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Fuel for Dreams

BYU Chemical Engineering Students and Professors Making a Difference
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What all started as Jacob Jones and Allison Frankman's dream of making the world a better place has come to fruition with the help of fellow Brigham Young University chemical engineering students and professors.

"I saw all of these students at BYU who are talented and learning valuable skills and how to apply them," said Jacob. "I saw so much potential for making a difference in the world there."

A class was quickly organized to provide students with specific opportunities to use their knowledge and talents to help solve global poverty. The first class project they took on landed twenty-six students in Tonga for two weeks to explain what they had learned about how to use Tonga's coconuts to jumpstart its economy.

Professor Randy Lewis, who is a co-advisor for the class, explained that Tonga thrived off of coconut exports until the 1980s. Now there are rows of untouched coconut trees and millions of unused coconuts that litter the ground.

"Coconuts were used in the past as a major food export for Tonga," he says. "However, that market dried up, and now there are more coconuts than the people know what to do with. We saw the opportunity to use what plentiful natural resources the people have and put them to use rather than just rotting away."

This opportunity lay in utilizing unused coconuts to create biodiesel fuel. Not only would this help Tongans use the natural resources available to them, but it would also help them spend less money on the expensive, one-hundred-percent-imported diesel fuel they are dependent upon.

"Diesel is used for electricity, boats, and all transportation," says Jacob. "It is used to get between islands and to power water pumps for clean drinking water. They rely on imported diesel so much, yet it's so expensive."

The trip was the culmination of eight months of hard work, refining the process of creating the fuel, testing it, and finding a way to use the waste produced.

Professors Randy Lewis and Vincent Wilding explained the seemingly simple process: For every liter of vegetable oil, add 4 grams of sodium hydroxide and 0.2 liters of methanol in a chemical reactor. This will eventually produce 0.2 liters of glycerol, which can be made into soap, and 1 liter of biodiesel fuel. The vegetable oil comes from the coconuts, after harvesting, husking, reserving the meat, and pressing them for oil.

This process was explained and demonstrated numerous times to Tongan government officials and locals. Jacob says everyone was surprised at the simplicity of the process.
"They were very excited about it," he recalls. "There are challenges and things to work out, but overall the reaction was very positive."

It may take time for adoption to take place, as some regulations may need to change in order to obtain the chemicals necessary for the reaction. But the future is looking bright and Tongans are hopeful for any way to lessen their dependency on expensive diesel fuel.