Thai Chemists report direct cracking of vegetable oils to liquid fuels.

[NNadir]

This is different from biodiesel. It is a method to crack the long chain compounds to make gasoline type molecules, which are typically more branched.

Alternative energy resources are more imperative because there is an increasing demand for clean transport fuels. Many researchers are concentrating on developing alternative and renewable sources of liquid fuels, which are new energy resources to replace commercial petroleum products for the future. Thailand’s manufacturing sectors use vegetable oil as cooking oil and for food processing. More than 47 million liters of vegetable oil are used per year,1 excluding large restaurants, fast food shops, and households. Used vegetable oil is not collected in a manner such that it can be discarded properly. Some vegetable oil traders will normally supply regenerated vegetable oil by bleaching it and reselling it to street food vendors because it is less expensive than new vegetable oil. As a solution to this problem of disposal, spent vegetable oil could be collected and processed through chemical conversion via a transesterification reaction to become a compound known as “biodiesel” or via direct upgrade from thermal cracking or catalytic cracking. These vegetable oils are long-chain hydrocarbon molecules, which can be converted to light hydrocarbons, using many types of catalysts...

...In another paper,1 we showed that HZSM-5 was effective for the catalytic cracking of used vegetable oil to liquid fuel; the effect of temperature and time of the reaction were the main aspects of the
conversion to gasoline fractions. The appropriate conditions of the cracking were a temperature of 430 °C, an initial hydrogen pressure of 10 bar, and a reaction time of 60 min; cracking products that consisted of gasoline (22.15 wt %), kerosene (9.85 wt %), light gas oil and gas oil (20.96 wt %), long residue (16.98 wt %), and gaseous products (28.66 wt %) were obtained. In this study, sulfated zirconia was applied to the catalytic cracking of used vegetable oil to become liquid fuel, and the effects of temperature, initial pressure, reaction time, and kinetic model were investigated...

This is from the ASAP articles from Energy and Fuels. The abstract can be found here: http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/enfuem/2005/19/i05/abs/ef0500181.html

For an appreciation of the scale of the potential note that the 47 million liters of vegetable oil annually discarded in Thailand translates into about 300,000 barrels of oil, about 4% of what the United States imports in a single day.

[goclark]

1. kick for more information

[mom cat]

2. How does this address the undedlying problem of the production

of carbon dioxide. It may indeed provide an alternatiove to gasoline, but it will be meaningless if we continue our earth killing lifestyles.

[skids]

3. It's carbon neutral.

For carbon to get into vegetable oil, it has to come from the air in the first place.

[mike_c]

8. but don't forget that unless no new land conversion occurs...

...you have to factor in the carbon storage of the forests that will likely be lost to provide land for biofuel production.

[skids]

9. You mean these?

[mom cat]

14. We can thank poor forest management for that. Bush's Healthy Forests

iniative will only make this more common.

[mom cat]

12. This will be particularly critical if the new technology expands beyond

its initial stated goal of dealing with "Used" vegetable oil and begins to try to develop vegetable oil for coversion to gasoline. Even the current corn oil production for fuel is a net energy loser. Add a cracking process and you have an energy sink hole.

[mom cat]

10. What about the energy spent in processing the vegetable oil?

The cracking plants require a high heat...that if more fuel expenditure. I saw recently that the corn oil used as a fuel substitute required more energy to produce than was produced by burning it...fertilizer, gas for the tractors, transportation, processing, etc. I am just wondering what the actual energy benefits will be. I hope that some good will come of it, but our first priority must be drastic reduction in consumption, or we won't have a driveable planet anyway.

[skids]

15. They use the methane.

They use the methane produced in the reaction as the power source to generate the heat.

As long as it is restricted to waste oils, there's no extra energy used on the agricultural end. If biofuel farming decides to use it's own crop, probably we are looking at fast pyrolysis of cellulose, not this technology. In that case, a low-fertilizer, high yeild crop like hemp would be optimal.

[mom cat]

16. Now that is something I could tank up on!

Of course, we would still be dependant on foreign sources since the xtian right is so hemp phobic!

