Europe and Asia: Chemically catalyzed biodiesel

The European and Asian strategy to improve climate change and fossil fuel depletion problems is based mainly on the chemically catalyzed biodiesel obtained from vegetable oils. There is a variety of feedstocks for the production of this biofuel, from inedible oils, (mainly rapeseed oil in Europe or jatropha oil in Asia), to edible oils (principally sunflower oil in Europe and palm oil or soybean oil in Asia, although corn, peanut, cotton seed or canola oil can also be cited) (Ranganathan et al., 2008; Abdullah et al., 2009). As the elected method for industrial biodiesel production is chemical catalysis, these vegetable oils are preferred to other heterogeneous lipids sources. These other lipids need pretreatment prior to their use (Peterson, 1986; Fortman et al., 2008), and include waste frying oils, waste — activated bleaching earth from the oil refinery industry, and even animal origin lipids such as beef tallow, lard, yellow grease and poultry grease or fat from fat traps, septic tanks, or waste water sludges. The need for economically viable vegetable oils for biodiesel production implies the cultivation of greater areas with oil-producing crops such as sunflowers or palm oil trees. Thus, the previously mentioned rising corn prices, owing to the derivation of huge amounts of grain for the industrial production of bioethanol, is neither an isolated case in developing biofuel industries nor the only aspect of the biofuel industry issue. Like the bioethanol industry, the European and Asian biodiesel industries have the energy and chemical problems associated with the current biofuels model. These limitations can be summarized according to nearly obsolete technology, being strongly dependent on chemical catalysis, non-renewable materials and promotion of non­sustainable market and farming practices (Guerrero-Compean, 2008; Demirba§, 2009; UNCTAD, 2010).