chemical engineering research and design 8 8 ( 2 0 1 0 ) 626632

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Chemical Engineering Research and Design

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cherd

Simulation and cost estimate for biodiesel production using castor oil
G.C.S. Santana a , P.F. Martins b , N. de Lima da Silva b, , C.B. Batistella b , R. Maciel Filho b , M.R. Wolf Maciel b
a

Laboratory of Technology, Department of Technology, State University of Feira de Santana, Av. Universitria, s/n, Campus Universitrio, CEP 44031-460, Feira de Santana, BA, Brazil b Laboratory of Separation Process Development, School of Chemical Engineering, State University of Campinas, CP 6066, CEP 13081-970, Campinas, SP, Brazil

a b s t r a c t
Brazilian government has established a regulation that imposes the commercialization of diesel blended with 3% of biodiesel by volume. Castor oil has being considered an option to guarantee the supply of biodiesel needed. For this reason, in this work, a continuous biodiesel plant was designed and simulated in HYSYS simulator using castor oil as feedstock. The developed process was capable of producing biodiesel at high purity using an alkali catalyst. Material and energy ows, as well as sized unit operations were used to conduct an economic assessment of the process. Total capital investment, total manufacturing cost and after annual equivalent cost were also calculated. A study of production costs was performed considering the uctuations of the raw material prices and the glycerin purication step. 2009 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Biodiesel; Castor oil; Ethanol; Cost estimate

1.

Introduction

The probable scarcity of fossil fuels in the near future, combined with concerns over the consequences of dependency on this type of energy source, in terms of changes in the Earths climate, has forced the world to nd alternatives that are less harmful to the environment. Renewable energy sources, especially vegetable fuel, have appeared as an important alternative. In 1975, in the midst of a world petroleum crisis, Brazil implemented a program to encourage the development of ethanol derived from sugar cane as an alternative to gasoline energy. This National Alcohol Fuel Program, called Prolcool, has resulted in the accumulation of a solid and diversied experience in the production and use of biofuels. It had been known before 1970s that it was possible to use alcohol derived from sugar cane as an automobile fuel, and this alternative had already been tested a number of times, but, until the 1970s, the low-cost availability of petroleum derivatives had

served as a disincentive to developing this option. However, in 1973, the situation changed, thus prompting the Brazilian government to seek out alternatives to petroleum-based energy. One of the principal benets of utilizing ethanol is that lead is eliminated from the fuel and carbon monoxide emissions are reduced, as are sulfur compounds, thus helping to reduce air pollution. On the other hand, Prolcool did not ultimately reduce Brazilian dependence on imported petroleum, and, since it focused exclusively on sugar cane, it neglected other alternatives that would have beneted small and medium-sized rural producers. Cassava is just one example of a product whose use could benet an immense contingent of farmers who are excluded from agribusinessbased markets. Another experience with vegetable fuels was the Vegetable Oil Program (Programa de leo Vegetal), which was implemented in the early 1980s and involved research centers and various sectors of Brazilian industry. At that time, a test was conducted, involving a eet of heavy trucks that traveled

Corresponding author at: Laboratory of Separation Process Development, School of Chemical Engineering, State University of Campinas, CP 6066, CEP 13081-970, Campinas, SP, Brazil. E-mail address: niveals@feq.unicamp.br (N. de Lima da Silva). Received 29 July 2008; Received in revised form 15 September 2009; Accepted 30 September 2009 0263-8762/$ see front matter 2009 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.cherd.2009.09.015

