

Typically, biodiesel is produced using vegetable oil and methanol as raw materials, and sodium methoxide as catalyst, whereupon the obtained product is composed of methyl esters. However, the use of ethyl esters as biodiesel presents many advantages compared to the methyl esters, specially taking into account the renewability of the raw materials employed to their production. In this work, the transesterification with ethanol to produce ethyl esters using sodium ethoxide as catalyst was studied. It was observed that methanolysis reactions are faster than the ethanolysis and sodium methoxide catalyst is more active than the corresponding ethoxide, due to the higher steric hindrance of the ethoxi-radical and to the more intense saponification of sodium ethoxide in ethanol medium.