Heating oil costs an average of $4.50/gallon in Japan, and disposal of used cooking oil costs about 80 cents/ gallon. These incentives have motivated Yoshida and Company, a Japanese firm that owns 30 Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, to contract with Pacific Biodiesel to develop a 200,000gallon/year facility that will produce biodiesel fuel from used cooking oil. The fuel will be used to heat Yoshida's restaurants. The operation is the second production facility constructed by Pacific Biodiesel of Kahului, Hawaii. In 1996, the firm built a pilot plant at the Maui, Hawaii landfill. The product from that operation is used to fuel Maui County trucks, as well as boats of a local concession. Farmers and hotels on the island also use the fuel.
Both facilities use a "transesterification" process refined by the University of Idaho. The fuels from the used cooking oil are produced in 600-gallon batch quantities. (A by-product of the process, glycerol, is used as a fertilizer enhancer in a composting facility located next to the Maui facility.) In the process, a catalyst made from wood alcohol and lye is added to filtered, warmed cooking oil and agitated for about four hours. Transesterification removes three triglycerides and glycerol from the oil's ester base. After the esters are separated, they are cleaned by repeated washing.
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