Jason Burroughs: Hi! This is Jason Burroughs with DieselGreen Fuels. Today I am going to be showing you how to make your own biodiesel. Before we get started, I'd like to talk a little bit about safety, which is the most important aspect. You'll notice I am wearing chemical-resistant rubber gloves. I am also wearing long sleeves and I have safety goggles on.

One of the chemicals we are going to be working with today, methanol, is very caustic. It's also going to be combined with lye, which is also very abrasive. We are going to want to make sure that we don't splash any of that on our skin, getting it in my eyes or on my hands. So, all the safety gear is very important.

Now, as I mentioned before, biodiesel is a chemical reaction between vegetable oil and alcohol in the presence of a catalyst. So the first thing we are going to do is we are going to pour one liter of vegetable oil into our reactor vessel. In this case, it's a two liter bottle, plastic two liter bottle.

The next thing we are going to do is we are going to combine our Lye, which is Sodium Hydroxide, which is the catalyst. We are going to put that into our 250 milliliters of methanol. That's going to create a compound called Methoxide, which will be what we are going to pour into the vegetable oil.

So you always add the lye into the methanol, because it's a powder, a dry powder, you always want to start out with the liquid and then put the dry powder in there. Now after the dry powder lye is put into the methanol, we are going to stir it. Now as we stir it, we want to make sure that it completely dissolves and then once it gets to a certain point, I am going to put the lid on it, and then we will shake it to make sure that it gets completely dissolved.

So once that's dissolved, as it's dissolving in fact, you will notice there is some heat associated with it. It's not a dangerous level of heat, but it does rise the temperature of it somewhat. Now that this is completely dissolved, we are going to pour it into our reactor vessel in with the vegetable oil. Now we are going to put the lid on it, and we are going to shake it up.

This agitation process ensures that the vegetable oil makes good contact with the Methoxide and we get the most complete reaction. Once we have a complete reaction, we are going to set this down. In fact, we are going to put it upside down on its lid, so that all the glycerine, which will be the byproduct, will fall out to the bottom. It will take probably an hour to get a good separation and at that point, all the glycerine will be at the bottom and all the biodiesel will be at the top.

However, during this process, there is going to be some residual methanol and lye still in the biodiesel. So what we are going to do is now that we have got it completely reacted, we are going to slowly open the lid, and drain off the glycerine. Once the glycerine is completely gone, and we have nothing left but biodiesel, our next step is to wash it using water.

We call it washing because we are adding water to it, and we are trying to get it the water to dissolve the water-soluble methanol and lye that's still present in the biodiesel. Once you have put the water in there, we are slowly agitating it to get it to dissolve those materials. You don't want to shake it too much or you will create soap.

After we do that, we are going to let it settle for a while and then what you are going to find is here is a murky white layer on the bottom of the biodiesel. We are going to want to take that murky layer off, which is the water with the methanol and the lye, and we are going to drain that off. Let's do that three separate times to make sure that we get all the water-soluble contaminants out of it.

Now once we have gotten all the water-soluble contaminants out of it, we are going to want to remove the water from the biodiesel. In order to do that, let's pour it back into this jar, which has an open top, which will allow the air to just slowly evaporate the water.

In our next clip, we will be going over storage and use of biodiesel.