Biofuels & Bioenergy

Biography

Biography: Andreia F. Peixoto

Abstract

Nowadays, social and economic demands as well as environmental concerns call for the development of alternative and sustainable renewable energies. More rigid government regulations and full or partial tax exemption are established to promote the utilization of sustainable fuels and biodiesel is one of the most interesting from an environmental point of view. However it is necessary to solve the major obstacle in its commercialization, its current high cost of manufacturing. The cost of the oil feedstocks (food-grade oils) and the complexity of the conventional production processes escalate the overall biodiesel production costs and is the major reason for its non-competitiveness when compared with diesel fossil fuels. INNOVCAT developed a new sustainable solution to transform wastes (oils and fats) into biodiesel. The Catalvalor project combines an innovative Catalyst (X-CAT) & Technology to produce biodiesel from wastes. Our catalyst is solid and prepared from a renewable source, is non-toxic and non-corrosive and combined with a simplified process allows the transformation of a wide variety of waste feedstocks (from 1-100 % FFA content) into high quality biodiesel without loss of activity and with a superior efficiency avoiding complex pre-treatment steps, complicated separation and purification steps and generation of large amount of waste water stream. This is an outstanding solution to solve the problems of non-competitiveness of biodiesel and the unique in the market that offers to biodiesel producers the possibility to reduce operation costs (reduction in feedstock costs) and also reduction in the equipment process costs since avoid all the complicated steps associated to biodiesel production processes.