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1.5 million km using biodiesel made from a number of different plant sources, yielding satisfactory results. The Brazilian National Program for Production and Use of Biodiesel (PNPD) has established the partial substitution of 3% of diesel fuel sold in Brazil since 2008, increasing to 5% in 2013. To guarantee the supply of vegetable oil needed for this substitution, biodiesel from Castor oil must be used. Biodiesel from Castor oil shows higher viscosity than the specication proposed by the National Petroleum Agency to be used pure as biodiesel, and so it can be sometimes considered not suitable. But in this case, it will be used blended with other oils or diesel, showing the properties required for this purpose. Unlike Prolcool, PNPB utilizes direct and indirect mechanisms to stimulate the production of biodiesel and include family agriculture in the chain of production. One of the direct mechanisms is the credit line offered by the National Program for Strengthening Family Agriculture (PRONAF). Indirect mechanisms include the so-called Social Fuel Seal (Selo Combustvel Social), which can be obtained by companies that meet a variety of requirements that help to encourage social inclusiveness in the production chain of biodiesel, mainly by offering tax incentives. Brazilian businesses that buy 50% of their raw material from family farmers in the northeast receive reductions in the portion of their federal taxes related to the production and sales of biodiesel. Some vegetables have received attention from the Brazilian government, including peanut, sunower, palm, and castor beans. The castor bean plant has received more emphasis because of its low production cost and because it is easily grown, even in Brazils vast semi-arid regions, where frequent droughts severely limit agricultural production. Its seeds show oil contents ranging from 45 to 50%, with a productivity of 470 kg of oil per hectare (energy balance equivalent to that of alcoholethanol). In addition, because castor bean is not suitable for human consumption, its use as energy source does not compete with food production. Considering the government interest in developing a program to promote the social inclusion of less economic favored areas from the northeast of Brazil, including family agriculture in the biodiesel chain of production, the aim of this work was to develop a process owsheet and simulation, and conduct an economic analysis of this process to determine the extension of the investment needed for biodiesel production from castor oil in Brazil. Published literature about industrial plant design simulation of biodiesel production has been scarce. Besides few studies evaluating economic aspects of biodiesel production from several vegetable oils, including canola, soybean, sunower, rapeseed, and animal fat, have been conducted (Haas et al., 2006; West et al., 2008; Nelson et al., 1994; Noordam and Withers, 1996; Bender, 1999; Zhang et al., 2003a; Marchetti et al., 2008) no work was found considering the castor oil.

Table 2 Raw materials for processing 1000 kg/h of castor oil feed. Material
Ethanol Castor oil NaOH Water

Amount (kg/h)
591.3 1000.0 9.9 1000.0

Castor oil consists mainly of esters of 12-hydroxy-9octadecenoic acid (ricinoleic acid) and is characterized by high viscosity due to largely to hydrogen bonding of its hydroxyl groups, although this is unusual for a natural vegetable oil. Because its viscosity does not attend the Brazils National Petroleum Agency requirements (ANP, 2008) to be used pure as a biofuel, the production of biodiesel from castor oil is intended to be used mixed with mineral oil or other oils.

2.
2.1.

Methods and materials

Process simulation

HYSYS (Hyprotec system) was used to conduct the simulation. The procedures for developing the process simulation based on use of HYSYS simulator consist on selecting the chemical components for the process, as well as a thermodynamic model. Additionally, unit operations and operating conditions, plant capacity and input conditions must be all selected and specied.

2.1.1.

Chemical components

HYSYS library contains information for the following components used in the simulation: ethanol, glycerol, sodium hydroxide, and water. Because ricinoleic acid is the major fatty acid in castor oil, triricinolein was chosen to represent castor oil and ethyl ricinoleate to represent biodiesel. Triricinolein and ethyl ricinoleate were not available in HYSYS and two hypothetical molecules were built up to represent them using the hypo manager tool. Specication of a component requires input of a number of properties, such as molecular weight, acentric factor, as well the critical properties of the substance. The properties used to create the molecules of triricinolein and ethyl ricinoleate are described in Table 1.

2.1.2.

Thermodynamic model

Table 1 Properties for hypothetical molecules creation (Ndiaye et al., 2006). Properties Substances Triricinolein
Molecular weight (g/gmol) Critical temperature (K) Critical pressure (bar) Acentric factor 925.9 993.4 3.3 2.542

Owing to the presence of polar compounds such as ethanol and glycerol in the process, the non-random two liquid (NRTL) thermodynamic model was selected for use as the property package for calculation of activity coefcient of the liquid phase in the simulation. Since some binary interaction parameters were not available in the simulation databank, they were estimated using the UNIFAC vaporliquid equilibrium and UNIFAC liquidliquid equilibrium methods.

Ethyl ricinoleate
342.2 802.8 9.8 1.151

2.1.3. Plant capacity, unit operations and operating conditions

Plant capacity was specied at 1000 kg/h castor oil feed. The amounts of raw materials needed to process the dened plant capacity is shown in Table 2. The process units included reactor, distillation column, extraction column, pumps, and heat exchangers.

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Fig. 1 Process owsheet for biodiesel production.

3.
3.1.

Results and analyses

Process design

Process owsheet is presented in Fig. 1 and the properties of main streams in Table 3.

3.1.1.