[Richard D]

4. Well . . .

. . . it wouldn't be releasing new (ancient, really) CO2 into the atmosphere.

[mom cat]

11. Except for production, etc

The appropriate conditions of the cracking were a temperature of 430 °C, an initial hydrogen pressure of 10 bar, and a reaction time of 60 min;

It might still be worthwhile to convert used vegetable oil into gasoline. We just have to look at the total and real costs. A new planet is going to cost a lot more than what i have in the bank.

[mike_c]

5. this is good work, but the essential problem of energy demand...

...out-stripping the available supply remains. Even if all arable land not needed for food production were converted to oil production-- an ecological catastrophe in itself-- conversion of solar energy to biomass and subsequent conversion of biomass to fuel could not do much more than dent the energy requirements of a global technological society. Maybe at 1/4 current consumer population levels, but not at current population, which is still increasing. Remember too that fossil fuels are more "biomass concentrated" in the sense of being the result of epochal deposition-- what we burn in 10 minutes might have taken a decade of solar collection to grow. And even if 100 percent of the growing energy demand could be met from some relatively inexhaustable source, the problem of dissipation remains.

The real key to solving the long-term energy crisis is to reduce demand to within sustainable production/dissipation levels. Frankly, I don't think this will happen unless human population is substantially reduced.

[glitch]

7. I like the optimism of Amory Lovins. He says our energy efficiency is 10%

(already an improvement, it used to be 2%, IIRC) which can be improved greatly.
We all need to live smarter, reducing useless consumption is only one aspect, but greatly improving the efficiency of what we do consume is an important other aspect. If we do that, we won't need to mow over the remaining forests, plains and wetlands for agricultural production, whether for beef or crops for biofuels.

Reducing human population growth is another much needed aspect. If we don't do it, nature will. And nature's population reduction plan won't be in the form of a tiny daily pill either.

[mom cat]

13. Amen to that "glitch"! We need to drastically cut back on consumption and

reproduction.One child per couple (or less) is the only solution. I guess multiple births can be exempted...I am the youngest of a set of twins! But, seriously, over population is a key driving force behind global warming. I refer to our own population, which is so heavilly consumptive that it exceeds most third world countries as a burden to the earth.

[NNadir]

17. You've hit on something here.

That's why I noted that the entire annual output of Thailand's waste oil is equal to only a few hours worth US oil imports.

It's important to keep scale in mind. Many people look at articles like this and over estimate the potential by a great deal.

Biologically derived fuels may ameliorate global warming/energy shortage/pollution issues to a tiny extent, but I very much doubt that they represent a realistic total solution to the problem. They will be doing well, very well, if they can even manage 5% of the demand, and that's pushing it.

The external costs of biological fuels are much better than coal and oil, but that's not saying much. Still, when used for electrical generation, the external costs of using biofuels are not impressively low, certainly not when compared with other forms of available energy. They are considerably higher than those associated with hydropower 0.05 Eurocents/kw-hr, wind power (0.09 Eurocents/kw-hr on shore, 0.12 Eurocents/kw-hr off shore), nuclear power (0.19 Eurocents/kw-hr), PV power (0.28 Eurocents/kw-hr), in that order.

For the data, please see figure 9 in this report, http://www.externe.info/expoltec.pdf to see the a graphic representation of the external costs of these forms of electrical generation, all of which are less than 0.2 Eurocents per kilowatt-hour, an external cost that is practically negligible for all these forms of energy. Note in figure 10 that the external cost of the most common form of biomass related energy, wood burning, is very high, especially in the case of use for home heating, where the cost is considerably higher than that of natural gas, and, in the home case, is roughly comparable to a very dirty well known fuel, petroleum based oil. In figure 11 we can see that the generalized biomass fueled boiler has an external cost of between 0.5-0.9 Eurocents/kw-hr, better the double the external cost of even the worst of previously mentioned (hydro, wind, nuclear and PV) forms of energy, the worst form being photovoltaic electricity.

[slor]

6. Thanks for posting n/t