How Do You Displace the Glycerin During Biodiesel Production?

During the production process of biodiesel, you will add either a methanol or ethanol based alcohol to separate the glycerin from the oil. In order to trigger the reaction that causes the separation, lye is used as the primary catalyst to start the chemical reaction.

Where Do You Find Methanol?

When you go to buy methanol to make your homemade biodiesel, you’ll find that there are a lot of different products out there to look through. Some of these include wood alcohol, wood spirits, alcohol, methyl hydroxide, methylol, pyroxylic spirit, monohydroxymethane, hydroxymethane, colonial spirits, carbinol, stove fuel, methy hydrate, and wood naphtha to name a few. They all describe methanol. If you are in doubt, you should double check before purchasing. One of the product names, methylcarbinol, can be used to describe methanol or ethanol. Ethanol is several degrees harder to work with when making your own biodiesel. The other thing to watch, is to not substitute isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) or methylated spirits (denatured alcohol) or your biodiesel production will fail. Do not buy methanol in large quantities until you have successfully made biodiesel and have your process nailed down.

What Does Lye Do in the Biodiesel Production Process?

Lye is the catalyst that helps change the glycerin into biodiesel. When choosing what type of lye to use for your production, you can choose between potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide. Normally, you will find it a bit easier and cheaper to buy sodium hydroxide. If you decide to use potassium hydroxide, check your biodiesel instructions with many of them requiring you to use up to 1.4 times as much as with sodium hydroxide. You will also need to use isopropanol for the titration of your biodiesel. All of these ingredients can be purchased at your local drug store, craft store, and chemical suppliers.

Biodiesel Production Safety When Handing Lye

You should be safe and careful during the entire biodiesel process, but especially so when handing lye. You will need to wear eye and hand protection when handling lye as well as a respirator rated to protect against the chemical. You should not eat around it, and do not store your materials in tin, zinc, or aluminum containers to avoid a reaction with the lye. Ensure you review biodiesel safety precautions before starting to make your first batch of biodiesel in the home.

When the Biodiesel Production Process is Completed

When you finish making your biodiesel, you will see the separated glycerin sitting on the bottom of the container in two different layers. The bottom layer of the gylcerin will be separated from the remainder of the mixture. You can then use the biodiesel fuel you have created as an alternative energy source that is located at the top of the container.

How Does Biodiesel Improve the Environment?

Using biodiesel as an alternative, renewable energy source for your vehicle produces significantly less pollution than using fossil fuel based gasoline. Biodiesel does not produce the same level of hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides found in traditional diesel fuel. Tests conducted on the exhaust output produced by the biofuel have proven that the pollution levels are reduced by more than half when using biodiesel as an alternative energy source.

Biodiesel Impact on Global Warming and Acid Rain

Global warming has received a significant amount of press of the past few years. If you choose to use biodiesel, the overall lifecycle emissions of carbon dioxide are reduced by 78% when using biodiesel when compared to traditional fossil fuels. When you take a look at the impact on acid rain, the reduction is a bit less, but the alternative fuel does produce sulfur oxide at a 8 % lower rate than that seen from traditional diesel fuel.

Biodiesel Impact on Human Health

One of the significant triggers for asthma sufferers and those that have lung cancer are the aromatic pollutants produced from combustion engines. Deliberate research has proven that biodiesel exhaust is significantly less harmful to human health than traditional gasoline. Reductions in carcinogens produced by biodiesel are reduced by 75 to 85 percent when you use biodiesel. The reduction in asthma irritants has been tested to be approximately 47%. Shifting to the alternative fuel also results in a 83.6% reduction in soot which is also considered to be a carcinogen.

How You Can Make a Difference Using Alternative Fuels

If you make the choice to start using biodiesel, you will have an impact on improving our environment. If you use just a 2 percent blend of biodiesel in your vehicle, you can help reduce the impact on the Earth’s environment. Carbon monoxide emissions will be significantly reduced along with hydrocarbon, and acid rain contributing substances. Regardless of what choices you make, it is definitely worth exploring how you can best leverage biodiesel in your daily life to help you live a greener life.

Protect Your Body from Hazardous Chemical Exposure

One of the biggest steps that you can take before you start making your own biodiesel is to buy the appropriate personal protective equipment. This include the appropriate chemical resistant gloves, a work apron, and eye protection. When you are making biodiesel, you are using a number of chemicals that can be very hazardous. If you splash or spill methanol on your skin, it will rapidly be absorbed and can potentially cause death in some cases. If you get it in your eyes, it can also result in temporary or even permanent blindness in some cases. Sodium hydroxide can also burn your skin or cause death. The two chemicals mixed together form sodium methoxide which can kill if swallowed, inhaled or absorbed through your skin.

When you are purchasing your work gloves to use during the biodiesel production process, you will need to make sure they are chemical and fire proof. Latex gloves will prevent you against initial spillage, but will breakdown when exposed to the chemicals used in the production of biodiesel and can fail. You should also try to wear long sleeved clothing when making the fuel in order to provide as much coverage of your skin as possible. You should never wear shorts or flip flops when you are near the biodiesel production and should have running water nearby in case you need to rinse chemicals out of your eye area.

Preparing Your Biodiesel Production Environment

Before you start to make biodiesel at your home, you need to make sure that you have appropriate ventilation in the work space to remove any fumes created in the process. Vapor cartridge respirators are not considered effective for use with methanol fumes. You should also make sure the production area is closed from access by your children and pets and no one with asthma should come near the production area. Methanol will produce fumes when its hot, and its recommended to make biodiesel on cooler days or in an environment that is not too hot.

