When lawn mowers are humming about the landscape at Sinclair Community College, the air is filled with the smell of french fries.
For the last three years, the lawn equipment at Sinclair has been run on the processed waste oil from Aramark’s Sinclair campus kitchens.
The oil is brought from the kitchens to the Center for Energy Education lab in Building 11. The lab was designed and built by a group of internship students in 2007 and has been improved by a grant from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
The Ohio grant also allowed the Facilities department to modify their lawn equipment so it can operate on a standard 20 percent biodiesel mixture.
The first challenge in implementing the new oil conversion program, according to Dr. Robert Gilbert, the technical director for the Center for Energy Education, was to determine which procedures lead to the production of high quality biodiesel.
“We’ve got the procedures down pat, so now the conversion is pretty routine,” says Gilbert.
The conversion process involves a reaction step (with methanol and potassium hydroxide as a catalyst) to remove glycerin from the waste oil and several water washes to remove other contaminants. The resulting biodiesel meets or exceeds the standard of the ASTM, formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials and Gilbert says that there have been no problems so far with the converted yard equipment.
The lab, which involves mostly chemistry and biology students, produces biodiesel in batches of 25 gallons and produces 200 to 300 gallons a year to be used in Sinclair equipment.
About 20 to 25 percent of the initial oil volume is lost as glycerin, and the lab currently has no process to recover the methanol used in the conversions (it evaporates out). Still, the cost of making biodiesel is less than half the cost of using petroleum diesel.
“We don’t do it to save money, it doesn’t make that much of a financial impact,” says Gilbert. “It’s more of a statement, keeping the used oil out of the waste stream and putting it into use.”
Burning biodiesel also releases less harmful emissions while having only slightly less heat content than petroleum diesel.
“Biodiesel is much more environmentally friendly than petroleum diesel,” says Gilbert.
Biodiesel will only be part of the total energy solution in the future, according to Gilbert.
“Biodiesel being made on a production scale is usually made with soybean oil,” says Gilbert. “If you took all the soybeans that are being grown today in the country, you could maybe make a four to five percent impact on the amount of petroleum diesel being used today. Soybean biodiesel is a temporary solution.”
The same is true of corn-based ethanol, another biofuel. If all the corn grown in the US was converted to ethanol, it would only replace about eight percent of our gasoline, according to Gilbert.
There’s some promising research being done on algae biodiesel.
“With soybeans you can get 1, 000 gallons [of biodiesel] per acre per year, but with algae you can get over 20,000 gallons per acre per year,” he says. And algae also takes a lot of carbon dioxide to grow, removing that carbon dioxide from the atmosphere until the biodiesel is burned, making it carbon neutral.
Gilbert says that as the world edges closer to the projected point of peak oil production and the rate of oil extraction is no longer sufficient to meet demand, economic pressure will make alternative fuels like biodiesel a more viable option.
“A well is only going to produce so much,” he says. “As countries like China and India become more industrialized and start using more oil, there’s going to be a world market for whatever oil is left. There may be oil in the ground in 60 years, but can you recover it? And can you recover it at a rate that meets demand?”
Companies are already selling conversion kits for biodiesel vehicles, and manufactures recently started offering warranties for those vehicles. Many gas stations offer the standard 20 percent mix.
Some countries are moving towards energy independence in preparation for the day when the oil supply tightens.
Brazil is already almost entirely off of foreign oil consumption, with close to 100 percent of their vehicles running on a mix of petroleum and ethanol made at low energy cost from sugarcane, according to Gilbert.
For every one unit of energy put into growing sugarcane, it yields eight units of energy, making it far more efficient than corn ethanol.
Biodiesel is only one part of the alternative energy options explored at the Center for Energy Education, which also has a solar thermal system and a wind turbine. Sinclair also offers a degree program in energy management and a certificate in energy technology.