BioDiesel for all

In today’s world of green energy industry, everyone strive to reach a reliable sources of renewable energy. This energy should effectively replace the current fossil fuel addiction of the modern society. Biodiesel is often rise as a promising source of renewable energy that is already available and can be used instantly without the need to radically change the entire technology used for industry and transportation, like other clean energy resources require.
Biodiesel is a nickname for natural fatty acids that can be used as a replacement fuel for diesel engines. Biodiesel is cleaner, more effective and good for the engine than ordinary fossil fuel based diesel. Moreover and most importantly, biodiesel is renewable and can be manufactured from the remains of biological materials (plants and animals oil) hence the name “bio-diesel”.
In order to produce biodiesel there is a need to process the natural fat, like vegetable oil with a simple chemical process called “transesterification”, which is actually reacting the oil with some kind of a catalyst like a strong base, to separate the fatty acids from the oil.
The biodiesel industry today focuses on the machinery and methods that will be used to produce biodiesel from vegetable and animals oils. This industry grow rapidly and provide a large set of methods to produce biodiesel from equipment for home made fuel, for personal use, to large industrial machines for mass production of bio-diesel and other bio-fuels. The sources of the raw material (oils) for biodiesel is also variable and go from used cooking oil to fresh oil produced directly from plants, like soy.
The problem with biodiesel is actually the sources that will be used to produce the fuel in large quantities. Today, there is not enough oil on earth to support the replacement of the entire fuel demand with biofuels. The simple facts are that if we will transform our currently crops to fuel, we will soon won’t have anything left to eat. The current source for biodiesel is mainly very important edible crops like corn and soy. The great increase in bio diesel production in the past few years already caused an increase in food prices, and the future famine disaster is already knocking on the door.
According to this, in order to secure biodiesel as a solid fuel resource for the future, the industry must focuses in a new resources of biological oils that will not jeopardize our edible crops. some replacements have been suggested in the past, and look promising.
One idea for new oil source is using algae. algae are most simple to grow than plants and produce a large amount of oil by fixing atmosphere carbon using the sun light energy. algae are also easy to harvest and process than plants. However, year of scientific effort to make oil production from algae was yet to be successful, and mass production of oil from algae and its relative is still seams to be a science fiction.
Other ideas focuses on new kind of crops that naturally producing large amount of oil, are easy to grow and are not used as a nutritional source, so they will not compete human food supply. As an example, people suggested to use jatropha plants has a resource for oil production. But the truth is that even these crops will probably will not solve the problem and will fail to supply the huge demand to fuel that predicted to the near future.
As a result, I believe that the big challenge of the biodiesel industry is not in improving that current methods of crops growing or industrial techniques, but in the scientific research and biotechnology.
Biodiesel research must try to use the new biotech methods that were dramatically improved in the last decades, to create a new kind of crops or algae that will be genetically engineered to increase the quality of these crops as oil providers. The scientific world is working on this topic for while with small successes, but in order to bring a good solution the scientists will need much more funding. This is where the industry must enter and supply the demand of science to make these crops a reality. The energy industry must switch its thinking and think more like people from the drug industry – invest in basic scientific research for better results in the future. The first company that will successfully create the new kind of crops, will gain a huge influence on the entire economy from agriculture to transportation, promising a gigantic profit in the prospect.
The biodiesel manufacturers must give attention to research and development of the raw materials of their industry (oils) in order to assure a fine and profitable future for them and for us.