Waste Coffee Grounds Offer New Source of Biodiesel

Julie188 writes "Researchers in Nevada are reporting that waste coffee grounds can provide a cheap, abundant, and environmentally friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks. Their study has been published online in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. Growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the world each year. Scientists estimate that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply."

Comments

won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

and as the price of bio-diesel goes up, so does the cost of our coffee. Eventually, none of us will be able to wake up at all.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[maxwell demon]

Note that they make the biodiesel from used coffee grounds. That is, unlike corn, it's not in competition to food usage. Indeed, a growing biodiesel price would mean that the coffee makers would get more money for the waste coffee ground, and therefore if at all, the coffee would get cheaper. Well, at least the coffy you buy ready-made. Making your own probably gets more expensive (but then, mabe it will be possible to sell personal waste coffee ground as well; after all, there should be a lot coffee be made by individuals). What would certainly get more expensive is instant coffee, because that doesn't produce waste coffee grounds.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[ozmanjusri]

What would certainly get more expensive is instant coffee, because that doesn't produce waste coffee grounds.

Eh? Where do you think the rest of those 43 beans goes?

Spent coffee grounds from the brewing process are the primary waste product. At least one manufacturer burns these grounds to heat water and generate steam that is used in the manufacturing process. The process is designed to be environmentally friendly, minimizing waste products by maximizing the use of the raw materials.

http://www.answers.com/topic/instant-coffee-1

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[merauder]

What they should do is offer a recycling program for the used coffee grounds, and take the money made from that to subsidize current fuel prices. Then eventually wean people off that to alternative fuels.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a great development really - how much energy could be distilled from the millions(billions?) of tons of waste produced each year by each and every country (and in particular the west). Many SF authors write about futures where space platforms are largely self sustaining and recycle waste to maintain their populations. IMHO that's where we need to be able to get to - assuming we can solve the issue of energy consumption during recycling. Maybe some portion of the coffee grounds could power the recycling of all the other stuff.

And when this happens I can claim that my coffee habit is good for the environment!

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Evil Pete]

Used coffee grounds. So how much feedstock to the process is this per person. Um let me calculate that.... squat per day. What is the point of this? Think how much fuel you use per day. Measured in litres not millilitres. The trouble with these bullshit figures is that they are unrealistic, they assume suspension of disbelief. Remember in physics classes where they emphasised that you estimated the power of 10 (magnitude) so that you would have a reality check? Same here.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[XavidX]

This is kinda interesting from the link you mentioned (http://www.answers.com/topic/instant-coffee-1)

The manufacture of instant coffee begins with brewing coffee in highly efficient extraction equipment. Softened water is passed through a series of five to eight columns of ground coffee beans. The water first passes through several "hot" cells (284-356F, or 140-180C), at least some of which operate at higher-than-atmospheric pressure, for extraction of difficult components like carbohydrates. It then passes through two or more "cold" cells (about 212F, or 100C) for extraction of the more flavorful elements. The extract is passed through a heat exchanger to cool it to about 40F (5C). By the end of this cycle, the coffee extract contains 20-30% solids.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Eunuchswear]

You want to "wean people off" "current fuels" by subsidising their price?

And Slashotters think this is "insightful"?

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[0100010001010011]

With this thinking nothing will ever be a viable "alternative" fuel. Every little bit helps. If oil really is running out, then we are in trouble. But say in 50 years we have:
1% of BioD from Coffee
5% from Hemp
8% from Switch Grass
9% from Soybeans
10% from Human Excrement.
10% from Animal Excrement.
15% from GTL....

Nothing alone is going to replace this magical black liquid made from millions of years of compressing carbons into a very energy dense medium.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Hognoxious]

10% from Animal Excrement.

Bullshit!

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[merauder]

Well whatever it takes to ease people in this economy, while transitioning to alternative sources.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[MindKata]

"how much energy could be distilled from the millions(billions?) of tons of waste produced each year" and "Many SF authors etc.."

Yeah exactly. I was wondering how much fuel we could get, if it was possible to recycle all bio waste? ... It seems to make sense that things like almost all waste veg could be converted into fuel? ... (In theory it seems possible, but I don't know about costs involved). Shops and markets worldwide etc.. create a lot of this kind of waste on their own. (It could become another source of money for them). Add in the waste from restaurants and homes, it must add up to a huge amount of bio waste?

Maybe it could be put into fermentation tanks, using bacteria to part-process it, into something more useful? ... not sure how practical that is, cost wise, but it does seem like there must be a huge amount of bio fuel sources, currently going to waste.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it could be put into fermentation tanks, using bacteria to part-process it, into something more useful?

something more useful -- like soil?

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[MindKata]

"something more useful -- like soil?"

:) ... I was hoping for something more useful, like alcohol or maybe hopefully something nearer to oil. I don't know if there is one bacteria that can convert all bio waste or if it needs sorting into different tanks?. If it can all be put into one tank, that should be cheap and easier. Maybe some kind of GM bacteria could be created that has oil as a waste product?. :)

Then again, as its near Christmas, alcohol would be more useful than oil ;)

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Cowmonaut]

You are doing it wrong. If you make current fuels (eg gasoline) cheaper you won't be weaning anyone off of anything.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Bert64]

All of this bio waste is used tho...
Some of it is used as animal feed, the rest is typically allowed to rot down and is used to fertilize land for use to grow the next crop.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[commanderfoxtrot]

I was wondering what happened to all those coffee grounds.

I put mine into a worm-farm, which makes great compost, although in small (household) quantities.

I hear many Starbucks happily give away their grounds to gardeners. Otherwise, where does it go? Landfill.

Cue more questions on "Is putting compostable ingredients into landfill good? Will it compost?"...

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Esp since, in the U.S., gasoline is already heavily subsidized.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[TheRaven64]

Actually, both. This is how biogas has been made for decades. Basically, you bury the bio waste with a balloon over the top. Bacteria consume it and produce waste products that fertilise the soil and they produce methane as another by product. You can then spread the solid waste over the fields and use the gas for power. A lot of farms do this, and it's something you can do at home relatively easily, although the amount of fuel produced is not very much.

During the second world war, a number of people converted their cars to run on gas (which was much cheaper than petrol) and some in rural communities made their own biogas for this.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[M-RES]

1% from Coffee? Are you kidding?

In reality, the figures they're talking about in TFA would last the US alone a couple days or so at 2005's consumption levels - average 22 million barrels per day (bpd) petroleum, 4.1m bpd diesel! That's BARRELS per day, not GALLONS per day

IMHO I think that what we really need is to stop consuming so much shit and rethink our infrastructures and ways of living if we're going to ride this one out. Too much town/city planning is oriented towards the car - shops located in retail parks (some without any sort of pavement for pedestrian access), business parks built miles from residential areas. It's all backwards and unsustainable. If we redesigned the way we live and travel we wouldn't need to find anywhere near as many 'substitute' energy sources in the first place.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to put this in perspective, the US consumes 169 million gallons of distilate fuel per day.

So reprocessing the entire world's spent coffee grounds for one year would produce enough biodiesel to cover US demand for a couple of days.

Understand why I'm not impressed?

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Silentknyght]

. That is, unlike corn, it's not in competition to food usage.

Unlike corn-based ethanol. Like the waste coffee grounds, part of the corn (e.g the cob) isn't used for human consumption. It, too, is actively being pursued as a possible source energy. Just an FYI from someone in the field, who is actively involved in these kinds of projects.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[o'reor]

Well, if we made biofuel out of all the bullshit that appears on /. ... the OPEC countries would go bankrupt.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

"That is, unlike corn, it's not in competition to food usage"

Try telling that to the worms.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[The_Wilschon]

Yeah, a couple days or so per 365 day year. Maybe 1% is a tiny bit high, but it's pretty darn close. You act like you're attacking the GP's post, but the only things you say that are relevant as a reply actually support it instead.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[necro81]

I agree with your main point that the future of energy will be made up of many smaller sources rather than some as-yet-undiscovered silver bullet. But, as with a lot of things, it is necessary to take a cold, hard, calculating look at the numbers before latching onto something. In this case, the numbers are particularly bad.

