A Maryland company has found a way to vaporize biodiesel into a natural gas substitute that can be turned into renewable electric power.

LPP Combustion, LLC announced it has installed the hardware on a demonstration unit in Columbia, MD to get some operational experience:

Generally, combustion of biodiesel in gas turbines requires extra refinement of the fuel due to impurities that can be harmful to gas turbine components. However, by vaporizing the biodiesel into nitrogen before introducing it to the gas turbine as LPP Gas™, the LPP Combustion hardware substantially reduces operational problems associates with conventional burning of biodiesel in gas turbines. Emissions from the C30 gas turbine, operating at full load on LPP Gas™ derived from biodiesel, are 5.6 ppmv NOx and 9 ppmv CO, at 15%O2, improving on the baseline natural gas emissions.

The fuel tested was a canola-based biodiesel provided to LPP Combustion, LLC by Northern Biodiesel, an Ontario, NY company. The C30 gas turbine was on loan from Harbec Plastics, an Ontario, NY based plastics manufacturer. Harbec Plastics intends to convert all 25 of its Capstone C30 gas turbines to operation on biofuels using the LPP Combustion technology, thereby eliminating the CO2 footprint from its plastics manufacturing.

The company has already successfully tested the same gas turbine using this technology on naphtha and on ethanol

More information is available at the company’s website, www.lppcombustion.com.