The Process of Making Biodiesel

Video Transcript

"CRAYDON BLAIR: My name is Craydon Blair and I'm from Utah Biodiesel Supply and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you the basic premise of how we make biodiesel. This is the theory of how it works. We take waste vegetable oil and we're going to heat it up. All you need to do is be able to put it in something that can heat that vegetable oil. Roughly, you want to get it to 130 to 135 degrees. We're then going to measure how acidic it is through a process that we call titration. We're going to then take that value of titration and we're going to mix some lye and the titration tells us how much lye with methanol and we're going to make something called methoxide. We then we'll pour that into the processor or whatever we have heated the vessel with and we're going to mix it together. After we've mixed it for a certain amount of time, the biodiesel is going to separate into biodiesel and glycerin. A thicker layer will fall to the bottom and then we will pull that glycerin off and we're left with biodiesel. We then will wash that biodiesel using water or various different things. It sounds weird to add water to oil but that's exactly what we do. We then remove the oil. We then take that biodiesel and transfer it to another container, and then we allow it to dry for a period of time. Once it's dry, we put it in our vehicle and we're able to tour on down the road for about a dollar a gallon. And that is how the theory of biodiesel works. It is a wonderful opportunity to make fuel and kind of stick it to the man if you will, and that's how we do it."