The Effectivity of Biodiesel in Reducing Air Pollution

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The fact of global rapid population growth has surely impacted many aspects of humankind. This also applies in terms of the air quality, where it is the source for all humans to breathe, as therefore good air quality is always going to be needed to sustain the human’s life. On the other side, this rapid growth of the human population will also affect the air quality, as these people will travel billions of kilometers daily to fulfill their needs.

Just like the game of tug of war, these two types of human needs; air to breathe and mobility issues, will indeed affect the earth’s air quality. However, we should be grateful for the technological advances that seem to be growing from time to time. Today, we are able to utilize biodiesel technology, where the researchers have found it more eco-friendly, compared to normal diesel that has existed for decades.

The biodiesel technology will hopefully be more common to our community in the future, as today we may find this biodiesel fuel technology on all gas stations around us. Two years ago the Ministry of Agriculture stated that they are in progress on making the biodiesel 100 (B100), where they said it is made from a hundred percent of organic waste. This palm oil-based fuel technology will indeed help humankind to preserve the environment, as it says in an article, where biodiesel fuel will help reduce the particular matter, carbon dioxide (CO2), and hydrocarbon (HC), where it will pollute the fresh air that we breathe.

However, to avoid misperception, the biodiesel fuel will still release pollution into the air, nevertheless the amount of pollution generated is still much less than conventional diesel fuel. The amount of pollution generated by biodiesel fuel is various, depending on some factors that might be affected. Some of the factors that will affect the amount of pollution released are the type of the vehicle’s engine, as it will matter on how the injection system will produce the toxic gas content, and also the mixture of the biodiesel itself.

The biodiesel that exists today, has a varied portion of the mixture. There are the B20, B30, and the ultimate B100, where the contained number within the word (ex. 20, 30, and 100) is the amount of mixture of biodiesel, where the rest is conventional solar fuel. However, the usage of biodiesel is various, aside from transportation fuel, biodiesel is also common to be used in the industrial building, residential, and even in a power plant. Each of the usage purposes has a different mixture of biodiesel, as it has to be adjusted to the equipment/engine usage.  

Biodiesel is also known to be produced from different bases of organic waste, and depending on the country that produces it, usually has a particular common waste to be processed into biodiesel, whereas European countries use mostly “fresh” oils, not waste. For example in Japan, they mainly utilize a used cooking oil, whether it is from a residential use or factory use. While in Indonesia, it is common to use palm oil to be processed into a biodiesel fuel, where today the government has set a rule that it is mandatory to have the B30 installed in every gas station in Indonesia. This hopefully will release Indonesia from a dependency on conventional solar fuel, where we all know that it pollutes our air very poorly.