They estimate producing 340 million gallons/year of biodiesel this way. That's a little over 8 million barrels per year.

The problem comes when you compare that amount to the total annual consumption of petrodiesel worldwide, which is about 5 billion barrels. So this could displace, maybe, about 0.1% of petrodiesel in the world.

One must then offset that possible production against the additional cost in producing it - namely the energy needed to collect and transport the grounds someplace to be made into biodiesel.

One might do better in not drinking coffee in the first place, and saving the diesel used in transporting the beans. The article mentions that 16 billion pounds of coffee beans are produced each year. Those are produced mostly in the tropics and then transported by ship, air, rail, and truck to their destinations. The 340 million gallons of biodiesel the authors claim is reclaimable would work out to about one gallon of diesel per 50 pounds of coffee beans, which I'd say is a reasonable estimate of the plantation-to-cup transportation cost.

So, if one could extract all the potential biodiesel from coffee beans, it could be used to offset the energy used to transport them in the first place. But that's about as far as it would get.

So, this new discovery ain't nothin', but neither is it much of anything.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

on gas (which was much cheaper than petrol)

Wait as an American that statement is confusing to me. My Brit-American translation matrix says Petrol=Gas

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Loadmaster]

Pigshit.

What?

Pigshit. It's a powerful gas called methane. It's what powers all of Barter Town.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[russotto]

IMHO I think that what we really need is to stop consuming so much shit and rethink our infrastructures and ways of living if we're going to ride this one out.

Fine. Shut off your computer and move to Amish country. Never mind that the Amish lifestyle is even less sustainable without serious population restriction.

Too much town/city planning is oriented towards the car - shops located in retail parks (some without any sort of pavement for pedestrian access), business parks built miles from residential areas.

Planning everything so everyone lives and shops within walking distance of where they work? Even as a one-time static task assuming one worker per household, that's an enormous task. Add the fact that you often have two workers per household, or that people change jobs and move (often not at the same time) and it gets flat-out impossible. Never mind that you also kill all the economies of scale which occur with the current set-up.

It's all backwards and unsustainable. If we redesigned the way we live and travel we wouldn't need to find anywhere near as many 'substitute' energy sources in the first place.

Yes, but we'd rather live in the 21st century than the 17th.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds like me. At times in my life, I've been powered 100% by coffee and hemp.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[swagv]

Not to mention that for years Brazilians have been making biodiesel from coffee that doesn't pass the quality controls cut (making this a bit of a Not Invented Here story for the U.S. researchers).

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[The Great Pretender]

They should subsidize the coffee-biodiesel and put fossil-derived fuel on the market with no breaks, in fact jack the price up higher. You wont see weaning then, you'll see a full cold turkey switch.

I'm sorry, but the weaning argument is BS, look at hybrid sales. Hybrid sales didn't jump up due to environmental issues they jumped up due to the price of gas. 6 months ago you couldn't find a hybrid here in "green" Seattle. Now they're sitting fallow on the lot because the price of gas has dropped, and yes Toyota will give you a loan if you want one.

The only way that people will change fuel types is if you make it easier to get than gas (plug-in hybrids) at the same cost or cheaper or the price of alternative based fuel is significantly below the price of gas.

Note: Here that I work in a company that's looking at hydrogen as a fuel, and they realize that they're not going to be successful until a decent delivery system to the forecourt is developed; that's going to require the use of existing infrastructure. Forget cryo, pressurized or metal hydrides etc. The closet thing we've seen to something useful are these guys Asemblon, assuming that they can do it with a decent energy balance.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who runs Bartertown?

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[everett]

I don't think you want to be drinking the rotten banana peel brandy this holiday season, but maybe the moldy carrot and gooey onion wine is more your style.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[tsalmark]

I think the energy used driving my waste coffee grounds to the central reclamation facility will more than offset the energy gained. Why don't I just through them in my garden and eat the tomatoes?

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Duradin]

It's amazing how people are initially unenthusiastic about being given what amounts to worm piss but once they've tried it on their plants you end up with standing orders for it to be delivered whenever you visit.

Now if only alternatives to petrochemical fertilizers would get the same attention alternative fuels do.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Fastball]

Master-Blaster runs Bartertown.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Oloryn]

One might do better in not drinking coffee in the first place

Though I'm not a coffee-drinker, I can think of no quicker way to generate a government-overthrowing rebellion than to have that government try to impose a coffee prohibition.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[sortius_nod]

Biofuels are no better than fossil fuels - same problem, same outcome. On top of this they are causing massive food issues thought developing countries. People are planting palm for palm oil production (I recently witnessed this first hand, oil palm crops as far as you can see) rather than for food crops. This is why rice is US$700 a tonne in Asia, and other basic staples are getting increasingly more expensive for the people really seeing the effects of global climate change destroy what little they've had.

We need better fuels - hydrogen, electric with sustainable charging, something like that is going to be better than any sort of "carbon fuel replacement". I think some of us are waking up to this huge issue, but the change needs to come from us as people, rather than through taxing or tax breaks.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[duggaman57]

Yes, the did say "Used Coffe Grounds" but that would still mean a higher demand for coffee beans overall, which would in turn drive the prices up. Er go, higher prices for Java in the morning and now for fuel. Bad idea! Try again.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instant coffee does produce waste coffee grounds. It's made like normal coffee then dried out.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Lars T.]

A high taxation of caffeine containing beverage raw materials may also work.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Molochi]

I am "required" by recent local ordinance to recycle already. Adding one more thing to the list would just shift the disposal cost from the garbage truck to the recycling truck. How to manage organic waste disposal for methanol production isn't even a problem if you can shift trucks from garbage pickup duty to methanol plant duty.

In my area our garbage fees are paid when we buy our bags and recyclables go into a bin (paper and cans. Recyclables are hauled off for free and you only pay for the bags you use. So there is a financial incentive. I usually save about $10-15 a month by using the bin instead of the bags that go for about $2 each.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[BlackSnake112]

I think they were referring to natural gas (not the liquid) or methane gas. I have seen natural gas, methane, and propane gas buses on the road. So cars engines that run on those fuels shouldn't be too far behind.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Hordeking]

and as the price of bio-diesel goes up, so does the cost of our coffee. Eventually, none of us will be able to wake up at all.

Won't that just make our economy go down, since people will be less productive? And then, with the economy tanking, the price of diesel and coffee grounds will go down (because the market won't be able to sustain the higher prices).

QED.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[rrhal]

What we need is Biodiesel from algae http://www.unh.edu/p2/biodiesel/article_alge.html. Doesn't need farm land, helps bioremediate agracultural waste. Doable with technology we have today.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Assassin bug]

Actually, assuming this works, it could increase the cost of coffee for consumers. Coffee producers could get more for their coffee if they sell it directly to a processing company if the coffee beans are contracted for fuel use instead of food. This would mean less coffee for food and higher prices. I'm not sure if coffee beans are graded for quality upon sale, but I suspect that the decision to sell coffee for fuel would happen either by contracted plantations or at the point of sale. I doubt the coffee food consumers will be the point of sale for feedstock. Besides, collecting coffee grounds from consumers would seem to use even more fuel than collecting grain or stover for fuel from coops.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[timeOday]

You're thinking too hard. Look, right now, all those grounds go into the garbage. That's the baseline. People who can afford to drink coffee will not quit to save energy. But if somebody can turn a buck buying used grounds and selling them to somebody who turns them into fuel, it's a win. I know a guy who owns a business emptying the lard bins from behind restaurants, and at least part of that becomes fuel. So this sort of thing is not all that far out.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[babyrat]

The whole point of this article is the production of biofuel from WASTE.

