Biodiesel from Soyabean Oil not for India

Rapidly expanding production of bio-diesel from Soybean oil is contributing to a projected 6 per cent increase in domestic soy oil disappearance.
Bio-diesel production is projected to use 19 per cent of total soy oil production for 2007-08 as compared with 13 per cent in 2006-07.

Soy oil is widely used in the US for bio diesel production. An interesting fact is that:-

One of the most important characteristics of diesel fuel is its ability to auto ignite, a characteristic that is quantified by a fuel’s cetane number or cetane index, where a higher cetane number or index means that the fuel ignites more quickly.7 U.S. petroleum diesel typically has a cetane index in the low 40s, and European diesel typically has a cetane index in the low 50s.
Graboski and McCormick8 have summarized several experimental studies of biodiesel characteristics. The reported cetane number for bio diesel ranges from 45.8 to 56.9 for soybean oil methyl esters, with an average of 50.9. In comparison the cetane index for petroleum diesel ranges from 40 to 52. They imply that careful production control could result in bio diesel products with cetane numbers in the high end of the range, whereas petroleum diesel tends toward the low end of the range.

In India soybean ranks third in oil seeds after groundnut and rapeseed/mustard.Soybean is considered to be a most economical and valuable agricultural commodity as, it has good adaptability towards a wide range of soil and climate. On an average dry matter basis, Soybean contains about 40% protein and 20% oil.But the down side to using Soybean is that it is very nutritious - the protein and oil components in soybean are not only in high quantity but also in high quality. Soy oil contains high proportion of unsaturated fatty acids, so it is also a healthy oil using some thing like this for producing oil when we still need more oil to feed the nation wont be justifiable. But if we can have new farms cultivating soybean for the sole purpose of bio diesel it can be a little more attractive option but in the overall picture it can turn out to be negative by leading to increase cost of Soybean oil for the common man.

So the last word would be that we have better options like Jatropha, algae, rubber seed and many other types of lower nutritional or inedible oils. In India due to its population we cannot think of using food to make bio diesel unlike what they do in The EU or US.

interesting links and news items on Bio Diesel on the right side