With many colleges going green, some are taking it to the next level by building “mobile
biodiesel education classrooms”.
North Carolina is converting traditional tobacco acres to other crops, so the state’s Southeastern Community College in Whiteville, N.C., has initiated a program to educate farmers on the ins-and-outs of biodiesel manufacturing, anticipating producers will be growing more oilseeds in the future.
Built for Southeastern Community College in North Carolina, which will use the processor for
educational purposes, demonstrating how various seeds can be turned into fuel.
While the concept of making fuel from soy, sunflower or even corn is not new, many colleges are just
starting to offer hands-on programs which focus on sustainable, eco-friendly programs. Biodiesel
production is one of many of these programs.
Project “F2F” (field-to-fuel), as it is called by the guys at Verde Biofuel who built it, will take a batch of
raw seeds, such as soy seeds and press the seed, extract the oil, clean the oil, and “process” it into fuel
during what is called the transesterification process. This all happens in a self contained mobile unit
that will run on – you guessed it – biodiesel. A biodiesel powered generator will provide the electricity
required to run this mobile biodiesel classroom.
“This is a very exciting project for us” says owner Tim McClellan, “I don’t think this has been done
before. Not to this scale anyways. This the ultimate biodiesel education classroom”.
When Southeastern Community College started looking for someone to build their mobile classroom,
they couldn’t find anyone. No one was doing this – then they found Verde Biofuel, who builds mobile
biodiesel processors for waste vegetable oil. “The process is the same for any vegetable oil”, says
McClellan, “we just had to add a few steps”.
Verde Biofuel is located in Jerome, Arizona and manufactures Verde Biotrailers™. Biotrailers™ are
complete mobile biodiesel processing units that can process 1000s of gallons of biodiesel per month.