You are correct if you need to grow something for fuel in lieu of food, but if you are taking something that simply goes to landfills and instead turn it into fuel, you avoid all those problems.

Seems like a good thing to do while we are working on better longer term solutions.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[cromar]

I'm calling bullshit here. There are certainly ways to move toward more sustainable ways of life without reverting to life 400 years ago. The OP didn't mention anything that would take us back 400 years or even 50 years; he asked we consider restructuring the way we use energy so that we use far less than we do now. There are obvious benefits to reworking zoning laws to allow say small groceries every 5 blocks so that nearby residents are able to get localized produce, dry goods, etc. without having to drive across town to the nearest Wal*Mart or other mega-grocer's. Allowing small commercial areas to be zoned in pockets closer to residential areas would also provide feasible ways to save energy used in transportation (not 100%, but even a 25% reduction in individual daily travel energy would make an astounding difference). Those are two changes Americans could make to lower energy costs with minimal impact on any other infrastructure. It might also help build communities by bringing us together instead of spreading us apart.

What the OP was saying is that replacing all of our energy with sustainable energy is going to be a lot easier if we also reduce the amount of energy we use.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[jhfry]

To even remotely suggest that biofuels are no better than fossil fuels shows just how ignorant of the subject you are.

A fossil fuel is typically millions of years old and is essentially sequestered carbon... if we don't use it it just sits there inert.

A bio-fuel is carbon that is actively part of our carbon cycle... it is temporarily in solid form, but in time it will be a gas again where it will get absorbed by a plant and made solid again. Essentially, using a bio-fuel is carbon neutral while a fossil fuel is carbon positive.

This is the reason that bio-fuels are the future.

Now as to sources for bio-fuels, I will agree that the greedy have pushed bio-fuel production without care for the cost. There are many responsible sources for bio-fuels. For example, if corn stalks could be used, or weeds grown on fallow fields, or algae grown in polluted waterways, or seaweed grown in oxygen depleted lakes. All of these sources would have a positive impact on the environment and or society. The use of corn stalks alone would encourage the growth of corn while not competing for the grain itself, which would make most corn producing countries have huge surpluses... effectively allowing corn to be nearly free, completely subsidized by bio-fuel production.

All of the uses above, except perhaps the algae, require some advances to be made in converting cellulose to fuel with a net positive yield that leaves room for profit. It will be done someday.

Using waste products, such as cooking oil, coffee grounds (as the article describes), straw, human and/or animal waste, etc. are all very positive things if they can be done without creating new problems. Don't let some of the stupid things that greed has made people do in the past (corn ethanol for example) fool you about the future of bio-fuels. Until a environmentally friendly, safe, and much higher capacity capacitor is introduced, electric cars aren't good for much more than commuter vehicles. Don't get me started on how far we have to go to make hydrogen happen. Bio-fuels are real, we have them and can continue to slowly replace fossil fuels as new methods of making fuel from waste products are created. Everything else is the someday, bio-fuels are something we can work on today.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Perspiring Blood]

The earth is already a 100% efficient closed system. The problem is with the sequestration of the residual energy in waste products. That styrofoam container will degrade someday, just not in any useful near term timeframe.

Time for someone to perfect the "Mister Fusion." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_capacitor#Flux_capacitor

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[freemywrld]

I have lived in Seattle for 2.5 years and saw plenty of hybrids when I newly arrived here and I see plenty of them on the road now. Also, gas prices only dropped very recently - too recently for one to really equate the number of hybrids on the road to the the newly lower prices. Those who bought hybrids to spend less on gas did not go and buy a regular gasoline engine the day that gas dropped to under $3.

My point is, the first section of your post doesn't make much sense. 6 months ago the price of gas was higher than it is now, yet you are claiming that there were no hybrids on the road then. Now that the prices have dropped, hybrids on the lot are just sitting there, yet you equate hybrid ownership to price of gas...?

Please let me know if I am misunderstanding what you were trying to say.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[kickassweb]

No, that's not what we need. Algae needs water. Lots and lots of water. And with problems like the post beetle devastating upper reach forests in the Rockies and wiping out the watershed, that will be in very short supply ten year from now. The south has suffered massive droughts from climate change as well. Desertification from stupid land use will do the rest.

Geothermal, tidal, solar, and wind in combination will give us what we need. Bio anything is not the answer.

Did you know that there is roughly the same amount of US acreage in farm production today as in the year 1900? And we have triple the population? You do the math.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Onymous Coward]

Nothing alone is going to replace this magical black liquid made from millions of years of compressing carbons into a very energy dense medium.

Actually, algal biodiesel could do it even at current rates of per square foot production.

This is the area required to do so at current production efficiency (about a seventh of the land being used for corn production). And marginal lands can be used. Think about that. And production can use ocean water and wastewater — it doesn't require fresh water. And the process can get part of its input by filtering out CO2 from power plant exhaust.

Algal fuel is something to look into.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[instarx]

"The trouble with these bullshit figures is that they are unrealistic, they assume suspension of disbelief."

No they're not. The stats on how many millions of gallons of gas that could be saved if everyone had proper tire pressure are real, but not everyone is going to inflate their tires properly. Same for the millions of gallons "possible" if all coffee grounds were processed into biodiesel - it isn't going to happen but it does give an idea of the magnitude of the fuel potentially available.

I could see one person collecting coffee grounds from all the coffee shops in his area weekly and converting it to biodiesel in his garage. That could easily be enough to fuel ONE car for free - but that's fine. If one person in each of the 10,000 communities around the nation did that it would be 10,000 cars off the oil treadmill.

The population of the world is so large that anything that can produce a few ml of fuel from each person will result in a lot of free fuel.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[Evil Pete]

Look if someone wants to convert coffee grounds to usable hydrocarbons good for them. Just don't expect an industry or a significant impact from it. And yes I do agree with your last sentence, I just think that there will be a lot of silly suggestions along the way: this is one of them. Each has to have the numbers done on it. We just don't want something that can be done in a lab but doesn't scale or have any real impact on the problem.

My opinion (and that is all it is) is that we should look towards tailored bacteria that can turn cellulose into oils, or direct from sunlight and CO2 and water.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[fingerfucker]

coffee makers would get more money for the waste coffee ground, and therefore if at all, the coffee would get cheaper

Wake up (pun intended).

If the demand for biofuel is strong enough and the coffee maker gets more for waste coffee ground than it gets for selling coffee to drink, the coffee maker won't bother making the coffee to drink and will sell straight to biodiesel buyer. Thus, price for drinking coffee will go up and you'll have to pay as much as the biodiesel customer for it (if not more).

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[MonkeyOnABucket]

What would certainly get more expensive is instant coffee, because that doesn't produce waste coffee grounds.

Eh? Where do you think the rest of those 43 beans goes?

Instant coffee is the waste product

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[MindKata]

"banana peel brandy"

For some strange reason, that sounds like a good drink :)

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[rrhal]

Bioalgea doesn't need fresh water - salt water will work just fine. Water that's been been poluted by agricultural run-off is also good. I'm not saying that Wind, Geothermal, etc. aren't valuable contrubutors - just that the perceived problems of biodeisel are not only solvable but relatively tractable.

Re:won't somebody think of the mornings?

[shnull]

in a perfect world it would ...

shipping cost

[convolvatron]

how much of it can one effectively suck back from the ends of the capillaries of the distribution system?

Re:shipping cost

[chaossplintered]

From large retailers like Starbucks and even places like McDonalds? I'm guessing a lot.

Re:shipping cost

[Joebert]

I don't even want to think about how much a gallon of Starbucks biodiesel would cost.

Re:shipping cost

[anagama]

If lucky, probably just enough to power the trucks to go get it at 47 pounds of coffee grounds per gallon of fuel.

