Hi! My name is Jason Burroughs with Diesel Green Fuels. We are going to be showing you today how to make your own biodiesel but first I would like to talk a little bit about what are biofuels. Little bit of history of biofuel.
So biofuel is any fuel that can be used to power vehicle or an engine that comes from biological matter. Historically, petroleum itself is the original biofuel. It's created when million of years of pressure pushes algae down and compacts it into a layer that hundreds or millions of years later, we go out and drill to produce petroleum oil. Biofuels today would include ethanol and biodiesel. Biodiesel will be the focus of our conversation today however, I did want to mention ethanol. Ethanol is a product that you use form corn and it is fermented into sugar which is then turned into ethanol. It's a replacement for gasoline although it does have slightly less energy than gasoline.
So biodiesel is a product that's called a Fatty acid methyl ester which is the chemical name that results when you combine vegetable oil and alcohol. Biofuels are important for this country and for our world for a number of reasons. Petroleum oil, there is only much of it in the ground. Eventually we are going to get most of it out of the ground and the cost to extract whatever is left is going to become prohibitively expensive. So biofuels are sustainable, renewable resource that can be planted year after year while petroleum can only come out of the ground so much until it's all gone.
Also, petroleum products produce a tremendous amount of pollution. They have millions of years of energy stored in them therefore when they are burned, all that energy is released including pollution like carbon-monoxide, green house gases and other things. So it's important for us to reduce that pollution for future generations.
Also, the United States stopped producing a majority of its petroleum oil about 30 years ago. Since then, most of oil has come from places like the Middle East. So for these three reasons, it's important for us to move away from petroleum and non-renewable resources and move towards biofuels.
Now biofuels can be used from a variety of what are called feed stocks. That's the base oil or fat that's used to make the biodiesel. Today, most biodiesel in United States comes from soybeans, although it's very important to know that the most sustainable way to make biodiesel is to use waste products such as used cooking oil or even slaughterhouse fats, animal fats can be used to make biodiesel as well.
In the future, biodiesel will probably be made from things like algae or Jatropha, a product that comes from India and can grow in waste lands where most people couldn't plant crops today.
So biodiesel itself is a chemical reaction. It involves taking about 90% vegetable oil combining it with about 10% methanol which is an alcohol used to fill top fuel dragsters and adding in a catalyst called Sodium Hydroxide to ensure that the reaction completes. When this is done, we are going to have a layer on the bottom called glycerine which is the same matter that's used to make soap and then the top layer will be biodiesel itself which can be used in any diesel vehicle with no modification. Those diesel vehicles include Volkswagens, Mercedes, they offer diesel models. In the future, Honda itself is going to be replacing the Honda Accord Hybrid with a Honda Accord Diesel.
Now as I said, biodiesel is a chemical reaction. The way it works is you have a triglyceride, that's the vegetable oil molecule. It's composed of a glycerin in backbone with three fatty acid molecules. During this chemical reaction, the methanol attacks the fatty acid molecules, strips off the glycerine and creates three biodiesel molecules. The left-over product is the glycerine, that's on the bottom which can be used in soaps and other manufacturing process and the rest is biodiesel.
Now in our next clip, we are going to be showing you how to make biodiesel.
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