VENTURE: Biodiesel Club
Posted on 13. Apr, 2009 by Charles Tsai in E-Ventures, Environment
Nick Selock, 19, USA - My venture is part of a larger group that works to improve biodiesel production and create a sustainable power source at a farm nearby.
We plan to create methane from an anaerobic digester and then take the gas and convert it into methanol. This methanol is an important part of the biodiesel production process and is currently obtained from processes using natural gas, which are inherently harmful to the environment.
Our project would take the manure from the farm and capture the methane released (which is a green house gas with more potency than carbon dioxide) and minimize the amount of natural gas required for the project.
This process would allow the biodiesel to be produced by more natural byproducts and without the need of more gas drilling.
This venture will demonstrate to the community that we can reduce our dependence on oil just by leveraging potential energy sources that are generally wasted and ignored. It will also produce higher grade fertilizer in the digestion process and remove the excess green house gas (methane) from the air while producing a necessary component of a clean fuel.
Success will be measured by the net amount of methanol created by the process. This not only represents the amount of green house gas that was stopped from going into the air, but also the amount of natural gas conserved by the process. We aim for the steady production of a gallon of methanol gas produced every week, but without further research it will be impossible to tell our lower and upper limits.
Goals:
- Design and construct an anaerobic digestion process
- Design and construct a methane-to-methanol conversion process
- Purify methanol to high qualities (90%)
- Use methanol in current biodiesel process
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