Re:shipping cost

[ILuvRamen]

from shows I've seen on TV, the idea is for it to be made in lots of local facilities to avoid shipping. It's sort of like future gas stations will make their own biodiesel or at least get it from a supplier within 25 miles in like 80% of populated US cities or something close to that. Also they'd have huge battery banks and solar panels and wind turbines so they could recharge electric cars at very little cost to them. Sounds like they'd make a hell of a large profit by doing either or those let alone both.

Re:shipping cost

[stranger_to_himself]

..It's sort of like future gas stations will make their own biodiesel or at least get it from a supplier within 25 miles in like 80% of populated US cities or something close to that...

And in the unpopulated cities they have to rely on imports because the undead don't drink coffee.

Re:shipping cost

[moosesocks]

I doubt there'd be special trips to pick up the grinds. Rather, the coffee shop would exchange their old grinds for new ones each time the truck comes.

That said, I doubt many coffee shops go through enough grinds to make this remotely economical.

Re:shipping cost

[Accursed]

Given the taste of their coffee, it would likely come pre-burnt anyway.

Re:shipping cost

[Joebert]

It works so good your fuel injection sprays it directly into your muffler, requiring no interference with the existing gasoline hybrid.

Re:shipping cost

[Anonymous Coward]

And it all seemed to work just fine, until the Juan Valdez oil spill...

Re:shipping cost

[theaveng]

Yes. As oil becomes more scarce, recylcing becomes more profitable. It's just basic economics.

Also in my humble opinion, diesel is the future not hydrogen. Diesel engines are the most-efficient method of moving cars, second only to solar which unfortunately has proven to be not practical (yet). So we'll trade-in our inefficient gassers for efficient diesel cars...... then sometime around 2030 diesel will be replaced with biodiesel made from home production (soybeans, corn, sugar cane, and waste products like scrap wood).

We will thus have eliminated most of our dependence on billion-year-old dead trees (oil), and instead fuel the economy using recently-grown plants or trees.

Re:shipping cost

[soundguy]

... because the undead don't drink coffee.

Citation needed

Re:shipping cost

[TheRaven64]

What happens to the ground otherwise? They're either thrown down the sink (and then extracted at the sewage processing plant), or they're thrown in the bin, and collected by a big truck. If you're consuming a lot of coffee grounds, it might be possible to do this process on-site, and use it to (partially) power a coffee machine, then have the grounds disposed of as they were before.

Re:shipping cost

[TheRaven64]

The undead drink beer.

Re:shipping cost

[maxume]

If the price for something like butanol ends up being cheaper than biodiesel, people won't worry about the difference in efficiency.

(butanol has some significant advantages over ethanol; the only disadvantage is that it isn't as easy to brew, but biodiesel faces that same problem when you talk about making it from varied feedstocks...)

Re:shipping cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, the folks from the populated cities would use these unpopulated cities full of undead to level up. They'd have to have some sort of fuel depots there.

Re:shipping cost

[Molochi]

I don't know... there was a lot of dissent that the idea that attaching pontoons to donkeys' feet was a sound one.

Re:shipping cost

[Wordsmith]

And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.

Re:shipping cost

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, I doubt many coffee shops go through enough grinds to make this remotely economical.

I worked in the food industry in the 1970's. Even then we recycled oil. We pured the lleft over into 55 gal. drums and every so often some guy with a truck came by and took the drums and oft off empty drums. It was economical because the guy with the truck worked a route where all his pickups were close together.

Same with Coffee pickup. I'm sure they'd save up a couple hundred pounds of grounds before they would call for a pickup and then in might take a week for the truck to fit your store into a pickup route.

The local thrift store calls me about once a month asking for old clothing and "whatever". They (literally) have some older women volunteers who work out the pickups and schedule trucks. They find it worth ther effort to send a truck and two men out to my house to pick up a few shirts that my kids have outgrown. It works because they line up who blocks of houses that are near each other all on the same day.

Who knew?

[nebaz]

After I drink my cup of coffee in the morning to wake up, I give it to my car, which needs it to wake up too.

Caffeinated Diesel?

[Ssherby]

I want my coffee to be unleaded, and my bio-diesel to be caffeinated.

Re:Caffeinated Diesel?

[Linker3000]

My deluxe vehicle only runs on biodiesel produced from Kopi Luwak grounds, made from coffee berries which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet.

My motor simply purrs along the freeways, naturally!

Save the world, become a geek!

[the_xaqster]

Yay! /. will supply 80% of the worlds Biodiesel!

Really, what difference does it make?

[glavenoid]

Sure, bio-diesel is great, but what difference does that make to people running cars dependent on refined gasoline?

Until either carmakers start to manufacture vehicles that can accept something other than regular gasoline (petrol), or realize the short-term benefits of diesel-based vehicles, this kind of shit will go no-where.

Car-makers -- Start going towards diesel fuel. It's the way of the near future. Diesel engines are already flex-fuel by nature. *Then* create motor vehicles that can handle multiple fuels.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[lisaparratt]

They do. They just don't sell them in the US, because your domestic diesel is dirty filthy stuff compared to that used in the rest of the world, and would foul their fueling systems in no time at all.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[glavenoid]

Touche.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Idaho]

Sure, bio-diesel is great, but what difference does that make to people running cars dependent on refined gasoline?

Until either carmakers start to manufacture vehicles that can accept something other than regular gasoline (petrol)

Uhm, they do?

Except in America, apparently. Meanwhile in the rest of the world, diesel-powered engines are very common, I think in Europe about 1/3rd of new cars sold run on diesel and will accept this bio-diesel without any engine modifications. For trucks (again in Europe), virtually 100% of them run on diesel and it has been this way forever, since diesel engines have high torque at low RPM and are therefore especially suitable to towing heavy loads.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[moosesocks]

We fixed that. By 2010, all US diesel will meet or exceed international standards.

VW can't sell their diesel jettas fast enough in the US.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[captainpanic]

Biodiesel can be used in any regular diesel engine. Gasoline is replaced best by (bio)ethanol. Fischer Tropsch fuels can replace both, although it is easier to make diesels (Fischer Tropsch = gasify biomass to CO and H2, then make a fuel from that over a catalyst).

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Anonymous Coward]

We fixed that. By 2010, all US diesel will meet or exceed international standards.

that's odd, where I am it's only 2008 meaning that you havent yet fixed it. exactly what timezone are you in?

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Anonymous Coward]

uhhh yea that's why US diesel prices doubled after the low sulfur legislation took effect in 2006

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[theaveng]

Manufacturers like Volkswagen, Ford, and Mercedes already build diesel cars that can burn biodiesel.

IMHO diesel is the future, not hydrogen. Diesel is the most-efficient form of energy, second only to solar which unfortunately has proven to be not practical (yet). So we'll trade-in our inefficient gassers for efficient diesel cars...... then sometime around 2020 diesel will be replaced with biodiesel made from home production (soybeans, corn, sugar cane, and waste products like coffee/french fry grease/scrap wood).

We will thus have eliminated most of our dependence on underground oil reserves, and instead fuel the economy using recently-grown plants or trees

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[UnderCoverPenguin]

Gasoline is replaced best by (bio)ethanol.

