The culminating vision for the Monadnock Biodiesel Collaborative (MBC) is the creation of a 10,000 square foot showcase facility located in the picturesque southwestern city of Keene, New Hampshire.  This facility will house a Batchelder Biodiesel Refinery (BBR), a state of the art biofuel refinery that will convert yellow and brown waste grease from across New England into a minimum of 250,000 gallons per year of quality assured 100% biodiesel.  Co-located with the MBC facility, the Keene State College fuel quality and emissions testing laboratory, will serve to expand the college’s current fuel emissions and exposure assessment program, and will verify the quality of biodiesel produced by the MBC as a collaborative service and for other biodiesel refineries as a contract service.  The fuel refinery and quality laboratory services will be self-sustaining.  Not only will this venture be economically viable, but it will embody a "first in the nation" private/public/college sector collaboration that will create a dynamic environment where business, research, education, and community service intersect with the goal of creating sustainable practices, and improving public health and environmental quality.

The goal of the collaborative is to produce a quality fuel product from a waste stream and to provide research, curricular growth,  community service and educational opportunities.  The refinery and quality testing laboratory will provide a sustainable funding stream to support student research and learning experiences from several disciplines across the Keene State College campus.  Keene State College currently has an active research program in occupational and environmental exposure assessment for petroleum diesel and biodiesel.  This collaborative venture will support expansion of this program, and KSC’s research collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to include engine emissions characterization and more specialized analyses of the gaseous and particulate phase toxins in petroleum and biodiesel fuel emissions.  In addition, the collaborative will provide KSC researchers with access to a highly characterized quality fuel product for future emissions analyses.  The research and educational opportunities will extend far beyond KSC’s current capacity.  It is anticipated that as many as 50 students per year will actively engage with faculty and staff from across the campus in learning experiences in areas such as:  journalism, communication, education, refinery processing, chemistry, environmental science, business management, green business practices, occupational and environmental health, ecology, and public policy engagement.  

Product and Service Description

Biodiesel is a light oil which is produced from vegetable oil or lard. It has a "0" on the carbon scale, which means that the plant the oil was made from produced as much oxygen as it will produce carbon dioxide. Biodiesel fuels burn cleaner and produces more British Thermal Units (BTU’s) than standard diesel fuel. Biodiesel fuel can be used to heat homes or run any diesel fueled vehicle.

Our Biodiesel can be made from waste vegetable oil or virgin vegetable oil (and with some process modifications, Brown waste). The process to produce Biodiesel from vegetable oil is a simple process of adding methoxcide to the oil and mixing to separate the glycerin from the oil. The oil must be washed to remove any soap that is left in solution. This cleans the fuel before it is filtered and used to power a vehicle or heat a home.

The waste from this process is food scraps from the initial filtering and the Glycerin as a by-product. The food scraps can be taken to a landfill as simple waste and the Glycerin can be sold to pharmaceutical/cosmetics companies.

The equipment to do this is an enclosed mixing tanks, mixers, filters and pumps. The chemicals are a simple caustic and methanol. The use of chemicals requires a permit so they can be regulated but is not a problem to obtain. Methanol is the main ingredient in Dry Gas.

Our belief is that New Hampshire could be the first "Green State" by encouraging restaurants in the state to donate the waste vegetable oil (that today they pay to dispose of) to local refineries for conversion into Biodiesel fuel for use in city/state vehicles.