News and information about Biodiesel & alternative fuels.

2006/04/20

Clean Car Maps

Clean Car Maps provides fueling station info for all sorts of alt fuels - electric inductive and conductive, CNG, LNG, Ethanol, Methanol and Hydrogen - but for some reason biodiesel isn't there...

New Biodiesel Reactor

Just saw this on Slashdot:
"A professor of chemical engineering at Oregon State University developed a small reactor to directly convert vegetable oil to biodiesel. Goran Jovanovic reports his invention is approximately the size of a credit card. It pumps vegetable oil and alcohol through parallel channels to convert the oil into biodiesel almost instantly. Current mainstream methods to produce biodiesel take more than a day and also produces other byproducts which must be neutralized before disposal or use in other manufacturing processes."
The Forbes piece says this new process doesn't even require a catalyst...