Actually, gasoline is best replaced by butanol. The problem is, butanol is more toxic to the microbes that produce it then ethanol is to the microbes that produce ethanol.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[ianezz]

I think in Europe about 1/3rd of new cars sold run on diesel

Actually, more than 50%.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[RMH101]

In the UK, it's more like 40% or so, although the rising prices and premium you pay at the pump when you buy fuel, and the premium on diesel engines (modern high pressure common rail diesels are complex) are starting to make it less attractive than it used to be. If you buy new, and do over, say 20,000 miles a year, it's a no-brainer. Less than that, maybe not.
Still, look at the numbers. VW have BlueMotion versions of most of their cars which are nothing more than standard diesels with slightly higher gearing, improvements to aero and rolling resistance and not a lot else. The Polo (slightly smaller than a Honda Civic) can do 75 (UK) MPG.
I drive an 03-plate Skoda Superb. This is more-or-less a VW Passat with an extra foot of wheelbase. It's got a 1.9L VW "pumpe-duse" diesel engine. I can get 50MPG *easily* out of it, and 44MPG in the city, and (after a laptop-powered ECU remap) I've still got nearly 200BHP and 312FT/LBs torque. Power, economy, size, safety - in a 5 year old car.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think in Europe about 1/3rd of new cars sold run on diesel

Over 50%. In France and Belgium it's over 70%. Even American makes such as Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge offer diesel engines (CRD) on all models.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[91degrees]

Most of the world uses the 24 hour clock. 2010 is just before quarter past 8pm.

HTH HAND.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[mcfatboy93]

not to mention the problem that happened last time the biodesel got really big on the news. food prices went up (alot, and their still there) because we were using corn, one of the most produced crops in america and turning it into ethanol.
what could the effects of this be?

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[moondawg14]

No, we already fixed it. All on-road diesel is 15ppm sulphur. In reality, it's more like 10ppm, because you have to allow some wiggle-room. Off-road diesel is still 500ppm.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Shotgun]

They can't sell them fast enough because everyone is out of a job 8*)

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Shotgun]

Ethanol, bio or otherwise, is not a sane replacement for gasoline. It might look good in a laboratory, but it sucks in the real world. The main problems revolve around its hygroscopic nature, and the corrosiveness of the resulting mix.

Ethanol is a terrible thing to add to a fuel tank.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[d3ac0n]

No, they don't sell them in the US because the two largest markets, NY and California, have ASININE environmental laws that prevent new diesel passenger vehicles from being sold. (Passenger vehicle being legally defined as a standard automobile or SUV)

I should know, I ran headlong into these laws just recently. In 2006 I was in the market for a new car. I wanted a Diesel Jeep Liberty. I was planning on brewing my own bio-diesel and getting nice, cheap, environmentally friendly fuel. But I ran into these laws. Apparently it has to do with the NY Environmental air regulations, related to the high-sulfur diesel. Well, the diesel is changing, but Chrysler decided that they couldn't make their diesels efficient enough to meet NY and CA standards (nobody can, the standards are stupidly unrealistic.) so they DROPPED the diesel from their lineup.

I ended up waiting longer as I heard they were coming out with a new diesel engine in 2008. Well, NY and CA RAISED THE ENVIRO STANDARDS AGAIN, making even the new, Diamler-Benz Blu-tech diesels too inefficient. So Chrysler decided to not even BOTHER adding the blu-tech diesel to the Liberty (and I think they dropped it from all US cars and SUVs). I still wanted a 4x4 to deal with Western NY winters, and the Liberty was still the best bang for the buck. So I ended up leasing a 2008 Jeep Liberty GASOLINE vehicle.

So, thanks to stupid Enviro laws, I am prevented from buying the vehicle I want, and am stuck driving a less-efficient gasoline vehicle, which creates more air pollution than the diesel vehicle I wanted.

This is why Big-Govt enviro laws are FAIL. Because there will ALWAYS be some stupid bureaucrat getting some pointless regulation passed which does the exact OPPOSITE of what they intend it to do. Stupid politicians and bureaucrats! GRRRRR! >:(

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[FrozenFOXX]

Very nice. Take note, mods, THAT is the definition of funny.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Anonymous Coward]

VW can't sell their diesel jettas fast enough in the US.

I'm assuming you meant VW can't make diesel jettas fast enough? i.e. they can't keep up with sales?

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Firethorn]

Manufacturers like Volkswagen, Ford, and Mercedes already build diesel cars that can burn biodiesel.

So doesn't GM and Ford.

Properly made biodiesel can be used as a 100% replacement for regular diesel without any modifications to the engine. That's a big part of it's appeal.

Ethanol would look a lot better if we had engines available that were optimized for it - the extremely high octane rating would allow us to build a more efficient high compression engine for it if we could jettison the requirement to run on regular low octane dino-gas.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Molochi]

Could you have bought one in NJ or Penn and transferred the title? I know it's a another hoop to jump through, but I know someone in Cal that did that.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, bio-diesel is great, but what difference does that make to people running cars dependent on refined gasoline?

(1) Those peolle live on Earth too. They will get to live on a very slightly nicer planet.

(2) If less crude oil has to be converted to Diesel then there will be more left from which to make gas. So, more gas will be available

(3) If the price of diesel were less more people will conceder buying diesel cars

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[jafac]

Um, really? 200bhp on the 1.9l diesel?
Because my 03 Jetta TDI is rated at something like 110bph. Pretty anemic, actually. Not at all the most exiting car I've ever driven. And actually, just crazy with flaky little electrical problems.

I do run B99 - but the hoops I had to jump through to find a reliable local supplier is just nuts!
(and yeah - I know I'm lucky to live somewhere where I don't have to worry about the higher biodiesel cloud-point, or gelling).

Don't get me wrong - I am 100% committed to the idea of Biodiesel being a crucial part of the overall solution to our (global) energy future.

I just think that VW produces crap cars, and then somehow gets away with charging BMW-prices.

($350 dollars for the one and only oil change I did at the dealer - I now do it myself for under $20, and I actually change the air filter, unlike the motherfucking fraudulent cocksucking lying cheating assholes at the VW dealership).

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Anonymous Coward]

Be thankful.
Winter is the last place you want a diesel.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[floodo1]

nevermind that there are all sorts of vehicles that run on the "dirty filthy stuff". It's just that they don't put those engines in cars.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[theaveng]

>>>So doesn't GM and Ford.

???. European Ford diesels run on biodiesel.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[Firethorn]

Oops... My bad.

For some reason I saw the first and last company, despite reading that line three times.

Re:Really, what difference does it make?

[RMH101]

You presumably have the PD110 diesel 1.9L engine. The 1.9 Pumpe-Duse VAG engines come in a number of variants - the 105, 110 and 130 BHP models. Most of the difference is ECU-controlled, but there are also differences such as slightly larger turbos, bigger injectors etc. Your 03 plate PD110 will benefit significantly from a remap up to around 140BHP.
Current engine's the 2.0 TDI which is around 140BHP as standard. If you have a google, you'll find that the PD130 engine is *ripe* for tuning. There's a whole load of tuners who specialise in it because the gains are so high. Mine dynoed at 193BHP (just shy of 200BHP) and 312FT/LBs torque - which is half as much again as, say, a Porsche boxster S!
I did use to have the before-and-after dyno plot up on the web but having just checked looks like the hosting's down right now, it was a couple of years ago.

In the UK, my favourite tuner is http://www.jabbasport.co.uk/ but there are a great deal of other ones.

The best VAG engine for bang for buck remapping is the post 2001 1.8T petrol engine, as fitted to Mk4 GTI etc. 150BHP as standard, simple remap and replacement panel filter gets you a verifiable 225BHP, and faster straight line speed than the 225BHP TT due to less weight and losses from 4WD. I've done a few hundred miles in one of these and they're *very* quick.
I don't know what US price comparisons between VW and BMW are (although both are *considerably* cheaper there than in Europe!) but here the pecking order is probably Merc/BMW/Audi, followed by VW, followed by SEAT and Skoda. Reliability? My Skoda's cost me a few sets of front tyres, a couple of services and not a lot else in the last 3 years, so I'm happy.

How practical?

[Anonymous Coward]

The number sounds huge until you try to figure out how to recover the grounds. The problem is individuals use a fair percentage of the coffee and even restaurants are spread out. Recycling coffee grounds will be a lot harder than aluminum. The best sources would be factories producing coffee drinks but that has to be a small percentage of the quoted amount. I'd be surprised if 15% could be recovered for processing worldwide even with a major effort. More than likely the number would be more like 2% or 3%. Still worth doing but it'll never be a significant source of fuel.

