Vegetable oils from biomass

Several developed countries have introduced policies encouraging use of biofuels made from grain, vegetable oil, or biomass to replace part of their fossil fuel use in transport. These initiatives generally have at... 

In addition to the previous observation, large-scale schemes are not strongly Unked with local agricultural systems and the rural community since they are highly responsive to biomass world markets (e.g., vegetable oils from Asian or North African countries) instead of locally produced biomass (the so-called zero-miles supply system). Consequently, in rural areas, the large-scale schemes may not activate any virtuous economic effects on local communities and, at the same time. 

Biomass is a renewable resource from which various useful chemicals and fuels can be produced. Glycerol, obtained as a co-product of the transesterification of vegetable oils to produce biodiesel, is a potential building block to be processed in biorefineries (1,2). Attention has been recently paid to the conversion of glycerol to chemicals, such as propanediols (3, 4), acrolein (5, 6), or glyceric acid (7, 8). 

The role of biocomponents in traffic fuel is increasing. The European Union Directive [1] on the promotion of the use of biofuels for transport purposes states that by the end 2005 traffic fuels should have contained 2% of components produced from renewables. The figure rises to 5.75% by the end of 2010 and up to 20% by the end of 2020. This directive defines biofuel as a liquid or gaseous fuel for transport produced from biomass, biodiesel as a methyl ester produced from vegetable or animal oil, of diesel quality, to be used as biofuel and synthetic biofuel as synthetic hydrocarbons or mixtures of synthetic hydrocarbons, which have been produced from biomass. The European Commission also encourages member states to lower tax rates on pure and/or blended biofuels, to the offset cost premium over petroleum-based fuels [1, 2]. 

Rapeseed oil and its fatty acids (stearic, palmitic, oleic, linoleic, and linolenic acids) were chosen as the samples of vegetable oil. The experiments were performed in the batch- and flow-type supercritical biomass conversion systems developed in our laboratory. For the batch-type system, a reaction vessel was made of Inconel-625 with a volume of 5 mL for the flow-type system, the supercritical treatment tube was constructed from Hastelloy stainless steel (HC 276) with length of 84 m and an id of 1.2 mm, with the total volume being about 95 mL. Detailed information about the equipment can be found elsewhere (13). 

Knothe, G., and Dunn, R. O. 1997. Biodiesel The Use of Vegetable Oils and Their Derivatives as Alternative Diesel Fuels. In Saha, B. C., and Woodward, J. (Eds.), ACS Symp. Ser. 666, Fuels and Chemicals from Biomass (pp. 1172-208). Washington, D. C. American Chemical Society. 

Shay, E. G. 1993. Diesel Fuel from Vegetable-Oils—Status and Opportunities. Biomass Bioenergy, 4,227-242. 

The most important monomers for the production of polyolefins, in terms of industrial capacity, are ethylene, propylene and butene, followed by isobutene and 4-methyl-1-pentene. Higher a-olefins, such as 1-hexene, and cyclic monomers, such as norbornene, are used together with the monomers mentioned above, to produce copolymer materials. Another monomer with wide application in the polymer industry is styrene. The main sources presently used and conceivably usable for olefin monomer production are petroleum (see also Chapters 1 and 3), natural gas (largely methane plus some ethane, etc.), coal (a composite of polymerized and cross-linked hydrocarbons containing many impurities), biomass (organic wastes from plants or animals), and vegetable oils (see Chapter 3). 

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