by Mike Wall (Idaho National Lab)  While oil companies drill deeper and deeper for increasingly hard-to-find petroleum, legions of mini-gushers lie untapped right on the surface. There’s one behind every restaurant, for example, and in the heart of every potato-processing plant. Such businesses produce loads of waste grease, a precious resource that can be converted to clean, green biodiesel. And a company called BioFuelBox is doing just that, thanks in part to key research by chemists at Idaho National Laboratory.

Though a young company — its maiden plant in American Falls, Idaho, just started running in August 2009 — BioFuelBox has already made a big splash. BusinessWeek magazine recognized it as one of 2009’s 25 most intriguing start-ups, and the World Economic Forum recently named BioFuelBox one of 26 “Technology Pioneers” for 2010. The accolades flow because the company, with INL help, has found a way to make the world’s most environmentally friendly, socially responsible transportation fuel — and a profit at the same time.  

… (Dan) Ginosar and (Bob) Fox wanted the gunk scraped out of restaurant grease traps, the slime clogging the filters of wastewater-treatment plants. This stuff is pretty much free — people throw it away, after all — but it’s a far cry from the clean, golden vegetable oil most biodiesel producers start out with. It’s incredibly variable and full of contaminants like flour, dirt and water. So converting it to fuel would require different, and much more robust, chemical methods.

After much tinkering, Ginosar and Fox came up with a way that works. Most biodiesel producers react vegetable oil with alcohol in the presence of a basic catalyst, such as potassium hydroxide. But the INL chemists substituted an acidic catalyst, because basic ones turned their waste grease to soap. And they injected “supercritical” CO2 into the reaction. Supercritical fluids are like a mix between a gas and a liquid. In this case, the supercritical CO2 was key, keeping the alcohol and grease together so they could react.

Ginosar and Fox weren’t the first to figure out how to transform waste greases to biodiesel; amateur chemists have been converting used cooking oil in their garages for years. What’s special about the pair’s technique is its versatility, robustness and efficiency. Their methods can convert a wide range of nasty, contaminated waste greases — the worst of the worst — in addition to relatively clean and uniform cooking oil.    READ MORE  and MORE