Fire and explosion risk in biodiesel production plants: A case study

Biodiesel production facilities are widespread in the world as the demand for "green" fuels increase continuously. So, the number of accidents increases with the number and the capacity of plants. In this paper, the fire and explosion risks in biodiesel production facilities are discussed. Beside some evident risk sources such as flammable storage tanks, we have shown that process deviations may give a relevant contribution to the overall risk and that two critical aspects may be: the excess of the amount of residual methanol in the streams fed to the phase separation step (e.g. biodiesel/unreacted separation after reaction, or glycerin/fatty acids separation), which can affect separation efficiency, and the condensation of flammable vapour streams.