Abstract
Enzymatic biodiesel synthesis can solve several problems posed by the alkaline-catalyzed transesterification but it has the drawback of being too expensive to be considered competitive. Costs can be reduced by lipase improvement, use of unrefined oils, evaluation of soluble/immobilized lipase preparations, and by combination of phospholipases with a soluble lipase for biodiesel production in a single step. As shown here, convenient natural tools have been developed that allow synthesis of high quality FAMEs (EN14214) from unrefined oils in a completely enzymatic single-step process, making it fully competitive.
Highlights
Bio-inspired processes or enzymatic reactions have a low environmental impact, reduce the amount of waste material and can minimize costs, serving the requirements to integrate environmental sustainability with economic growth and welfare
The soluble and immobilized preparations of LipA, LipI.3 and the cold-adapted lipases LipC and its thermo stable variant LipCmut described in Section 2.2 were evaluated for biodiesel synthesis
Different types of phospholipases can be applied depending on the acyl ester bond they hydrolyze in the phospholipid molecule [77]: Phospholipase A1 (PLA1), which catalyzes the hydrolysis of the fatty acid at position sn-1 in the phospholipid molecule releasing a lyso-phospholipid (Lyso-PL) and a free fatty acid (FFA), has already been applied to the degumming process [63,77,78] in combination with phospholipase C (PLC), which cleaves the phosphorus–oxygen bond between glycerol backbone and phosphate, releasing a diacylglycerol (DAG)
Summary
Bio-inspired processes or enzymatic reactions have a low environmental impact, reduce the amount of waste material and can minimize costs, serving the requirements to integrate environmental sustainability with economic growth and welfare. The reaction for the chemical synthesis of biodiesel (transesterification) is the conversion of vegetable oils or animal fats into methanol (FAME) or ethanol (FAEE) esters This reaction proceeds very efficiently in an alkaline medium by addition of sodium methoxide, sodium or potassium hydroxide, or by acid catalysis, usually with sulfuric acid [2]. This process requires efficiently pre-treated (degummed or refined) raw materials, is affected by the presence of water in the sample, and cannot make use of the free fatty acids (FFAs) contained by most crude oils [3], being difficult to achieve sufficiently high degrees of conversion [2,4]. The enzymatic method has only scarcely been industrially adopted, mainly due to the still high costs of both, the immobilized enzymes traditionally used, and the raw materials [2,12]
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