Re:How practical?

[maxwell demon]

Well, if you find 50 different sources which each provide about 2% of the needed fuel, you get 100% of your needed fuel.

Re:How practical?

[Joebert]

Ah yes, the Quagmire approach.

Re:How practical?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you find 50 different sources which each provide about 2% of the needed fuel, you get 100% of your needed fuel.

True. However, if all the coffee in the world will only generate 340 million gallons (~8 million barrels), then we're not even talking about enough fuel to run the US for two days (ie: 0.5% of US demand), never mind 2% of world consumption.

Re:How practical?

[necro81]

In the case of biodiesel from coffee grounds, the numbers are particularly bad. It's not even close to a 2% solution.

The authors estimate producing 340 million gallons/year of biodiesel this way. That's a little over 8 million barrels per year.

The problem comes when you compare that amount to the total annual consumption of petrodiesel worldwide, which is about 5 billion barrels. So this could displace, maybe, about 0.1% of petrodiesel in the world.

One must then offset that possible production against the additional cost in producing it - namely the energy needed to collect and transport the grounds someplace to be made into biodiesel.

One might do better in not drinking coffee in the first place, and saving the diesel used in transporting the beans. (I don't advocate that personally, I'm just trying to make a point.) The article mentions that 16 billion pounds of coffee beans are produced each year. Those are produced mostly in the tropics and then transported by ship, air, rail, and truck to their destinations. The 340 million gallons of biodiesel the authors claim is reclaimable would work out to about one gallon of diesel per 50 pounds of coffee beans, which I'd say is a reasonable estimate of the plantation-to-cup transportation cost.

So, if one could extract all the potential biodiesel from coffee beans, it might be enough to offset the energy used to transport them in the first place. But that's about as far as it would get.

So, this new discovery ain't nothin', but neither is it much of anything.

Re:How practical?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to work for him. Giggity.

Re:How practical?

[Anonymous Coward]

2 hours and 20 minutes is 9.75% of one day, or 0.0263% of one year. From all the coffee grounds in the entire US. You'll need 3802 different sources like that, not 50.

Sure, little contributions add up, if by "little" you mean 2% or 5%, but when it's 0.0263%, it just isn't going to work. People really need to learn the difference between big things and little things.

To put this in perspective...

[Protoslo]

The total yearly amount of biodiesel available from this "abundant" source worldwide is less than the amount of motor gasoline consumed in a single day in the U.S. in 2007. To be fair, TFA implies nothing of the sort, the summary is just rather enthusiastic.

Re:To put this in perspective...

[captainpanic]

There will not be a single source of biomass to replace all fossil fuels. Also, that is not desirable: then the whole world would need to be planted with the same crop. (Although I can see some enthusiasm for a world with only coffee). There are many, many sources of waste materials containing any form of carbon - those can all be converted into a fuel. Obviously, one should always consider the energy needed to make the fuel, and to transport it to where it is needed. If transport is too expensive, I suggest making electricity (rather cheap to transport that).

Re:To put this in perspective...

[Alsee]

Ok, on January 1st everyone drinks their year's worth of coffee, and on January 2nd we drive on it.

-

Re:To put this in perspective...

[Anonymous Coward]

If transport is too expensive, I suggest making electricity (rather cheap to transport that).

Transporting electricity is expensive. Suppose you decide to use wires to do it. You need several pieces of good quality metal all connected from one end to the other. It's not cheap to buy all that copper, and it's not cheap to have the wires and poles installed. And it's not cheap to maintain the wires and poles either.

Then we have the transmission losses. You can easily lose 10% of your electricity in a long run. You might think oh it's only 10%. Compare it to a truck which can carry 30 tons of diesel. How far can the truck go using 3 tons of diesel for fuel? A really long way right? Further than you can get 90% of your electricity?

And you don't need a very expensive road to drive a truck on. But you do need very expensive transmission equipment for electricity.

You know that Scene in Back to the Future?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't seen Back to the Future since I was a kid, but this reminds me of when they'd modified the car to run off waste. That seemed pretty cool at the time, but one of those ideas that is like the flying car. But it seems as if with all the research in this area, including genetics, bacteria, and algae, we may really be able to run all our cars off waste some day soon.

Re:You know that Scene in Back to the Future?

[Anaerin]

Ah, but the DeLorean always ran on Petrol/Gasoline (Hence the business with the train in BTTF III), the "Mr Fusion" only ran the "time circuits" (And presumably, though never mentioned, the flying).

Re:You know that Scene in Back to the Future?

[BlackSnake112]

I would like to have my Mr. Fusion too.

Re:You know that Scene in Back to the Future?

[domatic]

Actually it was mentioned that Mr. Fusion powered the flight circuits. Still, Doc Brown missed a major trick. If he had the gas engine removed and an electric motor installed in it's place then Mr. Fusion could have powered the entire car.

Re:You know that Scene in Back to the Future?

[rantingkitten]

If the flying part was powered by Mr Fusion they wouldn't have had any problems in the third movie. They could just take off and fly at 88 miles per hour. I can't see why an internal combusion engine attached by drivetrain to the wheels has ANYTHING to do with flying, but since they couldn't use Mr Fusion to fly off into the sunset, the engine must be involved somehow. Or maybe I'm just bored at the office at 4:40pm and giving this waaaayyyy too much thought. :)

In other words

[Once&FutureRocketman]

Scientists estimate that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply."

Of about a bit less than half of ONE DAY of oil consumption for just the United States.

It's nice to harvest the waste stream and all (although coffee grounds are also really great fertilizer), but this is not in any way a "sustainable" solution to anything. There's a scale mismatch to the problem they claim to be addressing.

Re:In other words

[Anonymous Coward]

Or what you're really saying is nearly all the fuel produced by the process will be consumed simply by transporting the 16 billion pounds of coffee to a plant where it can be processed to biodiesel and the cars of the employees traveling to the plant to process it.

Re:In other words

[bickerdyke]

Instead of transporting the 16 billion pounds of coffee to the dump. OK, I'm assuming that there will be a tight infrastructure for bio-diesel plants...

Big Deal?

[JRSiebz]

I've been putting coffee grounds in my Mr. Fusion for years.

Re:Big Deal?

[jo0ls]

And they already make it from Texas Tea anyway.

that's not great?

[CaptainNerdCave]

a little less than half of the current demand for fuel could come from waste products, and you're saying that's shameful? improving the processes will only improve the output. increasing the use of diesel will reduce the overall demand for fuel.

i don't know about you, but if i had the opportunity to turn my various organic _waste_ products into useable fuel, it would be high on my list of priorities. is this being done in europe yet?

Re:that's not great?

[Once&FutureRocketman]

Read TFA. The annual supply of coffee would provide less than one day's supply of fuel.

Not a scalable solution. Which fact is the weak point of most biofuel solutions.

How do they do it?

[Virtually Sane]

OK - so I read the article os I'm not a real Slashdot reader.

They quote a figure of 11 - 20% oil in the coffee grounds and processing leaves a solid that can be composted. This looks like standard solvent extraction of the oil.

The scale of the material available is not enough to replace non USA sources of fuel for cars.

BUT it is a step in the right direction, along with oil from algae, fischer-trope, oil from crops etc. Diversity of supply gives better security and helps keep the money in the country rather than export cash abroad.

If I were a betting man, I'd put money on small scale (1 tonne/hour) fischer-trope reaction vessels - this can use any waste organic material.

For the sceptics out there, look at the scale of ALL organic based waste in the USA and then look at the volume of oil that fuel derived by this process could deliver.

Also in terms of jobs, I believe there may be a number of auto parts suppliers looking to diversify into new industries right about now.

