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Biodiesel "Breakthrough"
A Minnesota college student has made quite a splash in the biodiesel world by coming up with a new way to produce fuel out of plant material. Brian Krohn, 21, teamed up with his college chemistry professor, Arlin Gyberg, to design a process that can squeeze oil from a wide variety of products, from animal fat to algae
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Biodiesel "Breakthrough" ENERGY Alternative Fuels 32-3-5 A Minnesota college student has made quite a splash in the biodiesel world by coming up with a new way to produce fuel out of plant material. Brian Krohn, 21, teamed up with his college chemistry professor, Arlin Gyberg, to design a process that can squeeze oil from a wide variety of products, from animal fat to algae to distillers grains left over from ethanol production. What's unique about the new process is that it uses very little water and doesn't produce a lot of waste.
Normally, companies make biodiesel by mixing soybean oil with a sodium hydroxide "catalyst" in a tank that's heated to a high temperature. The "batch" process takes hours to complete and produces waste that must be neutralized with either hydrochloric or sulfuric acid. The new method, called the Mcgyan method, uses a metal oxide catalyst that's added to feedstocks inside a tubelike reactor, using a continuous flow method that's much more efficient and produces little waste.
A $5 million production plant is under construction by StarTec Corp. in Isanti, Minn., which has licensed the technology. The plant will produce 3 million gal. of fuel a year using the process. It's slated to go into production in October of 2008.
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