Transesterication reaction or biodiesel synthesis

Biodiesel is dened as a mixture of long chain alkyl esters usually produced by transesterication of a lipid feedstock with alcohol, methanol or ethanol. Stoichiometrically, the reaction requires a 3:1 molar alcohol to oil ratio, but excess alcohol is usually added to drive the equilibrium toward the products side. There are several ways to perform this synthesis, either used in the industry or investigated at research and development stage. Transesterication can be alkali-, acid-, or enzyme-catalyzed and can also take place without the use of a catalyst under conditions in which the alcohol is in supercritical state. For oils containing free fatty acids (FFA) concentrations lower than 1 wt%, alkali catalysts are recommended, with KOH and NaOH being the catalysts most frequently used. For higher concentrations of FFA and water, acid-catalyzed or supercritical process to produce alkyl esters must be applied to avoid saponication during the alkali-catalyst reaction what would make the downstream separation of biodiesel problematic. In this work, an alkali catalyst was adopted because the process is using a pure vegetable oil feed, which contents of free fatty acids (FFA) and water are lower than 0.5 wt% and 0.05 wt%, respectively. Sodium hydroxide was used as catalyst and corresponds to 1% of the mass of vegetable oil that feeds the process. The ethanolvegetable oil molar ratio adopted was 12:1. Lab-scale reaction conditions and conversion data available were assumed to be appropriate for large-scale production, and set as the operating conditions for the reactor (Lima Silva et al., 2007). According to the results presented by the authors, the reaction is of rst order in relation to the molar concentration of the raw materials and the activation energy was 70,635.74 J/mol. It was assumed a conversion of 100%. It is important that the level of ethyl ester conversion be high, because the restrictions imposed by the standards of the Brazilian agency regulating vegetable fuels, the National Petroleum Agency (ANP), on the nal concentration of triglycerides in the biodiesel. Unconverted triglycerides, diglycerides, monoglycerides as a glycerol, water, and other undesirable components could cause signicant engines damage and its loss of power. Therefore, the high conversion and purication steps are the most important for biodiesel production.

Differently of biodiesel from other sources, the presence of OH groups in the ricinoleic acid increases the solubility of the ethyl esters in the oil phase, which affects the transesterication reaction, increasing both the reaction speed and conversion rate. Depending on the operating conditions we can have the extension of yield. In the case of the data presented in this work related to castor oil, it is possible to have high biodiesel conversion, and so high process yield. Besides the batch type reactors are the most utilized (Leevijit et al., 2008), the reactor was assumed to operate continuously due to its lower operating cost and high quality biodiesel production (Ma and Hanna, 1999; Noureddini and Zhu, 1997; Darnoko and Cheryan, 2000). The chosen reactor was a CSTR of 4 m3 . After the biodiesel synthesis through transesterication, the product obtained was sent to downstream purication in order to obtain the biodiesel with high purity. Downstream purication consisted of ethanol recovery by distillation; biodiesel purication, and glycerol separation.

3.1.2.

Ethanol recovery

The required molar ratio ethanolvegetable oil (12:1) is much higher than theoretical needs (3:1) and for this reason after the reaction step; the excess of ethanol has to be recycled into the process. That is done using a distillation column under vacuum to prevent biodiesel and glycerin degradation. Ethanol is the top product with 99.88% of purity. The number of stages of this column was dened based on the amount and quality of ethanol recovered. Towers using more than three stages and reux ratios over two showed the same ethanol recovery; that is, it is not worth to increase the number of stages or the reux ratio in the present study. 79% of the unreacted ethanol was recovered in the column second stage and was chilled before being re-utilized in the process. Recovered ethanol is recycled to the process being mixed with a fresh stream of ethanol prior to be pumped to reactor. The bottom stream containing mainly, ethyl esters, catalyst, and glycerol leaves the column at 97.2 C and passes through a heat exchanger to be cooled to 60 C and follows to the extraction column. The principal unit operating conditions are presented in Table 4.

3.1.3.

