How to Make Biodiesel: DIY Home Biodiesel Production

Homemade biodiesel helps you speed past the gas station toward fuel independence. Our expert outlines processing used cooking oil in a small DIY plant.

By Lyle Estill
Updated on April 28, 2022
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by Matthew Flansburg
Homemade fuel made from used cooking oil can power any diesel vehicle.

If you’re steering your household toward a more self-sufficient lifestyle, maybe you’d like to add do-it-yourself fuel to your list of goals. Biodiesel can be brewed from waste vegetable oil or animal fats, which you can collect free from restaurants, or you can grow soybeans or canola to press your own oil. Process the oil with a couple of chemicals to produce homemade fuel that can run any device powered by petroleum diesel — including pickups, cars, and home heating systems. Do it right, and DIY biodiesel can cost as little as $1 per gallon to manufacture. The scale is up to you: Brew enough to make your homestead fuel-independent, or join forces with neighbors to produce fuel for your collective households.

At minimum, the equipment you’ll need for home biodiesel production is a stainless steel reactor tank, a wash station to remove the coproducts, and containers for storing the resulting fuel. You can rig up an electric water heater as a biodiesel reactor for less than $1,000, or spend about the same amount on a kit. If you’d rather opt for a ready-made, automated system, expect to pay $10,000 or more.

Safely making high-quality fuel in your backyard will take planning and work, but the freedom and money-savings of driving down the road on fuel you’ve made yourself are hard to beat.

water heater converted in to a biodiesel reactor

The Chemistry of Making Biodiesel

Biodiesel production is dependent on two chemical reactions. The first is commonly called the “methoxide reaction.” It happens when you mix methanol with a catalyst, which can be either potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide.

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