Thread: Making bio paraffin

Hi burn welcome to the forum. Paraffin oil is known as kerosene in Australia and the U.S. Bio diesel is similar and may work in your stove, you will just have to try it. I have a primus stove that works on petrol, diesel, and kerosene, by changing the jets haven't tryed it on biodiesel but im pretty sure it will work. You may also want to do an Internet search on "biogas digester" as they are easy to build and make bio gas for cooking from animal and human crap.
good luck with it.

Sure you can make bio-paraffin via the Kolbe electrolysis. It is expensive. As best I understood it, make soap from vegetable oil, dissolve the soap in a little pure water, pass electric current through the solution, and you've got long straight chain alkanes/alkenes (bio-paraffin). It costs too much to be commercially feasible. Of course there may be other ways to make it, like pyrolysis of vegetable oil. I think an American oil company was working on that one with a Brazilian scientist PhD. I read about it on the internet so I suppose it is not a trade secret.

"Swamp Gas" (methane) can be made from vegetation. See Wikipedia to get a brief explanation. Wet or damp plant material is acted on by micro-organisms to produce methane. Methane gas can be collected, stored and burned for cooking, or even to power cars and lorries. Here, natural gas is sometimes collected from trash heaps (land fills), like a natural gas well. In the Kolbe Electrolysis, in addition to soap, pure water, and electricity, sodium acetate may be added to get bio-parraffin (synthetic bio-kerosene) and carbon dioxide.

There were tests done by the Alternative Technology association in 2000 to power a camp stove from biodiesel.

IIRC, the fuel worked well but the burner jet needed cleaning regularly to prevent it clogging with carbon (I presume that during thermal decomposition of the biodiesel, some carbon atoms are not oxidised and remain at the burner tip)

I hope this helps,
Tony

Thank you for the wonderful replies,i appreciated.