Illinois Biodiesel Initiative is a student-driven club that aims to make biodiesel from waste
vegetable oil that's produced in the dining halls on campus.
Biodiesel is the kind of biodiesel we make anyway, is when you take waste vegetable oil
and react it with methanol to create a fuel.
Biodiesel can be run in any diesel engine without any modifications or anything.
It's a fuel that's similar to diesel fuel, the normal diesel that's made from fossil fuels.
However, it does burn cleaner and causes fewer emissions of pollutants, particulate matter,
nitrous oxides.
The waste vegetable oil comes from the dining hall, so that's a waste product.
We're basically collecting garbage from them.
Grouch and Carpool has provided us with a truck, so we have a truck with a fuel tank
on the back and a waste oil tank.
And we have all the hoses and pumps there, and then we hook everything up, go to the
dining halls about once a week, and pick up all the oil and take it to ISTC where we
react it.
We run reactions pretty much every week, and that involves taking up to 350 gallons of
oil and mixing it and making biodiesel out of it.
We have a 400 gallon reactor, our main reactor is 400 gallons, so we can produce up to 330
gallons of biodiesel per reaction.
ISTC is the Illinois Sustainable Technology Center, so it's a research center in Research
Park, and they have been incredible with giving us space to work in and giving us a lot of
the supplies we need, research space, research supplies, speakers, stuff like that, so they
really help to make this possible.
It's Joe Pickowitz, and I'm an environmental engineer at the Illinois Sustainable Technology
Center here on the campus of the University of Illinois.
I assist the engineers with outdoors with the biofuel projects.
Several years ago, we just kind of got the idea, we've seen biodiesel coming online,
so we kind of jumped on it, and Lieutenant got in their bottles of truck to do experiments
with.
I kind of let them do the work, but I kind of hope to see them and try to do things
so fun.
We also have a research group that works to make soap.
We take glycerin, which is a waste product of biodiesel reaction, and we add potassium
hydroxide and heat it up for about three hours and mix it continually, and then we
dilute it with a bunch of water, and at the end we get soap.
Most of our research has been kind of adjusting our recipes so far, but we think we have it
down and all the calculations, so pretty soon we'll be making a larger scale batch of soap,
maybe a few hundred gallons instead of just small makers.
The dining halls on campus use a lot of liquid soap for a pre-wash for their dishes, so they've
expressed a lot of interest in that, so we'd like to be able to provide them with some
of the soap.
We've gotten our recipe kind of down to a science.
We get funding from the university to pay for the biodiesel.
We sell it at the market cost of diesel fuel, and hopefully we'll be able to sell the soap
too.
We do some financial analysis to see if that evens out, and right now we do cover our costs
definitely.
It's economically sustainable.
