Curriculum Vitae

Born in 1954 in Bad Nauheim, Germany Hans-Peter Löhrlein spent his early life in this region north of Frankfurt till he finished school and was called to do his military service in the German air force.

After his military service he studied mechanical engineering (Dipl.-Ing.) in Cologne. During his postgraduate studies he received a Diploma in Tropical Engineering from the ITT Cologne and an MSc from Reading University. His PhD he did at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, named after the famous German chemist Justus Liebig.

Right during his professional training he was dedicated to combustion engines, vehicles and process technology of agricultural products. Especially by-products of the oil palm were subject of his PhD-thesis.

After working some years for the aircraft construction company Dornier, Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, he decided to take an offer from the mechanical faculty of ESPOL, a well know technical College in Guayaquil Ecuador. After nearly five years of teaching and research in South America he returned to Germany to become a senior research fellow at the University of Kassel, were he lead the post harvest and energy section at the department of agricultural engineering.

During his stay at Kassel University from 1991 to 2006 all major investigations in the field of biodiesel took place in Europe. At the end of the 80th and beginning 90th still working on the modification of diesel engines to make them digest neat vegetable oil, the agricultural engineering department became one of the best known designers of process equipment for biodiesel production since 1995. Dr. Löhrlein got the water-free process to reach series-production readiness and designed the plants to accept feedstock with the permanent changing quality of used cooking oil. Therefore today these plants are the most versatile designs if it comes to exotic oils like castor, Jatropha or crude palm oil. With the recently designed and soap-loop-process, production reaches a true 100% yield with all available feedstock by the use of any of the common catalysts.