There is considerable interest for the use of biological derived fuels to be employed as motor fuel components. The reason for this is two fold:
-it enables countries that have a lack of crude resources, but available arable land to reduce their dependence on oil imports;
-the overall lifecycle analysis of greenhouse gas emissions for biofuels is more favorable than for oil derived fuels.
There is a noteworthy tendency toward the use of diesel fuel. While diesel engines make a lower contribution to CO2 emissions than gasoline engines, this can be further improved with the use of biodiesel as an additive. Biodiesel is composed of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME) which are produced via the catalytic esterification of vegetable oils. IFP has developed a fixed-bed, heterogeneous catalyzed process to produce FAME and glycerol from vegetable oil and methanol.
The Esterfip-H process, commercialized by Axens, requires neither catalyst recovery nor aqueous treatment steps, which are drawbacks from the current homogeneous catalytic processes. Esterfip-H exhibits very high FAME yields and directly produces salt-free glycerol at purities exceeding 98%.
