5 November 2008
BIODIESEL
All Good and Gaining Ground
North America is slowly catching up with the rest of the world on the 20 to 30% mileage advantage of diesel engine vehicles. Along with recent improvements in cleaner petroleum diesel, the next step in reducing emissions is adding biodiesel from renewable sources.
Biodiesel is a petroleum equivalent diesel fuel typically sourced from soybean or canola (rapeseed) oils and processed into ASTM D 6751 grade diesel fuel. While not necessarily fitting the “bio” prefix, biodiesel is also produced from tallow or cooking grease making productive use of a renewable waste product.
The pure biodiesel is blended with standard seasonal petrodiesel in proportions typically ranging from 2 to 20% cent biodiesel, with the mix amount identifi ed by the “B” number, e.g. B20 biodiesel contains 20% biodiesel content. Europe, with its significant proportion of diesel cars is the biggest user of biodiesel with many countries requiring a B5 (5% biodiesel) blend in their retail fuels, and higher blend ratios legislated over the next few years as part of further reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission levels and petroleum consumption.
Biodiesel uses
Most current North American biodiesel use is in municipal and industrial fleets having controlled fuel supply chains where it is used in B10 to B20 blend ranges. Over the past several years, hundreds of North American communities, including most major Canadian cities, have tested biodiesel in their public transportation systems running millions of kilometers.
Current Canadian federal regulations for Biodiesel content will require that all retail diesel be provided as B2 blend by no later than 2012. British Columbia and Saskatchewan are accelerating and expanding on this standard by mandating that diesel is B5 content by 2010. Production in Canada is still in its infancy with only two large plants generating approximately 100,000,000 L of annual capacity. This is expected to grow signifi cantly over the next few years, supported in part by the $1.5B federal ecoENERGY for Biofuels program dedicated to developing Canadian biofuel production, and with a proposed target of at least 500 million litres of biodiesel productionby 2010.
On a much smaller scale, several operators have built localized processing plants that take restaurant cooking oil and grease waste and convert it into industry grade biodiesel. This provides yet another win-win situation where a waste product can be used to provide further pro-environmental benefit. One such plant operated by The Biodiesel Company of Markham, Ontario collects waste cooking oils to be used in the annual production of almost 10,000,000 L of pure biodiesel, which is blended at local diesel fuel distributors.
Environmental impacts
According to the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association (CRFA), using a biodiesel fuel mix is the lowest cost opportunity for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from a diesel vehicle. Vehicles burning biodiesel also have less tailpipe particulate matter (PM), and fewer hydrocarbon (HC) and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions. In order to estimate potential emissions reductions from various biodiesel blends, several easy to use tools are available online from the British Columbia based Biofl eet group at http://biofleet.net.
Cold weather operation with higher blend biodiesel fuels such as B20 has been tested with good success in many Canadian locations, such as Montreal’s bus fl eet, provided that suitable cold temperature petrodiesel is used in the blend and a lower biocontent fuel mix is used in extreme cold. Continuing refinement of biodiesel treatments that lower the cloudpoint temperature of these fuels is expected to eliminate special winter handling and use factors required by higher biocontent fuels in the near future.
While the number of major city retail outlets offering biodiesel at the pumps is still very limited, it is expected that several smaller retailers will add more biodiesel supply ahead of the upcoming federal and provincial requirements. All of these developments should compliment very nicely with the planned introduction of many more high mileage diesel powered vehicles over the next two years and give fleet managers new opportunities in their quest for efficient and “green” vehicle solutions. | 
