Over 150 fleets of vehicles already using biodiesel.
Potential market is the 55 billion gallons/year of diesel fuel used annually in U.S.
Price is about twice that of gasoline.
Take fatty waste and transesterify:
triglyceride + alcohol ----> glycerol + fatty acids esterified with alcohol
Glycerol is a valuable byproduct.
Spent seed meal has value as a soil amendment 1.
The price of biodiesel will be strongly influenced by the price of the alcohol used for transesterification. Should
the price of biodiesel approach that of gasoline (or vice-versa), it is likely that applications such as industrial
solvents will compete to keep the price from falling further.
1. M.F. Cohen and M. Mazzola, "A reason to be optimistic about biodiesel: seed meal as a valuable soil amendment,
Trends in Biotechnology 22: 211-2 (2004)