Biodiesel Production from Crude Palm Oil under Different Free Fatty Acid Content using Eversa Transform® 2.0 Enzyme

Abstract

Low-cost yet viable feedstock, i.e., crude palm oil (CPO) is one of the potential sources to be utilized in the biodiesel industry. However, CPO mainly contains a high free fatty acid (FFA) content. One of the promising methods to treat feedstock containing high FFA such as CPO is an enzyme-catalyzed transesterification owing to no sensitivity to the presence of FFA. Hence, this study aims to investigate biodiesel production from CPO under different FFA content using enzyme-catalyzed transesterification. Eversa Transform® 2.0 lipase which is a low-cost enzyme was used as a liquid enzyme. Experiments were conducted by changing the temperature (30–60 °C), the methanol-to-CPO molar ratio (3:1–8:1), and enzyme concentration (0.1–0.4 wt%), and. Intriguingly, the higher the FFA content of CPO, the higher the biodiesel yield. The result showed that biodiesel yield as high as 97.91% could be attained at a milder temperature of 40 °C, CPO with FFA content of 19.33%, and methanol-to-CPO molar ratio of 7:1.