Down on the Bio Refinery

Professor Jovanovic


OSU Photo
Goran Jovanovic

As follow-up to a farmer making a biodiesel buck in Missouri or elsewhere, Yahoo! News1 tells us that Goran Jovanovic, a chemical engineering professor at Oregon State University, has invented a tiny reactor, which boosts biodiesel production. “If we’re successful with this, nobody will ever make biodiesel any other way,” Jovanovic said.

Jovanovic has been able to produce biodiesel by pumping vegetable oil and alcohol through tiny parallel channels, each smaller than a human hair, of the microreactor, which is about the size of a credit card. Such microreactors can produce biodiesel between 10 and 100 times faster than traditional methods. He envisions a processing facility using banks of these devices to increase production levels to the volume required for commercial use.

Theoretically, a large enough farm operation could process oil bearing grain, e.g., Canola, corn or soybeans, on site. “Instead of relying on distant refineries and tanker transport” the farmer uses the vegetable oil to produce diesel fuel for use by farm equipment.

Furthermore, it could be particularly advantageous to livestock operations to use microreactors for distributed biodiesel production2 because after the oil has been extracted the grain could used as feed for the livestock. A complete operation also would produce the alcohol feedstock, preferably from agricultural waste.

“(Speaking) as an economist, there are issues of cost and the capabilities of producing (biodiesel) in the right place in sufficient quantities to make it a viable energy source,” said OSU’s Bill Jaeger, an associate professor and extension policy specialist with the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department.

OSU extension soil scientist Don Wysocki, who works out of the Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center and has experimented with producing biodiesel on a small scale, said that one concern is getting the canola oil in a pure enough form on the farm to move through the ultra-tiny channels in the microreactors.

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