Your choices so far:
1 Residual oils/fats etc.; 2 Transport
| What is your resource? | What do you want to deliver? | What is the service the customer wants? |
| Biomass (digestible sludge) | District cooling | Comfortable indoor climate |
| Biomass (fermentable sludge) | District heating | Electricity |
| Biomass (solid) | Electricity | Process cooling (< 0 °C) |
| Geothermal | Fuel: Gaseous | Process heat/steam (50 - 150 °C) |
| Sunshine | Fuel: Liquid | Process heat (150 - 1000 °C) |
| Water | Fuel: Solid | Process heat (> 1000 °C) |
| Wind | Local cooling (ind. house) | 2 Transport |
| 1 Residual oils/fats etc | Local heating (ind. house) |
FAME mixes readily with diesel oil and the transport market is the prime target for FAME production.
For a fuel to be suitable in internal combustion engines (IC-engines) it must meet a number of criteria. For practical reasons (not having to fill the car too often) it will have to have reasonable energy content per volume unit. To maintain the angular momentum of the engine it must not burn too fast nor too slow. For the use in diesel engines, the cetane number must not be too low etc. For Otto engines the requirement instead comes to the octane number.
The final fuel quality, as measured by the cetane number, is strongly depending on the combination of feedstock and alcohol but some combinations – like coconut oil and ethanol – will typically yield cetane numbers > 70. Such quality fuel, provided it is not contaminated, can serve as a diesel substitute without any need for modifications of the engine while other fuels, such as RME produced from rapeseed oil and methanol (cetane number ≈ 50) may call for engine modifications.