Biodiesel Production Using Supercritical Methanol

The majority of all the energy generated worldwide comes from fossil fuel sources. These sources are limited and are shortly shortly. Depletion of these fossil resources has led to the search for alternative fuels from renewable resources such as plant biomass. Vegetable oil is one such renewable resource. Vegetable oil has attracted much attention in recent years because it has many environmental advantages and can be obtained from renewable resources. The energy of vegetable oil can be decomposed by converting it to biodiesel.

Biodiesel is produced by reacting vegetable oil (such as soybean, oil palm oil, algal derived oil etc.) and fat such as fat with alcohol such as methanol. The reaction products are biodiesel and glycerin. The chemical structure of biodiesel is different from the chemical structure of petroleum diesel in that oxygen is contained in biodiesel. This is a way that biodiesel can be a substitute for fractions, not a direct substitute like ethanol or gasoline. Biodiesel is the second largest biofuel in the world. World production in 2010 was 5 billion gallons. Major producers include Germany, France, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States of America. Because the technical barriers to biodiesel production are so low, many companies are engaged in biodiesel production and amateurs producing biodiesel in the garage are so.

"Green diesel" manufactured by hydroprocessing technology uses the same raw materials as biodiesel production. They do not react with hydrogen and feedstock, not methanol. The product of this reaction is hydrocarbons in the diesel range (green diesel) and propane (compared to glycerol as biodiesel by-product). The technical barriers to hydrotreated green diesel are higher than biodiesel, so participants will be fewer. The world leader may be Neste Oil in Finland. They began developing NExBTL technology in 2002 and in May 2007 started using 50,000 gallons of renewable diesel power station with vegetable oil and animal fat ingredients. In November 2010 Neste Oil asked Singapore the world's largest renewable diesel refinery (the world's largest renewable fuel plant to the best of my knowledge). The raw material of the plant is palm oil, and the annual production amount is 245 million gallons.