Feasibility evaluation of a biodiesel plant fed by recycled edible oils comparing two alternative production technologies

Abstract

The present work is about the techno-economic evaluation of a biodiesel industrial unit that exclusively use recycled edible oils as feedstock, for two alternative production technologies. Nowadays, many biodiesel production units use a mixture of virgin vegetable oils and waste cooking oils. The examined unit will use only waste cooking oil as raw material. Thus, two different methods for biodiesel production are assessed on a financial basis for different biodiesel prices. The investigated methods are the alkaline transesterification (a very common biodiesel production method) and the supercritical transesterification (a method with non sensitivity in moisture and free fatty acids and thus not requiring a pre-treatment stage). According to the financial evaluation, the acceptance of the project for each technology is strongly affected by biodiesel’s price. The results showed that the alkaline transesterification based project is accepted for the whole examined prices’ range while for supercritical transesterification, the project is accepted for biodiesel prices of about 0.75-0.85 €/L.