Inventure for Biodiesel Producers
Inventure’s patented biodiesel technology can process low-cost waste oils and fats to produce high quality distilled biodiesel and premium glycerin. Better yet, our Mixed Super Critical Fluid process can do so without the use of expensive and unfriendly reagents and catalysts (including sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and sodium methoxide).
As Biodiesel Magazine has pointed out, Inventure’s “novel process can be retrofitted into existing facilities and improve economics by up to $1.30 a gallon, eliminating reliance on the incentive.”1 The publication went on to state that Inventure’s novel transesterification technology represents a game-changing process for the U.S. market, “combining the advantages of existing technologies, but without any of the disadvantages. It can process any feedstock, including crude or refined vegetable oil, distillers corn oil, used cooking oil, acid oil, tallow, yellow grease and more with minimal cleaning required.”
Inventure’s technology has been in commercial operation since 2017. A recent commercial project in China processes a mixture of soybean and rapeseed fatty acid distillate (FAD) with a saponifiable content around 85%. The capacity is designed for 30 metric tons per day of FAD, with the main goal of recovering and purifying the valuable unsaponifiables in FAD, specifically nutraceutical products. The plant also produces 10,000 Metric Tons of biodiesel annually and a splitter crude grade glycerin (> 82% glycerol with remainder being water). More recently, Inventure has completed detailed engineering of another supercritical biodiesel processing facility at 400 metric tons per day, from a variety of waste lipid feedstocks. This project is ongoing and will be commissioned in 2023.
Inventure’s biodiesel process technology is marketed exclusively by Air Liquide.
Key Advantages
- Efficiently processes a wide variety of feedstocks
- High quality products such as distilled biodiesel & crude glycerin (no salts)
- Simple green process operation without catalysts like sulfuric and hydrochloric acids
- 30% reduction in production costs
- Qualifies for higher LCFS credits
- Can be easily integrated into the back end of most processing plants and tailored to specific processing needs and opportunities; a simple retrofit for existing transesterification facilities
- Blends with plant capacity of produced biodiesel ranging from 3 MMgal/yr to 150 MMgal/yr
Works with Most Feedstocks, Including:
- Crude or refined vegetable oil
- DCO
- UCO
- Acid oil
- Tallow
- Yellow Grease, etc.
Minimal cleaning required, no pretreatment needed.
Products
- Distilled FAME compliant with ASTM D6751
- Premium crude glycerin (no salts)
- Distillation bottoms (can be used as fuel)
Inventure completed the world’s first commercial scale plant utilizing MSCF technology at a Wilmar International Ltd. processing plant in Jiangsu province, China to produce both bio-diesel and high value nutraceuticals. In October 2019 Air Liquide became exclusive licensor of the Inventure process.
Mixed Super Critical Fluid technology is applicable to a broad range of agribusiness waste types, including:
- Cellulosic Biomass — MSCF technology breaks down lignocellulosic biomass into fermentable sugars, lignin and high grade cellulose.
- Seed oil residues – MSC can process low value oil residues into ASTM grade bio-diesel at a fraction of the cost of traditional processes.
- Lipids — MSCF technology reacts lipids (soaps, high FFA oils, glycerides) into alkyl esters. Total conversion of lipid residues into target materials exceeds > 95%.
1 Biodiesel Magazine, 2020 Winter Edition