Team Oil from [the] Soil is comprised of a group of senior chemical engineers at Calvin College who are proposing an alternative method to producing biodiesel. This alternative entails converting the oil found in seeds from the Jatropha Curcas plant into biodiesel. Team Oil from [the] Soil plans to design and optimize a full scale plant that extracts and converts the oil found in Jatropha Curcas seeds into a usable diesel fuel substitute. In addition to this, the team plans to build a simplified prototype to demonstrate the entire process. Using the Jatropha seed oil to produce biodiesel has been found to be a feasible option because: The yield of biodiesel per hectare for Jatropha is more than four times as much fuel per hectare as soybean, and up to ten times that of corn The Jatropha plant is a non-food plant and would not consume any food stock. The Jatropha plant can be grown in harsh, arid conditions, making it suitable for growth in many different and difficult environments. Jatropha plantations and biodiesel production has the potential to boost the income of less developed countries with vast wastelands. The producing of biodiesel from Jatropha Curcas seeds has been broken down into two major steps: 1. Extraction of seed oil: This requires a high yield chemical procedure to extract the oil from the Jatropha seeds. It has been decided that hexane solvent extraction is the most feasible method of extraction. 2. Conversion of seed oil to biodiesel This step utilizes the transesterification process, it is the most effective and feasible method to produce the biodiesel using the extracted Jatropha seed oil. Team Oil from [the] Soil has created this report to explore the processes that will be used in the project, and the parameters that govern the overall feasibility of the project.
