Continuing depletion of fossil fuel reserves and increasing environmental
concerns have encouraged engineers and scientists to look for alternative,
clean, and renewable fuels that can reduce fossil-fuels’ negative environmental
impact and secure the energy supplies. Biodiesel has been considered as one of
the best candidates for these renewable fuels. For its production,
transesterification reaction of triglycerides is recognized as a feasible
pathway. This reaction can be carried out in continuous or batch reactors,
however, most of the other unit operations, like decanters and distillation
columns, are operated continuously. Most of the studies of biodiesel production
have been done in continuous models. In this work, we evaluate batch and
continuous processing options for biodiesel production from the economical
point of view. The economic feasibility of biodiesel as well the plants
configuration not only depends on technical design aspects but also on other
important factors such as seasonal variation of feedstock, transportation
costs, and storage costs of material. Therefore, our comparison involves size
of the market, transportation distance from supplier to producer facility, and
feedstock availability of soybean oil by the allocation of supply of raw
material. It was found that based on these aspects, batch processing shows
interesting results and should be considered for production rather that
continuous production as it is done today. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis
provides more insights of the flexibility of batch processing when scheduling
variation is considered.