Comparative Studies on Production of Biodiesel from Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) & Noctiluca Scintillans(NS)

Abstract

The world realized that the main source of energy from crude oil, which leads to the environmental concern and disappeared in few years. That’s how new resolutions are under study looking for alternate fuel to replace the fossil fuels. The research studies have been made in field, but none of which are on a large scale production locally in Oman. Based on scenario, Biomass (algae) can be produced to make a numerous variation of bio fuels, for example; bioethanol, bio-propanol, biogas (methane) and nevertheless biodiesel. The main benefit is it’s not a hydrocarbon which means it produces cleaner and less polluting gas emissions when burned off as energy source. The present studies focused on to gather the feedstock and concentrate the biodiesel to study its properties. As a part of experimental study two possibilities are taken to recover the oil from the feedstock to undergo trans-esterification to produce biodiesel. The greater the surface area of the catalyst is better formation of an alkyl species for the making of biodiesel. Zinc oxide is a novelty in this case, as it produced a biodiesel as the same quality with using other types of catalysts such as potassium hydroxide, sodium hydroxide and calcium oxide etc. Propanol can be able to replace by methanol in the biodiesel production process, as it requires fewer amount of catalyst than with methanol but achieves a higher conversion. The extracted biodiesel was analyzed by Gas chromatography and proposed cost estimation has been made which calculates an initial selling price for the biodiesel to be 0.400 OMR/lt. Keywords: Energy, Crude oil, Biomass, Biofuels, Transesterification, Gas chromatography, Zinc oxide.