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
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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.
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