A choice Rajendra Srivastava made 20 years ago may now help the world fight air pollution and climate change. Then a student in Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh, he had just completed a BSc and had admission offers to pursue MSc in mathematics as well as chemistry.
While he enjoyed the rigours of desktop mathematics more than the demands of laboratory chemistry, he reasoned that chemistry would have more applications in day-to-day life. So he chose chemistry and, after his MSc, approached the National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) in Pune for a PhD. There, Darbha Srinivas, a senior scientist coaxed him to join the search for novel catalysts - complex compounds that facilitate chemical reactions and are crucial in myriad industries.
Three weeks ago, a chemical plant in Beatrice in rural Nebraska, the US, started full-scale commercial operations to turn recycled cooking oil and corn oil into high-quality biodiesel using a catalyst whose seed lay in that conversation between Srinivas and Srivastava.
The Beatrice plant with a capacity to produce 50 million gallons biodiesel per year, uses a solid catalyst developed at NCL that combines two key processes that turn oil to biodiesel through a single step, eliminating waste, improving process efficiency, and expanding the options of which oils to use.
The technology can turn most vegetable oils, animal fats, or waste cooking oils directly into biodiesel, without the need for expensive pre-processing or post-process washing with water. It also yields high-purity glycerin as a byproduct, an additional revenue stream for the plant.
"The start of production at Beatrice is a major milestone and a significant step toward demonstrating the commercial viability of the technology," said Rob Tripp, the chief executive officer of Benefuel, a biodiesel refining company that acquired the catalyst from the NCL. "The key question has been whether the technology can be scaled up and applied to a large production facility ... we're pleased that production is now underway and results are very encouraging," Tripp said in a statement released earlier this month.
The catalyst - which Srivastava and Srinivas do not mind describing as something that looks like "metallic noodles" - also represents a unique laboratory-to-market journey, an illustration of how scientific ideas can be turned into wealth.
The NCL, a laboratory under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has over the past four decades transferred about 300 technologies to industries - small, large, and medium, domestic and foreign - a senior CSIR scientist said.
"I saw NCL as a laboratory doing things important for the chemical industry," says Srivastava, who is now an associate professor and head of the chemistry department at the Indian Institute of Technology at Ropar in Punjab. He had joined NCL as a PhD scholar in 2002 after a three-year break following his MSc because he was unable to leave Gorakhpur for personal reasons.
Supervised by Srinivas, Srivastava looked for catalysts to facilitate the processes of esterification and trans-esterification - both required to convert oils into biodiesel. Oils contain free fatty acids that need to be esterified and triglycerides that need to be trans-esterified for biodiesel. About two years after trial-and-error laboratory experiments, the scientists identified a possible metallic catalyst.
The NCL filed a patent. While Srivastava left to pursue post-doctoral research in South Korea and Japan, other PhD scholars continued the work, trying to develop versions of the catalyst that would be commercially attractive.
"We looked for catalysts to support biodiesel production because of the focus over the past decade on environmental concerns, air pollution and climate change," said Srinivas. "Biodiesel is cleaner than conventional diesel and is carbon-neutral."
The US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) says biodiesel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 57 per cent to 86 per cent, when compared to petroleum-derived diesel. "Biodiesel also has lower levels of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter emissions than conventional diesel," Srinivas says.
According to the EPA, biodiesel is one of the most practical and cost-effective ways to immediately address climate change. In addition, biodiesel sharply reduces major tailpipe pollutants from diesel, particularly from older vehicles. This is important because the EPA has consistently cited diesel exhaust - primarily from older trucks, buses and other vehicles - as among the most dangerous pollutants.
Benefuel contacted NCL after the laboratory filed its patent application on the catalyst. Since 2010, Benefuel and Flint Hill Resources, another US company, have worked together to test and validate the technology for commercial-scale production.
"One of the attractive features of the process is the high-purity glycerin which may be used in pharmaceutical products," said Ashish Lele, a senior NCL scientist in the polymers and advanced materials division who was not directly associated with the research on the catalyst.
Biodiesel is usually blended with fossil fuel-derived diesel for use in engines, with blend levels ranging from two per cent to 20 per cent biodiesel with 98 per cent to 80 per cent standard diesel.
A senior CSIR official says it isn't surprising that Indian companies haven't approached the NCL for the catalyst for biodiesel. "There are two possible explanations for this - we don't have easily available non-edible oil and the subsidies enjoyed by diesel hasn't allowed the idea of biodiesel to take-off," the official said.
The 50 million gallons per year capacity of the Beatrice biodiesel is still a small fraction of America's domestic biodiesel production. The US Energy Information Administration has estimated that the 95 biodiesel plants across the US (in June 2016) had the capacity to produce 2.1 billion gallons per year.
Meanwhile, the primary source of biofuel in India remains cow dung.
