Greenstar claims two-minute Biodiesel process

From their press release today:


http://www.greenstarusa.com/news/06-05-23.html

Anyone know how they're achieving such fast conversion? What of the quality, how much washing is required? Are they using additional external energy to reach this efficiency? Curious to see whether their technology is adopted by others.

Most commercial bio production doesn't take an hour for the reaction. That's what it takes for us homebrewers who process at 120-130F or so with a conventional base catalyzed process. Increasing temp speeds up the reaction (but you also need to increase the pressure once you get much higher, to keep the methanol from boiling off - which is one reason it's not a good route for homebrewers).

To do it in only two minutes or so though they'd likely need to use a co-solvent, or perhaps supercritical methanol (although that seems to take 4 minutes for ASTM conversion). The fact that they still need washing (albeit they're doing waterless washing, probably with magnesium silicate or some ion exchange resin) to me indicates that they're not doing supercritical methanol. So, I'm guessing they're using a co-solvent to speed up the reaction. But, you then have to recover that co-solvent. But, that's not too difficult on a commercial scale.

Similar process to this: http://pig.ncl.ac.uk/about.htm

Process intensification via several methods?

My friend Gerald and I have also done bench scale experiments where it is found that intense agitation using ultrasound resonant probes submerged in a test bottle, coupled with stirring (magnetic stir bar) can shorten times dramatically. Also anwhere you can add high shear agitation helps speed things up.

In a homebrew setting, we need to stay well below the boiling point of methanol, but that doesn't proclude us from employing shear mixing.

In my reactor, there are 3 types of agitation: shear blending/mixing in the pump head (brass impellor inside cast iron cavity), shear dispersion zone where the spray output (pump-->heater-->spray head-->bulk liquid) is jetted at high velocity straight down into the bulk liquid, causing fine droplet penetration deep into the bulk liquid, and a third zone of mixing in the bulk liquid where it is contra-rotation of the bulk liquids, attained by placing two opposing stirring paddles on a rotating shaft.

I also bought a 100 watt ultrasound transducer off of ebay but haven't had time to locate an amplifier or signal generator for it yet--I'd like to play around with it but it is a low priority right now.

The press release says the process is waterless. And they already have a plant online in Bakersfield CA that produces 10 million gallons per year. The cost for the reactor is actually pretty cheap at only $30k that produces 10 million gallons per year, and since there are no discharged fluids CA is letting them permit them for construction in 14-18 weeks instead of the typical 14-18 months. Nothing said about ASTM compliance in the press release.

The web site is horribly out of date.

Longsnowsm said:

The press release says the process is waterless. And they already have a plant online in Bakersfield CA that produces 10 million gallons per year. The cost for the reactor is actually pretty cheap at only $30k that produces 10 million gallons per year, and since there are no discharged fluids CA is letting them permit them for construction in 14-18 weeks instead of the typical 14-18 months. Nothing said about ASTM compliance in the press release.

The web site is horribly out of date.

Click to expand...

The Bakersfield plant is offline right now, they're recovering from a fire on the site earlier this year. You're right, nomention of ASTM compliance... hmmmm.

HTML is obviously not their forte

They also haven't posted their financial statements online since 2003. I don't know about this company, almost seems like they are creating news to tap into the current hot trend and sell some stock. We will see what happens from this. Something seems strange about it.

Longsnowsm said:

The press release says the process is waterless. And they already have a plant online in Bakersfield CA that produces 10 million gallons per year. The cost for the reactor is actually pretty cheap at only $30k that produces 10 million gallons per year, and since there are no discharged fluids CA is letting them permit them for construction in 14-18 weeks instead of the typical 14-18 months.

Click to expand...

IMO, that $30k HAS to be a typo. No way in hell could you build it that cheap. Unless they're only counting the cost for one small portion of the entire plant as the reactor. Hell, you can't even build a small addition to your house for $30k. It's gotta be at least $300k.