Techno-economic assessment of the biodiesel production using natural minerals rocks as a heterogeneous catalyst via conventional and ultrasonic techniques

Abdallah S. Elgharbawy and Rehab M. Ali

Renewable Energy, 2022, vol. 191, issue C, 161-175

Abstract: The pollution problems and limited availability of diesel fuel urge the world to substitute it with clean biodiesel. The biggest obstacle to use biodiesel as a fuel is its high price. Using waste feedstock, cheap catalysts, and advanced production techniques can decrease the biodiesel price to be reasonable. This research can be divided into a technical part and an economic part. The technical one investigates biodiesel production from used cooking oil (UCO) and heterogeneous natural minerals rocks (NMR) catalyst via two different techniques conventional and ultrasonic. The technical study reveals that the ultrasonic technique has many advantages over the conventional one, as it does not need any feedstock pretreatment steps (one-step reaction), and uses a lower catalyst loading, methanol, and reaction time to produce the same biodiesel yield of about 99%. The second part relates to an economic study performed on a biodiesel plant with a capacity of 150 thousand tons per year based on the optimum operating conditions obtained from the technical part. The economic assessment proves that biodiesel production using NMR and UCO is very profitable, and the ultrasonic process achieves a higher net profit than the conventional one. The economic study concludes that the cost of the biodiesel that is produced via the ultrasonic method is 0.63 $/L and via the conventional method is 0.72 $/L, and both values are below the biodiesel selling price (0.78 $/L).

Keywords: Biodiesel; Used cooking oil; Conventional transesterification; Ultrasonic transesterification; Natural minerals rocks; Techno-economic assessment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:191:y:2022:i:c:p:161-175

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2022.04.020

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