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)?
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Source: Biodiesel Magazine
Image Credit: Ever Cat Fuels
This sounds great and all, but 300 degrees Celsius is DAMN hot, and takes a lot of energy (emissions) to produce. Also where does the glycerine go? If biodiesel is coming out the other end the glycerol molecules can’t be included, so where’d they go? It’s a very exciting time for the biodiesel industry, and I hope this group does well, but I don’t this is a silver bullet nor is one coming anytime soon. We ALL need to use less of whatever fuel/electricity we’re using even if it’s biodiesel.
Ian,
From what I’ve read, because they have nearly complete conversion of the feedstock to biodiesel, there is a very tiny amount of glycerine that comes out at the end… hence the statement “virtually no waste.” Glycerine is not a dangerous byproduct and can be sold as a value added product to the cosmetics industry.
Also, the inventors claim that because of the very efficient heat recapture off the column it actually uses very little energy to power the process once it gets up to temperature. Remember it’s a continuous flow so there’s no shutting down… eliminating the energy demands of constantly restarting.
I do agree that we all need to use less energy to start with, but I think it’s a 3-prong attack:
1) Use less
2) Develop future renewable energy sources (i.e electric, hydrogen)
3) Before future techs are truly viable, replace current energy sources with the best possible retrofit technology (i.e. biofuels, low-sulfur diesel, more fuel efficient cars/trucks, hybrids)
I’m with da on this one…. you mark yourself as shallow when you can’t resist America-bashing, even while delivering good news.
Don’t kid yourself, this country is going to make slow, steady progress, no matter what administration is in power.
Quit with the shallow politics and just report the energy news, ok?
I don’t think Minnesota is typically considered ‘the Midwest’.
Exciting story though. And I agree with you that our government is indeed monstrously pathetic.
Jay Tee,
Is it just me, or does “just reporting the energy news” sound as much like the lifeless and unenthusiastic endeavor that the statement makes it out to be?
When I read it out loud, “just reporting the energy news” sounds like it might suck my soul away.
Nick please ask these guys to substantiate where the glycerol goes. I haven’t been able to get any info from them.
I asked these guys about the process months ago and I got no info from them about it.
Emily,
Here’s a link to an Ever Cat Fuels web page that covers this a little bit:
http://www.evercatfuels.com/technology-McgyanProcess.asp
Also the Biodiesel Magazine article I found as one of my sources states that:
“The catalyst even dehydrates glycerin into other chemicals that act as additives to improve the quality of the resulting biodiesel, which increases the amount of biodiesel produced from a pound of vegetable oil.”
I’ll see if I can’t get ahold of somebody at Ever Cat to confirm.
I use the term “hippy” tongue-in-cheek (BTW, I’m not as old as you might have guessed) to describe the left-leaning technorati that I’m guessing makes up 90% of your readers.
I don’t claim to “love absolutely everything about this country”. I just don’t think it’s necessary to preface a positive statement about the US with negative context, unless, of course, I’m trying to keep my street cred with the left-leaning technorati that I’m writing for.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person for it either. This is your blog, man, do what you want. Don’t mind the sarcastic wags like me.
before long, the cruel oil barons won’t be able to afford American baloney! Maybe they’ll go back to the deserts and do solar! Thanks fellas!
“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”
Cool, but where does this continuous stream come from? If this is a process exclusively for individual use within a closed system within a vehicle, you’d have to have an idea of the size of the holding tank for raw oils and the size of the tank to receive the ‘essentially no waste stream.”
When you consider the projected facility to produce 3,000,000 or 30,000,000 gallons per day, even if the ‘reactor’ isn’t large or doesn’t need huge vats because it can use a ‘continuous stream’, I wonder where you will get the continuous stream of precursor vegetable oil or animal fat products absent any extant pipelines from zillions of restaurants and rendering plants to a ‘reactor’
And where will you find the precursor biofuel products in sufficient quantity to convert them to this staggering production estimate. The logistics seem to be against a commercial application.
There is a guy in Webster Texas who claims he is producing his own biomass fuel from oils and fats he collects at local restaurants. Just to run his ONE car, he has to collect from several restaurants.
I love the idea that a miracle invention will make us magically energy independent, but I fear this will lead to fights over the lease of mineral rights of restaurant deep-fryers?.