Refining vegetable oil into diesel fuel

December 5, 2008  |  Length: 00:04:27

At the AlwaysOn Venture Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif., Peter Bell, co-founder of Renewable Fuel Products, explains that his company's reactors are small and mobile enough to be loaded onto the back of a truck and taken wherever the waste oil is being created. They process an end product that can be used wherever people use diesel, with no special modifications. Through money from carbon credits, he says that developing countries will soon be able to gain access to this reactor as well.

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Transcript

Music

Male Speaker: We are bio-fuel technology company

based in Silicon Valley. We developed a little reactor

that turns vegetable oil into diesel fuel. It's diesel

fuel that meets the specification for existing hide o

column based fuel. We call it biodiesel 2.0. The

technology, it's a tiny little reactor, processes about

50,000 gallons per year. We process vegetable oils like

soy, tall o waste, and Inaudible. This is the process

of the reactor. Basically put in heat, prestock oil,

and out comes the finished fuel. Propane gas comes off

the top and a little bit of water, those are the

by-products, and we use the propane to run the reactor.

Obviously, vegetable oil is not a new source of oil.

The trick is to use it as a fuel is to reduce the

viscosity. You can put a kit on board to reduce the

viscosity so you can use vegetable oil directly as a

fuel, or you can reduce the viscosity chemically. Most

people do it using Inaudible other oil companies use

hydro-cracking. Most people go through a bio diesel

process, it's a very complicated process. Put in oil,

put in methanol, put in some catalyst, out comes the

finished product, blend it with the regular diesel fuel

and you have a product that's ready to go to market.

The challenge for bio diesel 1.0 is obviously low adopt

rates because of run-away feed stock costs, less

suitable in a carbon-constrained world, and it's slated

to be a Inaudible fuel or an additive. Renewable

diesel is what folks call second generation fuel. The

neat -- the neat thing about renewable diesel is that

it's an alternative fuel that meets the existing

specification for diesel fuel, enables production of

renewable fuel from vegetable oils, but goes directly

into the existing infrastructure. There are a lot of

folks doing this. It requires hydrogen catalyst to make

the reaction happen. Normally you go about putting it

into an existing refinery, the reactor cracks the oil,

you have the catalyst to control the reaction, and out

comes this fuel that meets specification. Our

technology does the same -- is the same process, but we

figured out how to do the reaction without requiring a

catalyst or without requiring any hydrogen. So we're

totally disconnecting the refining technology from this

whole infrastructure. Processing complexity comparison

of our technology versus everything else. Obviously, we

look at bio diesel, there's a lot of steps you have to

go through, you've got to strip the FFAs, add methanol,

you've got to separate the fuel, and eventually you end

up with a finished product. Renewable diesel, a little

bit more efficient, but obviously you have to add

hydrogen and crack with a catalyst before you finally

end up with a fuel. With our produce, a one-step

produce, and you end up with a finished product. The

technology scale comparison is quite dramatic. If you

compare us against the renewable diesel refinery, these

are vast infrastructures. The biodiesel company is a

little bit smaller, and our technology fits on the back

of a trailer. This is a picture of us taking our

reactor up to UC Davis where we do testing. What this

allows is a distributed refining. So for the very first

time we've allowed the refining to be taken out of the

refining infrastructure and put where the feed stock is.

And what's neat about this is it will allow an

exponential development of feed stocks that's never been

-- never happened before. So feed stocks can now be

right next to where the refining happens. I'll go

market strategies. Initially want to Inaudible with

existing biodiesel refineries to take their high FFA

waste feed stocks from there and turn that into fuel.

So we make the diesel bit while they make the biodiesel

bit. To make a B 20 blend. Second generation feed

stocks, we think there's a big opportunity there with

Inaudible and then obviously third gen radiation feed

stock availabilities is in the algae world, and we are

uniquely positioned to process algae because we don't

care about the amount of water in the feed stock, it

doesn't effect our reaction. And in the developing

market -- in the developing world we think there's a

big, big opportunity for distributed refining throughout

the world, and for the first time carbon credits allows

for these folks to actually pay for this piece of

equipment.

Music

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