The Chemistry of Biodiesel

"CRAYDON BLAIR: Hi, my name is Craydon Blair from Utah Biodiesel Supply and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you the chemistry of how you make biodiesel. First of all, biodiesel is made by taking any organic oil. We'll label it as O. We're then going to add to it an alcohol. This can be methyl alcohol or ethyl alcohol, so alcohol. We're then going to add to it lye. Lye is what we make soap with, typically. We have either potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide, so, I'm going to use an L. When you mix those three together with some heat, you need some heat. We're going to get biodiesel and something called glycerin. In fact, this is what it looks like after we've made it. I start with vegetable oil that is very much like this and I get this out of it. I don't know if you can see this real well, but we've got a liquid on top, and then we have some thick stuff on the bottom. That thick stuff on the bottom is the glycerin that comes from it. That's the basic chemistry of how we make biodiesel. We basically take 10 gallons of oil plus 2 gallons of methanol. We add a certain amount of lye and we've talk about how we figure out how much lye that is. And we're going to get 10 gallons of biodiesel, and we're also going to get 2 gallons of glycerin. We remove the glycerin and we take the biodiesel, and we do a little bit of washing and cleansing of it, and then we put it in our vehicles. We're able to travel down the road for a significantly less than what we make using diesel fuel."