Biodiesel is environmentally-friendly and renewable fuel that can be produced from waste greases and oils from municipalities, restaurants and industry.
Biodiesel plant produces environmentally-friendly and profitable biodiesel from animal and vegetable fats and waste oils. Biodiesel can be used blended with normal diesel as transport fuel. Biodiesel can also be used as heating oil or fuel for generators. The end products of the production process are biodiesel and valuable glycerol that is utilized in the chemical industry. When biodiesel is made from grease instead of virgin raw materials, it has significant environmental benefits.
Suitable raw materials for a biodiesel plant include:
As the cost of biodiesel production is low and the demand for end products is high, the payback period of a biodiesel plant investment is typically short, usually 2-4 years. The plants are factory-built, so they are quick to install and start using. The minimum processing capacity for a profitable biodiesel project is typically 20 tons of feedstock per day. The capacity of a biodiesel plant can be scaled up.
Biovoima’s primary partner in biodiesel technologies is a US based company Renewable Energy Solutions (RPS), which has built over 20 reference biodiesel plants. The technologies developed and patented by RPS allow for the profitable utilization of challenging raw materials, which is usually a difficulty in traditional biodiesel production processes.
RPS has developed a unique hybrid biodiesel plant that combines traditional biodiesel production technology with a new-generation patented supercritical process. This provides significant benefits in situations where the aim is to deal with reasonably challenging feedstocks with a free fatty acid (FFA) content between 0 and 20 %. The hybrid process enables the separation and conversion of free fatty acids into biodiesel (methyl esters) in a supercritical process, whereby only good quality fats are introduced into the conventional catalyst process. In this case, there is no need to worry about the disadvantages of free fatty acids that disrupt the catalyst process, but on the contrary, they significantly increase the yield of biodiesel.
As part of the hybrid process, the supercritical biodiesel process is an excellent alternative when the levels of free fatty acids (FFA) are higher than 20%. The process requires no acid or base catalyst, but the reaction with methanol takes place at high pressure / temperature, breaking the chemical bonds of the fatty acids and reacting with methanol. The end products are clean and require little post-treatment, making it an outstanding technology.
RPS has built two of the world’s largest supercritical biodiesel production plants and owns technology-related patents.