American Ingenuity Leads to Biodiesel Breakthrough
A small group of unassuming mid-westerners has discovered what could be a complete game-changer for the global biodiesel industry. Their new system makes biodiesel in mere seconds, creates a product that costs half the price, produces no waste, and can use any animal fat or vegetable oil as a feedstock.
Even though I’m sometimes down on my country because of the pathetic state of our government, the thing that always makes my patriotism swell is the truly amazing and unexpected ingenuity that seems to spring forth from the American people.
And in this tale, American ingenuity doesn’t get much more classic. A student and his professor at a small college smack dab in the middle of the heartland that virtually nobody’s ever heard of, have figured out a way to make biodiesel quickly, cheaply, and efficiently from a very small package.
- » See also: Biofuels Breakthrough: Making Fuel From Air With Engineered Microbes
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We’re not just talking an incremental improvement, we’re talking half the price and a tiny fraction of the time — a revolutionary change for the biodiesel industry. Think on the order of saving $2 for every gallon and going from raw materials to biodiesel in a few seconds versus many hours.
Not only that, the process can convert any animal fat or vegetable oil, mixed in any ratio, into biodiesel using the same compact reactor in a continuous stream. Compare this to the current method which converts the oil or fat to biodiesel over many hours in huge vat batches and creates a lot of potentially hazardous waste products.
The Mcgyan® process (so named for the inventors McNeff, Gyberg and Yan) started as a required undergraduate chemistry project for student Brian Krohn at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, MN. Krohn and his major professor, Arlin Gyberg, were looking at ways to catalyze the raw materials into biodiesel using a process called esterification.
The basic idea was to run the raw fats and oils over a sulfated zirconia catalyst to change them into biodiesel. This idea isn’t new, but the duo thought they could improve on it. In the end, the pair enlisted the help of another scientist Ben Yan and an Augsburg alum Clayton McNeff.
McNeff already owned a company that made zirconia separating columns which are typically used for something completely different. With a little modification, these columns were turned into sulfated zirconia biodiesel reactors.
Basically, the process works like this:
- Raw fats and oils of any type are combined with an alcohol
- This mixture is fed through a sulfated zirconia column heated to 300 degrees Celsius
- Their Easy Fatty Acid Removal (EFAR) system recycles any unreacted raw material back through the reactor
- Excess alcohol is recycled back through the reactor
- Pure biodiesel comes out the end
The advantages of the system are:
- No waste produced; No washing or neutralizing of the biodiesel is necessary
- 100% conversion of raw materials to biodiesel
- Any raw fat or oil can be used to make biodiesel
- Very efficient due to heat recapture from the column
- Sulfated zirconia catalyst never needs replacing
- Very small footprint of the reactor system, uses an extremely small amount of area for the amount of biodiesel produced
- Essentially no emissions and no waste stream from the process; Easy permitting from the government
The group has formed a company called Ever Cat Fuels and is in the process of building a 3 million gallon per year (MMgy) commercial biodiesel facility with the intention of scaling it up to 30 MMgy in the next 3-5 years. As soon as the Ever Cat plant is producing biodiesel successfully, the group plans on licensing the technology to other interested parties.
Bada-bing, bada-bang. Anybody have start-up capital to help me license their tech (I’m only part-way kidding)?
Posts Related to Biodiesel and Manufacturing Biodiesel:
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Source: Biodiesel Magazine
Image Credit: Ever Cat Fuels
AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!
Wow! This sounds incredibly great. I wonder if this technology can be down scaled to work for back yard processors? Or if it’s just for big commercial operations. Already in my area almost every restaurant has it’s waste oil collected by small scale collectives. This could potentially make it so much easier to make at home.
Combined with recent algae oil developments I feel downright hopeful!
By the way, I love your blog. Thanks for making it.
Nick! I love the articles! Ignore the nasty comments, i blog occasionally and i get flooded by them too. Overlook them because readers like me appreciate the cool articles you’ve got.
And this one is particularly fascinating.
It just goes to show that the rest of the world is reducing their consumption while the americans are figuring out ways around the problem, i love that attitude, and i’m an aussie.
Hi Nick,
What about the glycerol produced in the transesterification step?
Great website, by the way.
Nick, you really find some cool stuff. I visit your sight every day now. Just a joint comment on the bio and jet fuel articles.
I think that the answer to our problems is going to come from the private sector as the bio fuel brekthrough illustrates.
This is some serious stuff. Our dependance on oil is effecting our national security. Its time for people to get in the game and insist on using these alternative fuels whenever possible. All the high tech electronics aren’t worth crap, if you can’t get your fighters in the sky.
Nick
This is not such a great day, I am afraid. This process merely diverts organics to fuel and away from food production. The only thing that leads to a “great day” in America is whatever reduces our consumption of diesel fuel in the first place. Making more diesel fuel, from organic feedstocks that can be directed to food production, is a terrible idea. We need to get rid of diesel engines entirely, along with all other IC engines.
Dan, if he doesn’t get in at least one shot against the USA before praising it, he’ll lose all street cred with all his hippy readers.
Nevertheless, cool little discovery. Seems like there’s been a lot of great advances in biofuel technology recently. I hope it is all building to something. I still think oil and coal is pretty great, but it never hurts to have a good BATNA with OPEC.
mgroves,
Why is it that people can’t have mixed feelings about their country without having someone try and debase them, make them feel like they’re being unpatriotic, and shoehorn them into the category of “hippies”?
(BTW, your use of the term “hippies” belies your age — insert valley accent here — it’s, like, almost 2010, hippies don’t exist anymore. Sorry to be such a downer.)
Do you really love absolutely everything about this country? Is there nothing you’d like to fix? I find that hard to believe. And if you don’t love everything about this country, but you pretend to, then you’re part of the problem.
Wow, the Americans come up with a breakthrough? No way, surely it was stolen from a german.
RD
http://www.decrypt.net.tc
Hey…hippies still exist! The Bush administration hasn’t cut down all the trees yet (they sure are trying though). In fact, next time you are in a national forest and you see a bunch of old school buses with rainbows painted on them, ask them if the bus is converted to biodiesel. It likely is. It’s pretty easy to find a restaurant willing to let a bus full of hippies take their old fryer grease. There is a ton of practical biodiesel conversion information being passed by word of mouth in this country.
The PDF you linked looks interesting, but I couldn’t find any more in depth info on their site. I wonder if this process is doable on a small scale though. 300c might be doable with a serious pressure cooker, and a still is easy, but what about this catalyst? I don’t think Amazon sells it