📢 ICYMI! GCMD has recently released a report titled "Rapid forensic analysis of FAME-based biofuels: Potential use of its fingerprint as a fraud detection tool.” This report introduces a new technique that creates a fingerprint for Fatty Acid Methyl Esters (FAME). By identifying their feedstock origins, this fingerprinting technique can potentially be used as a tool to detect fraud in marine fuel supply chains and ensure biofuel authenticity. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a TL;DR of the report in the infographic below. 📄 For the full report, download it here: https://lnkd.in/gRHF9vZE
Thanks for this work Global Centre for Maritime Decarbonisation (GCMD). Unfortunately, the report findings do not prove the hypothesis and there are critical barriers to this approach. The risk is that declared UCO FAME could be produced from virgin palm oil. Yet, fatty acid profile of palm biodiesel is identical to biodiesel derived from used cooking oil of palm origin or POME. Also, since biofuel supply chains are regulated using mass balance allocation, mixing of veg oil origins is permitted so physical profiles are mixed. It would be great to see more work done to identify indicators of cooking like linolenic acid which shows a tiny correlation in palm and will be diluted in real UCO since cooking oils are normally mixtures of palm, soy, sunflower etc. Contaminant levels are not a useful indicator of waste status as they can be added.
Does the fingerprinting indicate if FAME-based biofuels have been mixed with non-FAME biofuels? If the answer is yes, does it indicate the degree of dilution?