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Glycerol, the Co-Product of Biodiesel: One Key for the Future Bio-Refinery

R. Comelli

Published 2011 in Unknown venue

ABSTRACT

The uncertainty of supply and prices of oil and the difficulty to establishing a sustainable model of economic and environmental development are weaknesses in the economies that depend entirely on fossil fuels, as in the most industrialized countries. In addition, the chemical industry uses about 15% of total oil consumption, 10% as raw material and 5% as fuel, being this industry still largely based on non-renewable raw materials, whose use does not control. Accordingly, from 1990 has been increasing interest in finding alternative sources of raw materials, emerging as obvious one the biomass, because it is an abundant, sustainable, and renewable energy-primary resource that can provide transport fuel, organic chemicals, and materials currently produced by fossil sources [Fulton, 2004]. In the past few years, research and technological projects related to the use of biomass as raw material to produce energy and industrial products are receiving support in countries like U.S.A., Germany, and Canada [Archambault, 2004; Werpy and Petersen, 2004; Oertel, 2007]. The use of biomass as raw material implies its transformation into chemicals and materials of commercial interest. It means moving from a petroleum-based economy to a biomassbased one; some potential advantages associated with this transition are: exploiting of unused productive capacity in agriculture and forest industry, developing new materials not available from petrochemical sources, revitalizing rural economies through local production and processing of renewable raw material sources, a more balanced development between urban and rural areas, economically sustainable development and environmental sustainability easier to achieve by using renewable raw materials, a decrease in net CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, and a reduced outside dependence on both energy and raw material sources. In this context and by similarity with the refinery, which is the base industrial unit of petro-economy, emerges the concept of "Biorefinery", which is the production facility in which biomass is transformed into energy and bioproducts. Bio-compounds, those ones produced from renewable sources, have a growing importance among the transport fuels. The EU imposed a 2% content of biocompounds into transport fuels by the end of 2005, increasing to 5.75% by the end of 2010 [EU Directive 2001/0265]. Transesterification of vegetable oils with methanol produces biodiesel, which is a mixture of methyl esters of fatty acid [Ali et al., 1995; Peterson et al., 1996; Vicente and Martinez, 2004]. This process generates glycerol as by-product, approximately 10 wt.% of total product. In this context, Province of Santa Fe in Argentine produces more than 2,500,000 tons of

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2011

  • Venue

    Unknown venue

  • Publication date

    2011-11-16

  • Fields of study

    Chemistry, Engineering, Environmental Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.5772/26823
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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