OSU ENGINEER'S FUEL MAKER A NATURAL.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Imagine gas without gas stations.

A new invention by an Oregon State University engineer offers an intriguing peek at what for some could be do-it-yourself fuel, thanks to a tiny chemical reactor that can turn vegetable oil and alcohol into biodiesel. The microreactor - a single unit is about the size of half a credit card and twice as thick - is the invention of OSU chemical engineering professor Goran Jovanovic.

"This could be as important an invention as the mouse for your PC," Jovanovic said. "If we're successful with this, nobody will ever make biodiesel any other way."

Homemade fuel would be a natural for farmers, who could even produce the vegetable oil from soybeans or oilseed crops. And even though the average car owner might never get a home biodiesel kit for Christmas, the new technology not only could help reduce dependence on foreign oil but also shift some fuel production from centralized refineries to clean, local producers.

That shift is still a ways off, if it ever comes at all, but Jovanovic's microreactor is a step along the path. What's needed now is some private investment. Jovanovic is working with the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute to drum up funding for a demonstration project that would show that the technology will work on a commercial scale.

At its heart, the microreactor is a simple device. It's made by etching tiny, parallel grooves into wafers of plastic and gluing them together. That creates small channels, each one smaller than a human hair.

When vegetable oil and alcohol are forced through the channels along with a small amount of catalyst, the reaction that turns the mixture into biodiesel occurs almost instantly.

The way biodiesel is made now takes place at biorefineries where oil and alcohol are mixed in huge tanks with the catalyst, typically sodium hydroxide. After mixing for a couple of hours, it takes another 12 to 24 hours to complete a reaction that creates biodiesel and glycerin, a byproduct that after extensive cleaning can be used in the manufacture of soaps.

The Jovanovic microreactor would move the refinery to the farm or perhaps a farmer's cooperative. Although each reactor wafer only produces a few drops of biodiesel, thousands of them could be stacked into a single device that would be no larger than a suitcase but capable of squeezing out hundreds of thousands of gallons a year.

"The reactor itself would be as big as your PC," Jovanovic said.

Jovanovic also hopes to improve the microreactor by coating the nanochannels with sodium hydroxide or a similar agent, eliminating the need to add a liquid catalyst and making biodiesel production even cleaner and simpler.

"Since microreactors have such phenomenal surface area per volume, it would be natural to put the catalyst on the (channel) walls," he said. "That's what this technology is good for."

But the biggest hurdle may come in changing the way people think about fuel. Like fuel cells that could give homeowners the ability to generate their own electricity, homemade biodiesel requires a shift in thinking from centralized fuel production to distributed fuel production.

"For anything like this to emerge, the whole system has to evolve," Jovanovic said.

It's still not clear how much homemade biodiesel would cost per gallon. But small-scale biodiesel has potential benefits that might make it worth paying for: It's cleaner than petroleum-based gas, the crops used to make it help remove heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the air, it would reduce dependence on foreign oil and it would make the fuel distribution system less vulnerable to attacks and natural disasters.

It also could bolster farmers by putting them in the business of energy production and give developing countries an easy source of cleaner fuel.

"I'm very excited," said Jovanovic, who's been doing research for 30 years. "This is something that is very close to the skin of a lot of people, and I see it as having the most potential of anything I've ever worked with. This is something that really builds onto our lives."

CAPTION(S):

The microreactor might shift fuel output to clean, local producers.