Next Generation Biodiesel Production
Biodiesel refers to vegetable oil or animal fat based diesel fuel that is generally produced through reacting a lipid (an oil) with an alcohol generally in the presence of a catalyst. Biodiesel is meant to be used in standard diesel engines and it is distinctly different in chemical characteristics from oils used in its manufacture. It can be used alone or can be blended with petrodiesel.
Biodiesel has much better lubricating properties and cetane ratings than today’s lower sulfur petrodiesels. There is growing evidence that biodiesel usage does indeed reduce fuel system wear be it in the form of fuel injectors or pump injectors. Biodiesel has virtually no sulfur content and it is an excellent alternative to low sulfur petroleum diesel products. However all comparisons are not favorable for biodiesel with respect to petrodiesel such as the energy content (calorific value) which is on average ten percent lower. However there are unproven claims that biodiesel burns more completely, thereby improving energy conversion rate of diesel engines.
Alternate production methods that use less expensive feedstocks, such as waste vegetable oil and low grade poultry fat, have been explored. These studies have led to consideration of: i) a two-step process of hydrolysis followed by esterification with an acid catalyst; and ii) a similar two-step process under supercritical (i.e. high temperature, high pressure) conditions without catalyst. It is possible to use feedstocks that are high in FFA content with these alternate production methods without the interference of soap formation as the first hydrolysis step separates glycerin from the feedstock. Studies have compared alkali-catalyzed transesterification to acid-catalyzed processes. These studies found acid-catalyzed esterification to be slower than alkali-catalyzed processes. This is mainly a function of the acid-catalyzed process generating water which impedes forward progress of the reaction and hence requires separation.
Biodiesel is commonly produced by the transesterification of the vegetable oil or animal fat feedstock. There are several methods for carrying out this transesterification reaction including the common batch process, supercritical processes, ultrasonic methods, and even microwave methods. However commercially viable methods at this time are limited to the batch process and ultrasonic cavitations. There are four major steps in biodiesel production:
- Feedstock Pretreatment: Depending on the feedstock being used it will include filtration (waste vegetable oils) and water removal.
- Treatment of Fatty Acids: Base catalyzed alcoholysis reaction cannot convert free fatty acids (FFA) into mono-alkyl esters (true chemical name of biodiesel) hence a pre-treatment of the feedstock in order to either esterify FFA into biodiesel or neutralize or to bound glycerol is a crucial step.
- Alcoholysis Reaction: Catalytic alcoholysis is performed using a strong base catalyst (NaOH or KOH mostly) with a simple alcohol (methanol mostly).
- Product Purification: Products of the reaction include not only biodiesel but also glycerol, excess catalyst, soap and trace amounts of water that must be removed.
Overall reaction rate of base-catalyzed alcoholysis of lipids to biodiesel conversion is very slow and it takes on average between an hour to eight hours of reaction time and on average two to twelve hours of settling time for by-product separation. These long reaction times virtually precluded a truly continuous production system without massive storage tanks.
Quantum Ingenuity's Biodiesel Production Technology
Quantum Ingenuity identified a new family of heterogeneous catalyst when added during biodiesel production cycle improve the speed of biodiesel production from hours to minutes and virtually eliminating by-product settling time by causing reaction to auto-separate. We also achieved a system that can simultaneously esterify and transesterify lipids to FAME biodiesel.
Our invention is the only true continuous biodiesel production system in the world and it achieves these goals through the addition of our proprietary catalyst that speed up the alcoholysis process by at least two orders of magnitude.
Simultaneous esterification and transesterification allows us to use any feedstock that batch or ultrasonic processes can use and it reduces the importance of pre-treatment of high FFA content oils. This yields very significant economic benefits in terms of much reduced CAPEX (due to reduced waiting tanks and piping) as well as reduced OPEX (due to reduced reaction times and energy requirement). It is our opinion that with the novel heterogenenous catalyst family we identified as part of our invention will make our production system de-facto biodiesel production method in the world.