Palm Biodiesel

One of possibility to convert palm oil (crude palm oil) to biodiesel by the catalytic processing. Mostly, palm oil contains long chain of free-, -fatty acid. In order to convert to biodiesel, the oxygen contain in palm oil should be removed by the catalytic process using hydrodeoxigenation catalysts (HDO reaction). These catalyts usually as suported bimetal catalysts. Surely, the conditon process is conducted at high pressure in H2 gas and high temperature. Therefore, this process needs the special equipments (reactor, condensor, etc) which can operate at high pressure and temperature. Moreover, high active of HDO catalysts also should be prepared. The adventage from this process is a high cetane number of biodiesel from palm oil (crude palm oil) could be obtained. For information, PERTAMINA as Indonesian Petroleum Industry has already been processing this reaction, converting palm oil (crude palm oil) to biodiesel in pilot plant scale.