MALCHIN, GERMANY (dpa) – With people more health-conscious, food containing lots of animal fats is a hard sell these days. Much of the fat from beef and pork must be separated like non-edible parts and disposed of as a slaughter by-product.
A northeastern German company, Rethmann, which operates an animal carcass processing plant, has found a unique new use for fat: process it into diesel fuel for trucks.
At its plant near the town of Malchin, the company has built what it bills as the world’s first facility to produce bio-diesel fuel derived from animal fats.
The family-owned company invested 20 million marks (9 million dollars) in the project, supervisory board chairman Norbert Rethmann reports, with the new facility creating 10 new jobs.
Each year, the Malchin facility is to produce around 13.5 million litres of bio-diesel fuel for the company’s 800 trucks, which operate throughout all of Germany.
Each truck will need to be re-fitted at a cost of 1,000 to 2,000 marks, company spokesman Burckhardt Greiff said. The vehicles can then run either on plant-derived or animal-fat-derived bio-diesel.
Right now the project is in the testing phase, planned to last until the end of the year. Early in 2002, the company hopes to conclude whether bio-diesel from animal fats can be a marketable product.
New facilities would have to be built if the answer is yes, Greiff said, since the Malchin plant’s capacity will be entirely taken up producing for the Rethmann group’s own fleet of vehicles.
Company executive board member Eberhard Schmidt said that two years of research work were needed before, for the first time ever, the technology was developed. Formerly animal fats were simply burned.
Bio-diesel fuel is low on pollutants and is cheap. But in order for it to be useable as a fuel in diesel engines, the animal fat must be chemically altered in a process known as ester interchange or acoholysis. An ester is an organic compound.
Under the Rethmann process, animal fat and plant oils are mixed in a ratio of 70 to 30 together with a methanol-catalyst compound and pumped into ester interchange vats.
In the separation of methanol, glycerine and solid matter in the first phase, followed by the purification and separation of extraneous methanol and water in the second, a bio-diesel fuel which meets the accepted norms is created, Schmidt said.
