As a farmer, it is impossible to see, how many fatty acids the dead animals have, but it is still important that you try to minimize the development. The sooner you register your animals, the less decay and the less risk of an unnecessarily high proportion of free fatty acids. The Daka ecoMotion facility, which converts fat into biodiesel, is built to handle up to 20 percent free fatty acid. If the fat we receive is decayed to such a degree that the proportion of the free fatty acids (FFA) exceeds 20 percent, it reduces our capacity. If we exceed 30 percent FFA, our facility only has a capacity of 60 percent. When the chemical manufacturing process is over, you finally have a cloudy biodiesel, where a number og microcomponents must be removed before it can live up to the quality and standard of the transport sector. Therefore, the biodiesel is cleaned three times before it is finally distilled

When the decay of submitted animals is high, it not only presents challenges now and here. The freshness is crucial for us to have an optimal production at the biodiesel factory – the process is one thing, but the crucial point is that we cannot make up for lost production again. Our facility is constantly running at maximum capacity. It is therefore not possible to catch up with periodic capacity reductions. It thus reduces the amount of biodiesel, we can pass on to the market in the end. When summer strikes and the heat sets in, the development of decay can become so intense that we can not produce biodiesel from the fat. If this happens, some of the fat can be stored and mixed in later in the season, when there is enough quality fat to mix with, but then the periodic capacity reduction is extended.

A sustainable contribution from agriculture

For Daka to produce enough biodiesel during a year is not only a question of how much biodiesel can be sold, but also how sustainable the total Danish livestock production is. Daka Denmark’s recycling of agricultural residual flows is a direct contribution to the CO2 reduction that agriculture determend to accomplish.

The reduction targets from the government pose major challenges for agriculture, and in order to meet them, it is crucial that we think holistically and use strengths, we already have, fully. We need to reuse and recycle the resources we can – and the freshness of the dead animals that are handed in, determines how effectively it can be done.

We annually produce 55 million liters of 2nd generation biodiesel that can substitute fossil diesel. Our production accounts for about 30 percent of the total marketshare of the biodiesel, we use in Denmark, which generally corresponds to 2 percent of all diesel used in the transport sector. It is a significant contribution, and a contribution we must cherish in the industry.