Biodiesel purication

Glycerin/biodiesel separation is an important step in biodiesel production. High content of glycerin in the biodiesel can lead to storage problems due to phase separation, clogging of the injector fuel and emission of aldehydes present in the combustion gases of biodiesel (Mittelbach, 1996). Some works have proposed the separation of biodiesel and glycerin by washing the mixture with water (West et al., 2008; Haas et al., 2006) or

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Table 3 Properties of the main streams. Stream name 6

Temperature ( C) Pressure (kPa) Mass ow (kg/h) Molar ow (kg/h) Mass fraction Castor oil (triolein) Ethanol Ethyl ricinoleate Glycerol Water NaOH

7
70.0 101 1601.6 14.155 0.0002 0.2767 0.6552 0.077 0.0062

8
77.8 101 287.5 6.234 0.0010 0.9988 0.0805

12
60.0 101 1314.1 7.922 0.1187 0.7986 0.0807 0.0076

13
30.0 101 1000.0 55.51 1

14
30.0 101 1051.0 1.144 0.0018 0.9977 0.0647 0.0004

17
266.05 101 109.2 1.354 0.9031 0.0054 0.0915

38.1 101 1601.6 14.155 0.6246 0.3692 0.0062

Q 100 = 5 kW, Q 101 = 34 kW, QCOND1 = 199 kW, QREB1 = 228 kW, QOND2 = 1010 kW, and QREB2 = 1087 kW.

by gravity settling (Canakci and Van Gerpen, 2003; West et al., 2008; Marchetti et al., 2008), besides that Zhang et al. (2003a) indicated that satisfactory separation could not be achieved by gravity alone. In lab-scale the biodiesel/glycerin purication has been conducted by three washing steps. Because of the presence of OH groups in the ricinoleic acid, the solubility of glycerin on biodiesel from castor oil is higher than biodiesel produced from other oils making the separation even harder. The parameters used to simulate the washing column were estimated by calculations in HYSYS Simulator. In this work, biodiesel was puried in a water washing column presenting 10 plates. Biodiesel comes out from the top of the column, without catalyst, and with water and triglyceride concentra-

tions in accordance to the ANP (2008) standard. The biodiesel nal composition was 99.77% ethyl ricinoleate, 0.18% ethanol, and 0.04% water.

3.1.4.

Elimination of water from glycerin

Glycerol is removed by distillation using a column of three stages, a reux ratio of 0.5, and the feed by the second plate. The glycerin comes out from the bottom of the column with a purity of 90.31%.

3.2.

Economic assessment

Table 4 Summary of unit operating conditions for each process. Transesterication reaction/biodiesel synthesis
Catalyst Reactor type Temperature Pressure Alcohol to oil ratio Residence time Conversion NaOH CSTR (4 m3 ) 70.0 C 1 atm 12:1 30.95 min 100%

Ethanol recovery
Reux ratio Number of stages Condenser/reboiler pressure Recovery Distillate owrate Distillate purity 2 3 1 atm 79% 287.5 kg/h 99.88%

Biodiesel recovery
Water owrate Number of stages Recovery Final purity 1000 kg/h 10 99.9% 99.77% ethyl ricinoleate

Glycerol separation
Reux ratio Number of stages Condenser/reboiler pressure Recovery Bottom owrate Bottom purity 0.5 3 1 92.93% 109.2 kg/h 90.31%

Since the process is technically capable of producing biodiesel at the required purity; it was of interest to conduct an economic assessment to determine the investment needed for biodiesel production from castor oil. According to Perlingeiro (2005), the total investment corresponds to the sum of the materials needed to implement the process, resulting from the stages of a project known as xed investment, and of the sum of the resources necessary for initiating the production activities and maintaining them, referred to as working capital. The xed investment corresponds to the resources required for constructing the plant, including direct and indirect investment. Direct investment includes the nancial resources that are allocated or to be allocated in setting up installations, which can be subdivided into ISBL (Inside Battery Limits) and OSBL (Outside Battery Limits). ISBL refers to the resources applied to the acquisition, transportation, and installation of equipment directly used in the processing, also including structural supports, insulation, paint, instruments, pipes, valves, and electrical supplies. The investment denominated outside battery limits, or OSBL, refers to the investments made in items related to the process but located outside the processing area. This includes, for example, buildings for housing equipment (structure, stairs, elevators, etc.), auxiliary buildings (cafeteria, administration, etc.), improvements in the plant grounds and facilities (wells, water treatment) and investments applied to acquiring the land where the plant will be built. The value of OSBL can be estimated as being equal to 45% of the value of the ISBL variable (Perlingeiro, 2005). Aside from direct investments (ISBL and OSBL), there is also indirect investment, which includes occasional other costs and can be estimated as corresponding 25% of the direct investment (Frare et al., 2006). The sum of the direct and indirect investments is dened as the part corresponding to the xed investment of a process. In this way,

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the total investment is established only as a function of the values of ISBL, as shown in the following equation: ITOTAL = 1.81 ISBL (1)

