Biodiesel Production from Waste Cooking Oil

Abstract

Biodiesel refers to all kinds of alternative fuels derived from vegetable oils or animal fats. prefix bio refers to renewable and biological nature, in contrast to the traditional diesel derived from petroleum; while the diesel fuel refers to its use on diesel engines. Biodiesel is produced from the triglycerides conversion in the oils such as those obtained from palm oil, soybean, rapeseed, sunflower and castor oil, in methyl or ethyl esters by transesterification way. In this process the three chains of fatty acids of each triglyceride molecule reacts with an alcohol in the presence of a catalyst to obtain ethyl or methyl esters. ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials Standard) describes the biodiesel as esters monoalkyl of fatty acids of long chain that are produced from vegetable oil, animal fat or waste cooking oils in a chemical reaction known as transesterification. Biodiesel has the same properties of diesel used as fuel for cars, trucks, etc. This may be mixed in any proportion with the diesel from the oil refined. It is not necessary to make any modifications to the engines in order to use this fuel. The use of pure biodiesel can be designated as B100 or blended with fuel diesel, designated as BXX, where XX represents the percentage of biodiesel in the blend. most common ratio is B20 which represents a 20% biodiesel and 80% diesel”(Arbelaez & Rivera, 2007 pp 4). Colombia in South America, is taking advantage of the opportunities that biofuels will open to the agriculture. With more than a million liters a day, Colombia is the second largest producer of ethanol in Latin America, after Brazil. This has decongested the domestic market of sugar at more than 500 thousand tons. result is strong revenue for the 300,000 people who derive their livelihood from the production of panela (from sugar cane). In Colombia the biodiesel is produced from the palm oil and methanol, being the last imported to meet the demand in the biodiesel production. In the past two years, the biodiesel production from Palm was between 300000 liters/day to 965000 liters per day, distributed in four plants located in the Atlantic coast and in the country center. In the biodiesel production is technically possible to use methanol and ethanol alcohol (Cujia & Bula, 2010. pp 106). palm oil is one of oilseeds trade more productive on the planet; it is removed between six and ten times more oil than the other as soy, rapeseed and sunflower. Colombia has more than 300,000 hectares planted in Palm oil, generating permanent and stable employment for more than 90,000 people.