Synergetic Sustainability Enhancement via Current Biofuel Infrastructure: Waste-to-Energy Concept for Biodiesel Production

The concept of waste-to-energy (WtE) with regards to the utilization of byproducts from the bioethanol industry (e.g., distiller’s dried grain with solubles: DDGS) was employed to enhance the renewability of biodiesel, which would be an initiative stage of a biorefinery due to the conjunction between bioethanol and biodiesel. For example, DDGS is a strong candidate for use as a biodiesel feedstock due to the tremendous amount that is regularly generated. On the basis of an estimation of possible lipid recovery from DDGS, ∼30% of the biodiesel feedstock demand in 2010 could be supported by the total DDGS generation in the same year. Considering the future expansion of the bioethanol industry up to 2020, the possible lipid recovery from DDGS would provide more than 6 times the biodiesel feedstock demand in 2010. In order to enhance the renewability of biodiesel, the transformation of lipid extracted from DDGS into fatty acid ethyl ester (FAEE) via a noncatalytic transesterification reaction under ambient pressure was investigated in this work. The newly introduced method reported here enables the combination of the esterification of free fatty acids (FFAs) and the transesterification of triglycerides into a single step. This was achieved in the presence of a porous material (i.e., charcoal), and the optimal conditions for transformation into biodiesel via this noncatalytic method were assessed at the fundamental level.