Enzymatic large-scale production of biodiesel

✍ Scribed by Per Munk Nielsen; Anders Rancke-Madsen

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 319 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0956-666X
• DOI: 10.1002/lite.201100147

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Enzymatic production of biodiesel has been the subject of intensive research over the last 5‐10 years. When comparing the economy of enzymatic and chemical produced biodiesel important factors include yield, flexibility in feedstock, value of by‐products, recovery costs for alcohol as well as the cost of enzyme, enzyme lifetime, reaction time are important factors. By 2009 large‐scale enzymatic biodiesel was considered to be cost effective [1]. Since then development work has further improved the technology which is now ready for the market. We have developed a full enzymatic two‐step process for converting oils to biodiesel, and a pretreatment unit which can be installed in an existing chemical biodiesel plant to enable it to process high free fatty acid feedstocks.