Grau Baquero, Bernat Esteban, Jordi-Roger Riba, Rita Puig and Antoni Rius

Escola d’Enginyeria d’lgualada, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya

Spain

1. Introduction

The current dependence on oil in most industrial sectors and mainly in the transport sector is unsustainable neither in short nor in long term. This encourages to consider alternatives in most industrial sectors and incentivises to promote renewable energy use. In addition, the EU is promoting or even forcing the use of renewable energies in order to accomplish the commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.

In Europe the most common biofuels in transport are biodiesel and bioethanol. These biofuels are mostly obtained from large-scale plants and its production involves serious environmental and social problems as shown by several authors (Russi, 2008; Galan et al., 2009). In this scenario it is necessary to implement other biofuels currently not present in the Spanish market.

Straight vegetable oil (SVO) is a biofuel that can be small-scale produced from rapeseed planted in dry Mediterranean areas. The small-scale production presents several advantages and is more sustainable than large-scale production as cited by several authors (Baquero et al., 2010).

This chapter presents a method to produce rapeseed and process it to obtain rapeseed oil and rapeseed cake meal from a small-scale point of view. It also shows how rapeseed oil can be used as fuel in diesel engines for agriculture self-consumption. A production, processing and use-as-fuel model for rapeseed oil is also presented, analysing environmentally and economically the use of rapeseed oil as fuel compared to other agricultural production alternatives. The results are evaluated for dry Mediterranean area conditions.