produce biodiesel fuel right on their own farms.

All that’s needed now is someone to put everything together.

Professor Goran Jovanovic, 57, a native Yugoslavian who earned his doctorate degree in chemical engineering at OSU in 1980, said he had farmers in mind when he came up with the idea for a small chemical reactor that uses alcohol and vegetable oil to produce biodiesel.

“We’ve been doing all kinds of things with these microreactors and one day we said, ‘How about if we try making biodiesel,’” Jovanovic said.

As he puts it, the credit card-thin plastic reactors are capable of helping to free farmers not only from the stranglehold of OPEC but dependence on the traditional American fuel delivery system as well.

“There are entities that wouldn’t like to see this, and entities that do not understand it,” he said.

Essentially, the reactors, which can range in size from less than a square inch to several square inches, use tiny, parallel channels no larger in diameter than a human hair, to bring the alcohol and vegetable oil into contact with each other in the presence of a sodium hydroxide catalyst.

What results is not only a tiny stream of 100 percent biodiesel fuel, but also glycerin, the latter having uses in making soaps and even fossil fuel-free plastics.

The microreactors, each of which produces only a minute amount of biodiesel, are designed to be used with thousands of others of the same size in a single, integrated system.

Arranged this way, a unit about the size of a computer printer and costing $1,000 to $5,000 could produce as much as 50,000 to 100,000 gallons of biodiesel a year.

Jovanovic said that the energy world, which depends on billion dollar infrastructures, hundreds of thousands of employees and massive equipment to find, produce and deliver fuels, is probably not ready for the biodiesel microreactor.

“Well, these are challenging times, and we are challenging that idea. Think of a world where individuals will be empowered to produce their own energy. That world will look different and I would say would be a little more free than it is today.”

While the reactors have proven themselves in the OSU chemical engineering lab, there’s much more to the technology, Jovanovich said.

Should, say, a group of farmers, or a single farmer — willing to devote a large number of acres to grow canola oil or mustard oil — decide to make biodiesel on the farm, several other pieces of equipment, such as a crusher and an oil refinery, are needed.

Jovanovic compared it to Hewlett-Packard when that company invented the inkjet printer cartridge.

“There were so many processes along the way that had to fall into place for (that) technology to work.”

Jovaonvic said it’s difficult at this time to say how much farm-produced biodiesel would cost per gallon, but even if it were more than petroleum-based diesel, there are the environmental prices of diesel to consider, such as greenhouse gases.

OSU is now looking for partners willing to fund the building of a demonstration microreactor system, and just recently spoke with a farmer group from Utah. There has also been a lot of interest from offshore.

“There are various ways people could work together on the farm to produce biodiesel,” said Jan Auyong, assistant director for the OSU agricultural experiment stations.

While OSU Extension has held workshops on producing biodiesel on the farm, it featured scaled-down production systems for demonstration use only, Auyong said.

“(Speaking) as an economist, there are issues of cost and the capabilities of producing (biodiesel) in the right place in sufficient quantities to make it a viable energy source,” said OSU’s Bill Jaeger, an associate professor and extension policy specialist with the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department.

OSU extension soil scientist Don Wysocki, who works out of the Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center and has experimented with producing biodiesel on a small scale, said that one concern is getting the canola oil in a pure enough form on the farm to move through the ultra-tiny channels in the microreactors.

“It would have to be very clean, have to be filtered, beyond (how) you’d normally treat oil.”

Jovanovic said that his students have done a lot of the work in taking his concept to prototype reality, and that the microreactors could possibly be used to produce ethanol, too.