Table 5 Cost of the equipments. Equipment

One reactor Two distillation columns One extraction tower One boiler Four pumps Other Total US$ ISBL I total AEC

Cost (US$)
515,000 280,000 100,000 80,000 90,000 46,000 1,111,000 5,555,000 10,054,055 2,003,291

According to Kasteren and Nisworo (2007), the ISBL can be estimated based on the unit cost of the equipment needed for the process: ISBL = total cost of the equipment 5 (2)

In the current study, Eqs. (1) and (2) will be used to obtain the total investment for the biodiesel production plant. Another item to be considered in estimating operating costs is depreciation. In the present study, a depreciation rate of 10% per year will be used. Thus, equipment is estimated to have a useful life of 10 years. The annualization of total investments will be performed using the annual equivalent cost method, or AEC (Frare et al., 2006), which permits us to nd the annual equivalent cost of the initial investment. The AEC is given by: AEC = ITOTAL (1 + j) j (1 + j) 1
i i

Table 6 Cost of raw materials and other supplies for biodiesel production. Specication
Castor oil Ethanol NaOH Electricity Thermal energya
a

Unit
Ton m3 Ton MWh kJ

US$/unit
1,157.00 354.21 353.00 85.00 1.00E5

(3)

Considering natural gas as the fuel source, PCI = 8500 kcal/m3 , price = 0.3583 US$/m3 (BAHIGAS, 2007).

In which AEC represents the annual equivalent cost, in US$; t is the average useful life of the equipment, in years; and j is the annual interest rate of the current nancial markets. According to Frare et al. (2006), the useful lifespan of a project is a voluntary decision, based on identifying the projects possible economic results. Even imagining that a useful lifespan could be innite, for the purposes of the study, it is necessary to dene a temporal horizon, one that is not too far off, in order to make it possible to perform the desired analyses and verify project viability. Normally, the length of the period can be taken to coincide with the useful lifespan of the equipment to be used. The useful life of a piece of equipment, for our purposes, will be taken as 10 years, and the interest rate calculated at 15%. The cost of the equipment for the plant under study was obtained using Kasteren and Nisworo (2007) and Zhang et al. (2003b), as it is shown in Table 5. The operating costs considered are based on the raw materials used, catalyst, utilities, labor, repairs, and maintenance. In order to estimate labor costs, the plant will be considered to employ two workers per shift, plus an engineer, for a total annual cost of 408,000. The cost of repairs and maintenance will be taken as 6% of the total value of investments (Zhang et

al., 2003b) and the costs of raw materials, reagents, and catalysts will be based on the daily rate (ABOISSA, 2007). Table 6 shows the cost of the raw materials utilized and other supplies for biodiesel production. The cost of biodiesel production is obtained using Eq. (4), as follows: Cbiodiesel = CAE + annual operational cost mglycerol Pglycerol biodiesel s annual production (4)

Table 7 shows the nal cost of biodiesel, considering: the current price of castor oil in Brazil (1.157 US$/kg), the glycerin treatment stage, and the current market value of glycerin (0.36 US$/kg). Furthermore, it was also considered an optimistic scenario with castor oil being sold for 0.53 US$/L.

4.

Discussion and conclusions

The high cost of biodiesel production is largely attributed to the cost of virgin vegetable oil used as feedstock. Exploring methods to reduce the production cost of biodiesel has

Table 7 Biodiesel cost. Castor bean 1.157 US$/kg (with glycerin purication) US$
CAE Castor oil NaOH Ethanol Energy Maintenance Labor Total Biodiesel cost (US$/L) 2,003,291.20 9,996,480.00 60,998.40 869,976.81 571,530.77 603,243.30 408,000.00 14,130,153.00 1.56

Castor bean 1.157 US$/kg (without glycerin purication) US$

1,900,676.38 9,996,480.00 60,998.40 869,976.81 18,893.58 572,343.30 408,000.00 13,827,368.47 1.52

Castor bean 0.526 US$/kg (without glycerin purication) US$

1,900,676.38 4,544,640.00 60.998,40 869,976.81 18,893.58 572,343.30 408,000.00 13,827,368.47 0.92

