<![CDATA[Waste cooking oil is a food industry waste product that can be converted into biodiesel as an alternative fuel. The use of heterogeneous base catalysts such as commercial CaO offers advantages in biodiesel production due to its reusability. This study investigated biodiesel production from waste cooking oil using commercial CaO catalyst through simulations to evaluate kinetics and techno-economics of its production at plant scale. The simulations used in this study were divided into three process schemes. Scheme 1 was a scheme without CaO catalyst recycling, Scheme 2 was a scheme with 3x recycling of the commercial CaO catalyst, and Scheme 3 was a scheme with 10x recycling of the commercial CaO catalyst. The results showed that the recycling process of commercial CaO catalyst used affects the conversion value of waste cooking oil into biodiesel. Lower reaction conversion was obtained with increasing amounts of recycled commercial CaO catalyst. The highest conversion of waste cooking oil to biodiesel achieved in this study was 92.84% from scheme 1. Based on the techno-economic evaluation, scheme 1 was the most profitable compared to the other schemes, with a net present value of US$34,652,659. Schemes 2 and 3 had lower net present values due to the increase in total capital investment and operational costs for recycling commercial CaO compared to scheme 1. Meanwhile, based on CaO catalyst requirements, scheme 3 had the lowest CaO requirement which was 3.06 tons/year.]]>
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