Economical Evaluation

Balanced Investment Costs
AT technology is characterized by balanced investment costs. Cold- and warm-pressing procedures, transesterification and esterification at ambient conditions reduce the energy costs and lower the use of consumables to a minimum.

The yield related to the portion that can be transesterified adds on to almost 100%. AT plants can be flexibly adapted to changing conditions (different oils, waste fats and fatty acids).

There are alternatives for an additional added value from the resulting glycerine phase (90%). Glycerine with purity of 99.7% can even be used in the pharmaceutical industry. The optional glycerine evaporation at technical quality (90%) produces the by-product potassic salt, which can be used directly as fertilizer in agriculture.

Based on a plant with a production size of approximately 100,000 tons of RME per year and taking the current market prices for auxiliary agents and resources such as methanol into consideration, transesterification costs sum up to approximately 0.10 EUR per litre biodiesel.

The production costs can even be further reduced by additional conditioning of the glycerine that results from the transesterification process (glycerine distillation).