% (participation)
13.80 68.80 0.40 5.99 3.94 4.16 2.81 100.00

%
13.75 72.29 0.44 6.29 0.14 4.14 2.95 100.00

%
22.69 54.26 0.73 10.39 0.23 6.83 4.87 100.00

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been the focus of much recent research. One method involves replacing a virgin oil feedstock with a waste cooking oil feedstock. Another alternative is to increase the oil productivity, thus reducing cost per unit. Between 2006 and 2007, the price of castor beans in Brazil shot up drastically, mainly, because of a drop in domestic production. However, in upcoming years, there will be a different scenario because state and federal governments have made an effort to encourage castor bean production. Beyond the biodiesel production, castor oil is widely used as a starting material for many industrial chemical products because of its unique structure. The presence of hydroxyl groups and double bonds makes the oil suitable for many chemical reactions and modications. It is a raw material for paints, coatings, inks, lubricants and a wide variety of other products (Ogunniyi, 2006). Because of its large range of application, it is important to ensure the supply of raw material needed for keeping these industrial sections active, and avoid the simple migration of large amount of this oil to the biodiesel market. Although it is hard to predict the castor oil cost dynamics, mainly because in this case there is a government intervention, it is expected that the increase of castor oil production will be able to supply both markets: biodiesel and chemical industries. This increase is expected because the government has stimulated castor bean production by family farmers to develop lesser favored areas from the northeast of Brazil. However, one possible way the government has to avoid the simple migration of raw material from one market to another is to favor the integration of new oilseed processing units with biodiesel plants. With regard to the glycerin purication stage, it is noted that this part of the process demands 82% of the energy consumption of the entire plant (Table 7). It should be noted that the low price of glycerin contributes negatively to the nal price of the biodiesel, which is a real problem for companies manufacturing this product. In Brazil, in 2005, the price of glycerin went as high as 1.20 US$/kg, and in May of 2007, the price fell to 0.35 US$/kg. Data from the Brazilian Chemical Industry Association reveal that Brazil is capable of producing 35.8 thousand tons of glycerin per year, but the production remains around 12.9 thousand tons, for a consumption of 13.5 thousand tons. Of this volume, 48.9% are destined for cosmetics production, 14.5% for the pharmaceutical industry, 11.9% for the paint and varnish sector, and the rest is sold to other sectors. Nowadays, a large number of biodiesel producers are incinerating glycerin (ODriscoll, 2007) to avoid glut the existing market for this substance. This shows that there is a need to nd ways of increasing the demand for glycerin and revalorize it in order to absorb the guaranteed production from the biodiesel industry, as the work of Galan et al. (2009) that proposes an efcient way to convert glycerin to food grade triacetin. Triacetin is reported to function as a cosmetic biocide, plasticizer, and solvent in cosmetic formulations. It is a commonly used carrier for avors and fragrances (Ogawa et al., 1992), and was afrmed as a generally recognized, as safe human food ingredient by the Food and Drug Administration. Another alternative to make the biodiesel production more economical is to introduce a catalyst neutralization step in order to produce glycerol of pharmaceutical grade (>99.5%), which reaches a higher value in the market. Certainly, considering the current scenario, the nal cost of biodiesel made from castor and other vegetable oils require more incentives from government in order to be able to com-

pete economically against the commercial diesel that sells in gas stations for about 1.00 US$/L. In an optimistic scenario, with castor oil been sold for 0.53 US$/L, the cost of biodiesel would be 0.92 US$/L. In Brazil, the maximum proportion of biodiesel in mineral diesel will be 5% in 2013, which will not contribute signicantly to the nal price of diesel, only about 5% in current prices. However, the use of biodiesel in Brazil will probably provide nancial and environmental benets to the country, especially in terms of diminishing the nations dependence on imported diesel fuel and stimulating agricultural sectors. This paper analyzed the technical process and production cost of biodiesel plants from castor oil through a transesterication reaction using ethanol. From a technical perspective, this process proved to be feasible producing a high quality biodiesel product to be used blended with diesel or biodiesel from other sources. However, the castor oil is more expensive than the conventional ones used to produce biodiesel, and glycerin/biodiesel separation is harder because of the OH group presented by the ricinoleic acid. Brazil has chosen for a decentralized production of biodiesel including and prizing the agricultural production of each region from its huge territory and different weather conditions. It means a diversity of reactions routes, production scales, and raw materials. In this case, the production of biodiesel from castor oil is not only linked with the energetic independence of petroleum, but an opportunity to include many small producers in the biodiesel production chain generating new sources of wealth for this underdeveloped area, that is the northeast. Research studies must continue in order to improve the transesterication reaction and purication steps to make biodiesel from castor oil more competitive.

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