Biofuels will play a key role in the 21st century as the world faces two critical problems; volatile fuel prices and global climatic changes. Both of these are linked to the overdependence on the fossil fuels: petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Transportation is almost totally dependent on petroleum based fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel, liquefied petroleum gas, and on natural gas. Despite a significant amount of research into biofuels, the field has not been able to replace fossil fuels. Recent advances will change this scenario. Extracting fuel from biomass has been very expensive (both monetarily and in land usage), time consuming, unusable byproducts, etc. Technology to obtain liquid fuel from non-fossil sources must be improved to be faster, more efficient and more cost-effective. This book will cover the current technology used for a variety of plant types and explore shortcomings with each.

Biofuels will play a key role in the 21st century as the world faces two critical problems; volatile fuel prices and global climatic changes. Both of these are linked to the overdependence on the fossil fuels: petroleum, natural gas, and coal. Transportation is almost totally dependent on petroleum based fuels such as gasoline, diesel fuel, liquefied petroleum gas, and on natural gas. Despite a significant amount of research into biofuels, the field has not been able to replace fossil fuels. Recent advances will change this scenario. Extracting fuel from biomass has been very expensive (both monetarily and in land usage), time consuming, unusable byproducts, etc. Technology to obtain liquid fuel from non-fossil sources must be improved to be faster, more efficient and more cost-effective. This book will cover the current technology used for a variety of plant types and explore shortcomings with each.

This book explores a novel technique for processing biodiesel using lipase immobilization by encapsulation and its physical properties, stability characteristics, and application in stirred tank and re-circulated packed bed immobilized reactors for biodiesel production. The enzymatic processing of biodiesel addresses many of the problems associated with chemical processing. It requires only moderate operating conditions and yields a high-quality product with a high level of conversion and the life cycle assessment of enzymatic biodiesel production has more favourable environmental consequences. The chemical processing problems of waste water treatment are lessened and soap formation is not an issue, meaning that waste oil with higher FFA can be used as the feedstock. The by product glycerol does not require any purification and it can be sold at higher price. However, soluble enzymatic processing is not perfect. It is costly, the enzyme cannot be recycled and its removal from the product is difficult. For these reasons, immobilized enzymatic process has been developed which retains the advantages of the soluble enzymatic process and reuse of the enzyme is possible which decreases the enzyme cost, the biodiesel produced does not contain any enzyme residue and the activity of the enzyme can be increased by immobilization. The drawbacks of the immobilized enzyme process are mass transfer limitation, enzyme leakage, the lack of a versatile commercial immobilized enzyme and some of immobilization methods involve toxic chemicals. To overcome the drawbacks of the immobilized enzyme, an attempt is made to use a degradable biopolymer ( -carrageenan) as a carrier for lipase immobilization.