http://theorion.com/blog/2015/04/15/professor-pioneers-research-on-repurposing-biodiesel-waste/
Professor pioneers research on repurposing biodiesel waste
April 15, 2015 7:00 AM
With more than 200 million gallons of glycerol waste produced each year
from manufacturing biodiesel, the process of disposing of this hazardous
byproduct can be a sticky business.
Lisa Ott, a Chico State chemistry professor, has been engaging in
innovative research to turn the glycerol waste into a substance that can
in turn be sold for profits.
With her method, Ott is going to be taking hazardous material out of the
the waste system and making the glycerol into a useful tool for the
chemistry department as well as a profitable substance for biodiesel
manufacturers, she said.
Ott has been studying biodiesel since her postdoctoral education.
“We were doing a lot of fuel chemistry work and working with rocket
fuels and jet fuels and things like that,” Ott said. “And so that’s
where I sort of started thinking about fuel chemistry and got into
biodiesel. Since I’ve come here, we have always done some sort of
biofuels type (of) research.”
Biodiesel is a clean-burning, renewable alternative to traditional
diesel, which is minimizing the United States’ dependence on foreign
oil. Recycled cooking oil, soybean oil and animal fats just barely
scratch the surface of what biodiesel can be made from.
Ott’s research is focusing mainly on what to do with the glycerin waste
produced from manufacturing biodiesel. For every 10 gallons of biodiesel
produced there is one gallon of glycerol byproduct, she said.
To put things into perspective, Ott spoke about the waste on a larger scale.
“If you’re making two billion gallons of biodiesel, that means in the
U.S. and EU there’s about 200 million gallons of waste,” Ott said.
Biodiesel companies have either been burning this waste, landfilling it
or using it as a dust suppressant. Burning the waste is bad for the
environment, using it as a dust suppressant seems wasteful and
landfilling it is expensive, Ott said.
“There’s a local biodiesel company called Springboard Biodiesel,” Ott
said, “and if they have to get rid of a barrel of it, it’s like $400 a
barrel because it’s hazardous waste.”
To fix this problem, Ott involved her chemistry students in doing
research on turning the glycerol into another substance that could be
sold for profits. Through her research, she found that glycerol waste
can be transformed into a deep eutectic solvent.
A deep eutectic solvent is an ionic liquid with a very low boiling point
that can be used in chemical reactions for scientific research.
“If you’re tying to make a new molecule, you have to dissolve your
reactants in a solvent,” Ott said, “and we are proposing this as a
reaction solvent.”
A reaction solvent serves as a medium for chemical reactions, the main
purpose of which is to dissolve the reactants in the liquid.
Ott, along with other faculty members, Chico State students and two high
school students submitted a paper about their research to the journal
Fuel Processing Technology. Chico State is the first university to
submit a scholarly paper about this subject, she said.
“I’ve been looking at the literature, and I haven’t seen anything else,”
Ott said. “That doesn’t mean someone else isn’t working on it, but we
submitted our paper so hopefully it will come out first.”
When the paper is approved and published, Chico State will be the first
university to create a way to turn biodiesel waste into a profitable
deep eutectic solvent. Curiosity surrounds every problem we have, Ott
said, and this is what drove her to create a clean way of reusing
hazardous waste.
“I think that’s the best kind of chemistry,” Ott said. “(The kind) that
comes about from natural curiosity or wanting to solve a problem you have.”
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel