Biodiesel as a promising alternative energy resource has been a hot spot in chemical engineering nowadays, but there is also an argument about the sustainability of biodiesel. In order to analyze the sustainability of biodiesel production systems and select the most sustainable scenario, various kinds of crop-based biodiesel including soybean-, rapeseed-, sunflower-, jatropha- and palm-based bi...

Microalgae-derived biodiesel has been regarded as a promising alternative for fossil diesel. However, the commercial production of microalgal biodiesel was halted due to its high cost. Here, we presented a pilot study on the industrial production of algal biodiesel. We began with the heterotrophic cultivation of Auxenochlorella protothecoides in a 60-m(3) fermentor that produced biomass at 3.81...

Biodiesel or fatty acids alkyl esters (FAAE) of long chain are an alternative fuel produced by a transesterification process. The potential production of biodiesel from rapeseed oil in Chile is associated to the solution of economic, environmental and social problems. Experiences from other countries have demonstrated that biodiesel prices are higher than diesel, due to the high costs of the ra...

BACKGROUND Wax ester synthases (WSs) can synthesize wax esters from alcohols and fatty acyl coenzyme A thioesters. The knowledge of the preferred substrates for each WS allows the use of yeast cells for the production of wax esters that are high-value materials and can be used in a variety of industrial applications. The products of WSs include fatty acid ethyl esters, which can be directly use...

Biodiesel production may provide a sustainable route to reduce environmental pollution caused by fossil fuel consumption. In order to minimize environmental impacts of biodiesel production, the chemical process should be optimized to minimize waste generation and energy consumption. Therefore, it is important to design biodiesel chemical reactions and processes using green chemistry and green e...

This paper presents emergy assessment of biodiesel production in Brazil using conventional, organic and agroecological grown soybean. For the conventional soybean biodiesel the indicators are: Transformity: 5.05E+05 seJ J; Renewability: 24.1%; Emergy yield ratio: 1.40; Environmental loading ratio: 3.15. These values indicate high demand of non renewable resources and low sustainability degree, ...

Reduction of fossil fuels sources, increasing of pollution gases emission, and global warming effects increase the demand of renewable fuels. One of the main candidates of alternative fuels is biodiesel. Biodiesel limits greenhouse gas effects due to the closed CO2 cycle. Biodiesel has more biodegradability, lower combustion emissions such as CO, SOx, HC, PM and lower toxicity than petro diesel...

There is a need for alternative energy sources to petroleum-based fuels due to the depletion of the world’s petroleum reserves, global warming and environmental concerns. Biodiesel is a clean and renewable fuel which is considered to be the best substitution for diesel fuel (Singh & Singh, 2010). Soybean oil is one of the major feedstocks for biodiesel production. According to United States Dep...

The major challenges for industrial commercialized biodiesel production from microalgae are the high cost of downstream processing such as dewatering and drying, utilization of large volumes of solvent and laborious extraction processes. In order to address these issues the microwave irradiation method was used to produce biodiesel directly from wet microalgae biomass. This alternative method o...

With an increase in the global pollution, there is requirement for an alternative to the fossil fuels. Non-edible vegetable oils are highly promising for producing liquid fuels like diesel. Jatropha is a potential feedstock for biodiesel, currently utilized in India and many parts of the world. The optimization of reaction conditions such as temperature, time, catalyst and molar ratio for biodi...