Prepare for Emergencies Before They Occur

Another planning step to undergo before you start producing vegetable oil based biodiesel, is to make an emergency plan for your home. This should include a plan for getting medical help in the event of significant exposure of yourself or a family member to the hazardous chemicals, skin exposure, etc. Even if its just having the poison control and ambulance phone numbers handy, any planning you do ahead of time will help you mitigate any potential emergency situations that arise.

With the proper attention paid to safety and planning before you start producing biodiesel, you can make the process as safe as possible on your road to living a greener life.

What Are the Steps to Make Biodiesel?

Many home enthusiasts have started to make biodiesel at the home in order to leverage the Green technology today instead of waiting for industry to start producing biofuels on a large scale. In order to produce biodiesel in your home, it takes a four step process. At the high level, the steps entail creating sodium monoxide. Then, you take the sodium monoxide mixture and mix it with the vegetable oil and let the by-product of the solution to separate. Next, you clean the fuel and you are ready to use the fuel. The process to create biodiesel is referred to as tansesterification.

What Do You Need to Make Vegetable Oil Based Biodiesel?

Vegetable oil-based biodiesel is a first generation biofuel that has been successfully made at home by consumers. Biodiesel production from vegetable oil requires alcohol, lye, and vegetable oil to make the fuel. Although you do not have to use new oil, if you use old or dirty oil, you will need to take the time to clean the dirt and debris from the oil. As a result, many biodiesel home producers prefer to make their fuel from new vegetable oil. Once you have the ingredients collected, you mix the lye with alcohol to make the sodium menoxide. This will foam significantly during the mixing process, so ensure your container has enough room to allow the foam to occur and that the floor under your working area is covered with a tarp or other substance that can get wet in the event of spillage. Then, you take the sodium monoxide and mix it with the vegetable oil. Once mixed, the byproduct and glycerin will separate and you will clean the biodiesal. Once you have cleaned the fuel, it can be used in a vehicle powered by a diesel engine.

What Do You Need to Be Careful of When Making Biodiesel?

Before you decide that you are going to produce all of your personal fuel with biodiesel production in your garage, you need to realize that it will be a time consuming process that will take up to a week for your first batch to be ready. You may need to create several batches of the fuel before you get the right mix to be fuel grade to run your vehicle. If you run your car on less than fuel quality biodiesel, you could damage your engine or car. Also, when you are producing biodiesel, the ingredients are toxic, so make sure you are working in a kid-safe environment.

How Do You Get Started Making Biodiesel?

The best way to get started making biodiesel from vegetable oil, is to purchase a biodiesel production manual and/or kit so that you more effectively get through the production process for your first batch or two of biodiesel production. When you make biodiesel at your home, you do not have a danger of explosion or harmful vapors being produced. Most people will make their biodiesel in the garage, though there is no requirement to have to produce the fuel outdoors.

What Makes Up a Biofuel?

Biofuels can be in various forms to include liquid, gas, or solid material. The form that the fuel is stored in depends on the method of fuel harvesting of the material. Biofuels can be made from any biological carbon-based substance, with corn and soy beans being the most popular crops used for fuel production in the early 2000′s. Using crops such as these to produce biodiesel, however, requires that land normally use to grow food that we eat is not producing edible corn or other crops any longer. As a result, industry has been investing time and energy into refining the process to extract biofuel from algae as a third generation biofuel.

Biodiesel Algae Advantages

Algae has show significant promise in being able to be the industry answer in biofuel production. Most algae will grow at 50 to 100 times a greater rate than corn or soy, and do not require freshwater or soil to be grown. Algae can be grown in non potable water in suspended containers located where the land can not be used to grow food. The traditional barriers to effective use of algae as a biodiesel have been the relative low cost of oil when compared to the cost of extracted the biofuel from algae, however, with improved technology and increased crude oil prices this gap has shrunk over the past few years. When grown in a closed system, the algae growth process can be controlled resulting in greater yields and increase biodiesel production. Another advantage of the algae growth process is that the algae pulls carbon dioxide from the air and replaces it with oxygen. This makes biodiesel algae farms more attractive to place near manufacturing plants that produce excessive amounts of carbon dioxide to help reduce pollution but also benefit the algae grower.

Biodiesel algae has the potential to make more than 100,000 gallons of algae oil per acre grown a year depending on how the algae is grown, the type of algae, and how the algae oil will be extracted. This means that if you have a 100 acre algae biodiesel farm, you could produce up to 10 million gallons of biodiesel algae in a year. It would take approximately 140 billion gallons of biodiesel algae to replace all crude oil word-wide. If algae farms can live up to their potential, then this could be done on less than 100 million acres where it would take exponentially more land to achieve the same effect with traditional biofuel crops.

How Is Oil Extracted from Algae?

Extracting the oil from algae has been the major cost barrier to the major expansion of the use of biodiesel algae in the marketplace. Once the algae are harvested, the oils are then extracted from the walls of the respective algae cells. The most rudimentary process to do this is to use an oil press which is similar to how an olive press works. The oil press has approximately a 75 percent extraction rate. Another method used to extract the oil is the hexane solvent method which first uses the oil press. Then, the leftover algae is mixed with hexane, filtered, etc so the remaining oil extracted does not have any chemicals remaining. This method results in approximately a 95 percent extraction rate of the oil from the algae. The third method used is the supercritical fluids method which can get up to 100 percent of the oil out of the algae. In this method, carbon dioxide is used to act as the supercritical fluid. The algae is pressurized and then heated to change it into a liquid and gaseous state. Then, the CO2 is mixed with the algae which turns it almost completely into oil. This method requires a significant investment in equipment and incurs significant cost. Regardless of the extraction method, once the algae oil is extracted, it is then refined using the transesterification process where sodium hydroxide is mixed with alcohol to create biodiesel fuel. After this step, glycerol is removed from the substance resulting in biodiesel algae.