Sustainable biodiesel production on micro-scale

Due to the fact that fossil fuel resources are decreasing significantly and that their usage has a negative impact on the environment, there is a constant search for alternative fuels. Biofuels, especially biodiesel, attract more and more attention since they are usually considered as environmentally friendly. However, conventional methods of biodiesel production include the application of large amounts of acids or bases together with large amounts of water needed for purification. Therefore, a question mark can be put on the term environmentally friendly. The most common in- dustrial process of biodiesel production is transesterification of different oils with methanol in a batch reactor using acids or bases as catalysts. Alternative production paths are constantly being explored. One of the solutions to max- imize production efficiency and minimize the production costs is the use of enzymes as catalysts in a continuous process. Advantages of continuous biodiesel production processes are being more and more explored whereby appli- cation of microreactors results with many advantages comparing to conventional, batch and macroscale processes. In this paper, a short overview of different microreactor types for biodiesel production has been presented