I posted this in sci.energy, but noone seemed interested. There seem to be some smart chemists here, so I'll ask again..... The transesterification process used to convert vegetable oil to biodiesel evidently breaks 20 carbon chains into 10 carbon chains. I take it this cetane rating is what characterizes diesel fuel. My question is, can you dump a batch of straight vegetable oil into a crude oil refinery and catalytic crack it into gasoline like they do with Arabian crude?? Break the cetane into octane, propane, butane, methane?
- posted
17 years ago