Re:How do they do it?

[Shotgun]

A better plan would be to dump the coffee grounds into an organic waste dump with everything else and have some hearty microbes eat it all at once. Breaking out waste streams into individual components will be more efficient only if the individual components are large enough. There will be a threshold where it makes more sense to just throw them all together.

Re:How do they do it?

[maxume]

The problem is that there is an upper limit on the scale of the process (unless you want to start competing with them for fresh beans), so all that has to happen for it to be a useless investment is for someone else to come up with a marginally cheaper process that can be scaled arbitrarily (it appears that algae farms can be scaled arbitrarily, the only question is the price where the farms are cost competitive with traditional supplies).

Re:How do they do it?

[Virtually Sane]

Good point, but as fischer-trope reactions scale down, the price drops geometrically due to the geometric reduction in wall thicknesses etc, to maintain the same pressures. I know that thermal losses become more significant as scales reduce, but insulation can help there

Back to the future?

[guacamole]

All this talk about biofuel from this and a biodiesel from that leads me to wonder whether some day our cars and homes will be equipped with mini power plants that process organic material, kind of what we saw in the Back to the Future's modified DeLorean from the future..

Re:Back to the future?

[haaz]

I've thought about something like this. I'd like to buy a small ranch house with a southern exposure, deck out the roof with solar panels, and rent it. It may not make sense in the strictest capitalist sense, but that's not the point.

I've also had a similar idea about home-made energy sources. But what I think composting is a better use of people organic waste. If we had a victory garden (or three) in every backyard, that would do more to save energy and improve the food supply than anything involving biodiesel ever could -- and this is coming from a guy who loves his biodiesel.

Diesel in the USA..?

[heavygravity]

With all the talk about driving more fuel efficient vehicles and people buying hybrids thinking that they're getting the most efficient vehicle out there, I have one question: why aren't diesels being used in the USA?

Of course they can be found very occasionally, but they're certainly not mainstream.

Why a diesel? Well, I drive a 4-year old diesel car. It's a full size car. It uses 5.3L/100km (that means I get 44.38mpg). And I drive like a normal person (or perhaps a little more aggressively). The car tops out at about 140mph.

This is a run of the mill vehicle - except it uses a 2.0L diesel engine. Why don't carmakers sell diesels in the USA? It doesn't seem like rocket science.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.businessweek.com/autos/autobeat/archives/2008/09/can_diesel_ever.html

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[RustinHWright]

Our car companies and national vehicle policies haven't turned out to be very bright. Some people say that eventually this may even cause American car makers to have financial problems. Maybe you've heard about it.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Gasoline car gets about 25mpg average. My gasoline motorcycles gets something like 100mpg.

Either of them can reach 0-60 in under 5 seconds. The bike will do it much, much faster (if you can hold on).

My GF's Diesel VW gets more than 40mpg, but it's slow as dog shit. Almost to the point of being dangerous.

In the town I live in, the ONLY major road from one end of town to the other is a highway with a 50mph limit, dropping to 30 in parts of town. Ever pull out onto a highway in a car that goes 0-60 in like 10 seconds? It's fucking terrifying.

Meanwhile, I've got a dual fuel car (natural gas/gasoline) that gets 40mpg and still has decent power and speed. It costs me about 5$ to fill the NG tank, and that'll get me about 250 miles. At which point, if no NG source is handy, I can get another 250-350 on the gas tank.

The kit to convert to dual fuel cost about 1500$ professionally installed, and I got a tax write off for double that in the process. The gas company paid for it, and let me pay them with interest free installments.

The joke is on my landlord. NG is included in my rent. ;)

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[moondawg14]

Ever pull out onto a highway in a car that goes 0-60 in like 10 seconds? It's fucking terrifying.

I've never had a car that goes 0-60 in less than 10 seconds. I've never been terrified while pulling out into traffic. Ever. You indicate that you drive like an asshole. If there were less of you on the road, nobody would have to be terrified on the highway.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[fprintf]

Unless you have a moped, I challenge you to prove or cite you get 100 mpg from your motorcycle. A recent Motorcyclist article showed the mileage available from a couple of small, current motorcycles. On average, they were getting 45 mpg during normal riding. Riding at 55 mph for as long as possible, the best they could get (out of a very underpowered Honda Rebel 250) was something like 78 mpg, if I recall correctly.

Motorcycles have much better efficiency that most cars, when comparing a single person transport mechanism. However the almost 2:1 advantage disappears very quickly when you start adding in diesels or carpooling into the comparison. Then motorcycling advantages become more about fun, maneuverability, splitting lanes (if legal) and ease of parking.

With that said, you do realize that you are stealing from your landlord, right?

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[Cowmonaut]

Um, I beg to differ. I live in southwest Washington state. I don't travel a lot so I don't know how the roads work in other states so maybe we're just weird. Anyways, on I-5 you have a little less than 10 seconds to get up to 60 usually. Most cars from the 80's and newer can handle this with no problem.

I'll elaborate. Most of the on-ramps go in a big curve with a speed limit of 25 mph, occasionally you get one that is 35 mph. If you are a jackass you can usually go up to 10 mph over without being in risk of losing control, unless its icy. Once the on-ramp straightens out you have less than 10 seconds to get up to speed.

This is where driving at certain times of day just gets dangerous in my opinion. There are people who seem to think you "should" be going 5-10 mph *under* the speed limit. The problem is these people are in the vast minority and are causing a road hazard.

You feel if someone is driving 60mph that it is dangerous for someone to be passing them at 80mph correct? So how dangerous is it for you to take your time getting up to 60mph (when the car is FULLY capable of doing so in less than 10 seconds; average of 12) and getting on the freeway at 40mph while everyone else is trying to go 60mph or more? How about when those people going 60 have to get between you and the car infront/behind you so they can merge onto the off-ramp? 20 mph is a big difference, slowing down reasonably won't cut it sometimes and your average drier won't be able to tell that until its (almost) too late.

You want to go the speed limit, that's fine. We can talk about driving slowly/speeding some other day. But grow a backbone and accelerate! I see far too many near-accidents caused by some yahoo who is getting on a freeway and is still going 40mph even though he had a nice stretch of on-ramp to get up to speed all because he's not accelerating enough.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[moondawg14]

0-60 times != 25-60 times.

I didn't advocate unsafely merging on the highway. I merely suggested that it's not necessary to drive like an asshole to do so.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[Shotgun]

I have one question: why aren't diesels being used in the USA?

You ever seen those dispensers of plastic gloves next to the diesel pumps at gas stations. Diesel

-stinks (the raw fuel you pump), and the stink hangs around.
-has a reputation for being a dirty, smoky fuel used by truckers and dualy-driving construction workers.

That is enough right there to get the "wife veto" on any diesel purchase.

PS.- Save the protest about it doesn't smell that bad, or today's diesels are better than yesterdays. You're preaching to the choir. The question is why don't they sell, and I've tried to answer that question.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[Shotgun]

Bullshit.

The US imposed heavy tariffs on truck imports. The SUV's the car companies were building qualified as trucks, which allowed the companies to actually make a profit on them. People were buying them up as fast as they could be built. They were making big profits on a fast selling product. What is not bright about that?

Oh, they should have seen the oil crisis coming? We've had an oil crisis coming since the 70's!!

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[Beezlebub33]

With that said, you do realize that you are stealing from your landlord, right?

Well, that depends on the lease doesn't it? Is there a clause that discusses what the utilities cover? Does it discuss vehicles? Maybe and maybe not.

If it does not cover vehicles currently, expect leases to start covering them very soon. With the advent of plug-in hybrids, you have to wonder if the electricity for the hybrid should be paid for above and beyond the normal expenses. If electricity is directly billed, then it would not be a problem, but in my experience that's only about 50% of the time.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[maxume]

The core problem isn't 'car companies' or 'national vehicle policies', it is that for the last 30 years, the unions have been paid with promises, instead of real dollars.

