Alvin Gita Raharja-Putranda Yeremia Tumewu

27 Desember 2011

Undergraduate students

Chemical Engineering Department,

Gadjah Mada University

Title:

Preliminary-design of Biodiesel Production from Algae Oil using Reactive Distillation, Capacity 500,000 ton/year

Outline:

Esterification using solid catalyst Amberlyst 15 Resin is intended to diminish free fatty acid contained in algae oil, while trans-esterification is the reaction of trygliseride with methanol producing Methyl Ester as biodiesel using Sulfated Zirconium as solid catalyst.     

Solid catalyst based reactive distillation will significantly reduce product purification cost compared to the conventional method using base based catalyst, which require 85% of total cost of production for biodiesel refinement purpose. Reactive distillation method possesses positive advantage regarding environmental issue because it does not generate base waste.  Moreover, reactive distillation will reduce cost of production due to regeneration of solid catalyst.

Jathropa oil and CPO as common sources of raw materials for biodiesel production require large area of cultivation.  The major repercussion of using those materials is the increase of food price. This impact can be decreased by using microalgae as alternative raw material due to the availability of microalgae cultivation area in Indonesia’s coastline and convenience of cultivation method.

Microalgae can produce more lipid than Jatropha in the same size of area because of its high lipid content which reach 57% of total biomass.  Besides its adaptability of living in harsh environment, microalgae can help reducing CO2 from flue gasses emission from utility process to be reused for biofixation process. 

Therefore, solid catalyst based biodiesel plant can significantly reduce global warming effect both from production of biodiesel and its production process which apply green engineering concept