Soybean oil is a common base material for biodiesel production, but high costs involved in its processing impair widespread production and distribution.
The method used by Haas and his team removes the use of the air pollutant hexane from the soy oil synthesis process. Hexane, a liquid derived from petroleum, is used to extract vegetable oil triglycerides before the actual biodiesel production process.
The new process incubates dry soy flakes with sodium hydroxide and methanol rather than using the hexane oil removal procedure.
Although preventing the use of the polluting hexane, the high moisture of content of soy flakes would require a large amount of methanol. The research team have circumvented this by using dry soy flakes, saving over $US2 per gallon in production costs from biodiesel made with full-moisture flakes.
Once the biodiesel production is finished, the protein-rich flakes left over can be sold as animal feed, countering the cost of using the alternate biodiesel production scheme, according to Haas.
