A Comprehensive Economic Assessment of Producing Biodiesel Derived from Used Cooking Oil Using the BioPro380 EX

The authors performed economic assessment of producing biodiesel at pilot scale using used cooking oil as feed-oil in a Bio-Pro 380 EX biodiesel reactor. The overall results suggest that the biodiesel production using used cooking oil is a viable project even at large or medium scale. The payback period for producing biodiesel at a pilot scale of 31,320 liters per year was 1.5 years, which was 1 month longer than the payback period for a large plant capacity of 66,000 liters per year. The study demonstrated that the unit selling price and unit production cost are sensitive to the economic feasibility of biodiesel production, since price variations of BWP 1 result in at least a 13% increase and 12% decrease in profit, respectively. The study further revealed that feed-oil (used cooking oil) was the most expensive among all the inputs accounting for 61%, followed by methanol and direct labour with 19% and 13% respectively. The overall energy recorded to produce approximately 360 liters of biodiesel contributed to 2% only, suggesting that Bio-Pro 380 EX biodiesel reactor is relatively a low energy intensity processor. The situation is suitable for the promotion of biodiesel particularly in countries where initiatives to stimulate the development of biofuels are at its infant stage Botswana included.

Exergy and exergoeconomic analyses for integration of aromatics separation with aromatics upgrading

Methanol to aromatics produces multiple products,resulting in a limited selectivity of xylene.Aromatics upgrading is an effective way to produce more valuable xylene product,and different feed ratios generate discrepant product distributions.This work integrates the aromatics separation with toluene disproportionation,transalkylation of toluene and trimethylbenzene,and isomerization of xylene and trimethylbenzene.Exergy and exergoeconomic analyses are conducted to give insights in the splitting ratios of benzene,toluene and heavy aromatics for aromatics upgrading.First,a detailed simulation model is developed in Aspen HYSYS.Then,300 splitting ratio sets of benzene and toluene for conversion are studied to investigate the process performances.The results indicate that there are different preferences for the splitting ratios of benzene and toluene in terms of exergy and exergoeconomic performances.The process generates lower total exergy destruction when the splitting ratio of toluene varies between 0.07 and 0.18,and that of benzene fluctuates between 0.55 and 0.6.Nevertheless,the process presents lower total product unit cost with the splitting ratio of toluene less than 0.18 and that of benzene fluctuating between 0.44 and 0.89.Besides,it is found that distillation is the biggest contributor to the total exergy destruction,accounting for 94.97%.