There are many anthropogenic climate change mitigation strategies being adopted worldwide. One of these is the adoption of biodiesel FAME (Fatty Acid Methyl Ester), in transportation. The fuel has been widely promoted as replacement for petroleum diesel because of its potential benefits for life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide reduction and particulate matter improvements.
Presently biodiesel may be made from a wide variety of starting materials, including food waste and agricultural materials such as vegetable oils and greases. The number and variety of possible starting materials continues to increase. Though, there is a limiting factor in the use of FAME, and that is cold weather operability. The regional climate can often influence FAME adoption with resultant economic and environmental implications. Often this cold temperature operability manifests itself as in vehicle fuel filter blocking. Several analytical protocols have been produced over the last few years to identify the chemicals in biodiesel that cause this problem.
However, the presence of petroleum hydrocarbons compromises many of these methods and others involve derivatization. Here we propose a protocol built around supercritical fluid chromatography mass spectrometry (SFC-MS) and Fourier transform ion cyclotron mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) that has the flexibility to meet these challenges and allow the analysis of petroleum diesel/FAME blends and afford detection of the suspect compounds causing filter blocking under cold temperature