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What is BioDiesel

Biodiesel’s chemical name is "Fatty-Acid Methyl Ester". This fancy name means it is a simple molecule made from vegetable oil. This fuel has a high energy content and a proper viscosity “willingness to flow” to be used in all diesel vehicles and equipment. It’s made from a naturally grown crop making its energy from the sun.

The chemical reaction to make biodiesel is fairly simple. The chemical term for vegetable oil is ‘triglyceride’, which is made up of three hydrocarbon chains attached to the some glycerin molecule. A certain amount of catalyst is needed to break off these hydrocarbon chains. The most common catalyst is lye (sodium hydroxide). When using used cooking oil to make biodiesel more lye will need to be added to the batch to neutralize the free fatty acids in the waste oil. The catalyst or lye is dissolved into methyl alcohol (methanol) at 20% of the total volume of the batch of oil needing to be converted to biodiesel. This premix is then blended with the oil vigorously to break off the hydrocarbon chains one by one and bond with the methanol molecule. The glycerin molecule then falls to the bottom of the reaction tank where they are disposed of. You will have about 10% left out of the total mixture.

No conversion work to a diesel vehicle prior to 1990 is required to use biodiesel. Other models would need any rubber fuel system parts replaced with synthetic parts. In most cases biodiesel will not void your warranty or ruin your engine in fact it should run cleaner and smoother than using petroleum diesel.

Heating the oil prior to the reaction is not required above 70 degrees. If you want to polish your biodiesel to high quality you can use a process called washing, which removes trace soap (which petroleum diesel contains).

You can mix any ratio of biodiesel and petroleum diesel without a problem. Biodiesel is safe to use in any device that uses #2 diesel fuel or home heating oil which includes cars, trucks, tractors, generators, and pumps.

Biodiesel is non toxic and fully biodegradable.

It is not cost effective to buy new unused cooking oil you would end up paying more for the biodiesel than you would for petroleum diesel. Used cooking oil from you local restaurants usually can be obtained for free because the owner usually has to pay someone to take away the used oil.

If free used cooking oil is used, you are looking at about 70 cents a gallon for biodiesel. Biodiesel is another step in moving us toward energy independence, but using human food like soybean oil is not the answer. It is already evident that using food for energy is increasing food cost. Finding other sources of feedstock is available and many cases cheaper.