CHE.12 – BioDiesel-ious

• Lenka Kostadinov
• Kevin Malec
• Darshil Patel
• Mariam Saeed

Addressing the global need for more sustainable fuel options, our chemical plant proposes a solution to repurpose waste cooking oil which often gets discarded by restaurants and other facilities worldwide. We intend to manufacture high-quality fuels for automobiles, vehicles, ships, power generation, and machinery by utilizing approximately 1% of the world’s annual waste cooking oil output, which would otherwise contribute to environmental degradation. This project not only reduces petroleum-derived diesel but also promotes a sustainable environment by utilizing renewable resources. Our innovative process involves pyrolysis, hydrotreating, and hydrocracking processes to transform waste cooking oil into biodiesel and naphtha. Pyrolysis decomposes waste cooking oil into its chemical constituents, yielding syngas, bio-oil, and char. Syngas is a valuable fuel source for the fire heaters in the process to heat up the reactants. Bio-oil is hydrotreated with a high volume hydrogen gas to remove any impurities such as nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen. The hydrotreated reactants will then be hydrocracked. Where it uses catalytic reactions to convert heavy oil fractions into lighter oil based products such as naphtha and biodiesel. Using Aspen as a simulation tool, our approach exhibits the conversion of 60,000 metric tons of waste cooking oil into 15,000 metric tons of biodiesel and 5,000 metric tons of naphtha per year. For future plans and suggestions, we plan to investigate alternative feedstocks and optimize process efficiency to increase project profitability and sustainability.