The car companies should have been able to figure out that this was a bad recipe, and the unions should never have accepted it (they aren't going to get what they were promised...), and I'm not real sure that the accounting surrounding it should be legal, but for a long time, it worked really well for the management of the companies, and the shareholders of the companies, as they were able to pretend that the financial condition of the companies was pretty good.

If they weren't trying to pay off promises that didn't make any sense, they wouldn't need huge amounts of financing to survive.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[heavygravity]

The diesel I mentioned is a BMW, which does 0-60 in about 8.5-9 seconds. That's not bad.

I don't know what kind of car you are driving, but under five seconds is the same (or faster) than a Porsche 911. Certainly not a 'usual' car.

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[brianerst]

Why so few diesels in the US? Largely due to far more stringent emissions standards in the US.

The largest market for cars in the US is California, and due to the unique geography of Los Angeles, traditional "smog causing" forms of pollution (NOx, SOx and soot) have been regulated far more strictly than anywhere else in the world. Several other states (New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine) have adopted the California standards and many more states are considering them.

Part of the problem (SOx) is being solved through a switchover to low-sulfur diesel, and NOx may largely be handled by new technology like BlueTec, but soot/particulates are still a problem. The current Euro 4 European regulations for diesel allow 150% more particulate matter than does California's LEV II.

As much as many Slashdotter's would like to make everything into a "USA sucks - why can't we be more like [Canada/Europe/Botswana]", this is actually largely the result of a few things that we are either more stringent about (particulate pollution) or have little control over (Europe's source of crude oil - the Middle East - being naturally lower in sulfur than the US/Canadian crude that is our primary source). The US is actually far more stringent about all sorts of pollution than anywhere else - it's just that carbon gets all the ink, and even there, we've done a lot better in real terms than either our or the European's rhetoric would lead you to believe.

In the end, no car company is going to sell cars that are illegal to own in half the country, so they just don't bother. That may change when Euro 5 compliant cars start rolling off the lines in a year or so, but we still have "two-fleet" regulations hindering things. (The "two-fleet" rule states that the Big 3 have to calculate their CAFE/fuel efficiency standards for cars they build in the US separately from cars they import, so it makes no economic sense for Ford to import fuel-efficient models built in its plants in Europe.)

Re:Diesel in the USA..?

[DreadPiratePizz]

Well I drive a full size car too. A 2009 Ford Focus. I just went 421 miles on slightly over 10 gallons of 87 octane gasoline this thanksgiving. So not only did I just meet your fuel economy, but I did it while releasing fewer pollutants into the air.

Multi-fuel is a bad idea

[Kupfernigk]

Multi-fuel engines have been around for a while (engine nerds like to restore the ancient Kelvins, which ran on both gasoline and Diesel - but not very well on either.) However, they will never be as clean and efficient as a single fuel engine because the actual mode of combustion of gasoline and Diesel engines is quite different - gasoline burns fast and Diesel burns slow. I remember well the horrible multi-fuel engine of the British Challenger tank, which betrayed its presence with a plume of smoke. A favorite trick of the squaddies was to wait till an MOD official was near the exhaust and then start the engine, covering them in clouds of soot (I've been in a tank when this happened, and believe me it was very funny).

As noted above, small and efficient Diesels are common in Europe, one reason why our average gas mileage is nearly twice that of the US. The reason for no US sales? Lack of demand, and regulation. US consumers do not like sub-200BHP engines, and the emissions regulations are biased in favor of gasoline. Repeated claims that Diesel particulate emissions kill over 20000 people a year have never been substantiated by proper studies, AFAIK.

Not bailing out GM could be the most environmentally friendly thing the Senate can do, as with GM and its lobbyists off the plot, there is a chance that the US will adopt a more rational (read German, Japanese or French style) approach to car manufacture.

Re:Multi-fuel is a bad idea

[jsoderba]

In most of Europe taxes on gasoline are much higher than on diesel. This creates an artificial demand for diesel powered cars. Without taxation diesel is actually somewhat more expensive than gas due to a more complex refining process. Today this tax discrimination is partially motivated by lower greenhouse gas emissions, but originally it was a sop to the trucking industry. It was only in the 90s that environmentally friendly diesels were pioneered by VW.

The diesel engines used by GM's European divisions (Opel and Saab) are competitive with VW's and other European manufacturers' engines. Ford also has good diesels in its Volvo cars.

A major barrier to diesel adoption in the US is California's environmental laws. Diesel engines produce more particulates (soot) than gasoline engines, increasing local air pollution. Due to the geography of Los Angeles it is unusually prone to smog, so California's emission controls are particularly strict. US car makers don't like the idea of marketing models that are excluded from the biggest car market in the country.

Re:Multi-fuel is a bad idea

[Bert64]

Or they would just import more foreign cars...
Cars from all these countries are already for sale in the US, most manufacturers offer diesel variants in europe but only offer petrol versions of the same cars in the US, and would likely continue to do so but in greater numbers if american car companies folded.

Re:Multi-fuel is a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lack of demand..."

Not. Diesel Jettas, Golfs and Passats sell out regularly. The diesel Jeep Liberty was also a sell-out. We'd buy them if they'd make them.

I really wanted to see Jeep make a diesel Jeep Wrangler (or Unlimited). I think that would have been a winner.

Re:Multi-fuel is a bad idea

[Anonymous Coward]

US consumers do not like sub-200BHP engines

That part just isn't true (my car has less than 100 HP); a lot of us have sent our money to Japan because the locals just don't make the cheap-to-run cars we want.

It's more about the emissions regulations that you mentioned, and (resulting?) lack of availability. Demand for cheap-to-run vehicles is huge; just ask Toyota and Honda. (or conversely, ask the guys who are begging our government for handouts because no one wants to buy their cars.)

Re:Multi-fuel is a bad idea

[GordonS3]

In the UK, diesel costs around 25% per litre thank petrol does. So if I get 25% better fuel economy, I'm not really saving any money... plus cars with diesel engines are more expensive here too...

Citation needed.

[RustinHWright]

I doubt many coffee shops go through enough grinds to make this remotely economical.

Let's do some rough math. According to TFA, coffee grounds are at least 15% oil. So if a typical coffee shop disposes of 20 lbs of grounds a day, which I would guess is modest, then we're talking about approx. 3 pounds of oil. Are you saying that it will use up a pound or more of oil to transport that to somewhere to process it? And if a coffee shop generates less, why would they have to dispose of it daily? Once they understand it to be a revenue source they will, as restaurants already do about other kinds of waste oil, be more than willing to make the storage space to accommodate the extra income.
 
If we assume that retail space costs $4 per square foot (which is a high estimate for much of the country) and that grounds are stored 4' high, then if, say, 20 lbs of grounds are stored per cubic foot, each square foot of space can store at least 12 lbs of oil. Assuming that oil is worth fifty cents a pound and pickup once every three days, then $0.50 * 12 lbs * 10 pickups = $60 net revenue.

You tell me, is $60.00 bigger than $4.00? It's been a while since I took arithmetic but I seem to remember that this is so.

Re:Citation needed.

[sleeponthemic]

You tell me, is $60.00 bigger than $4.00? It's been a while since I took arithmetic but I seem to remember that this is so

Confirmation on that, chief. $60 is more than $4.

Re:Citation needed.

[moosesocks]

Don't forget to subtract out labor and administrative costs, as well as the cost of operating the coffee to oil process.

At best, it might break even. (See also: that episode of Seinfeld where they fill up a truck with glass bottles to drive to Michigan to redeem the $0.05 deposits.)

Re:Citation needed.

[phantomlord]

Once they understand it to be a revenue source they will, as restaurants already do about other kinds of waste oil, be more than willing to make the storage space to accommodate the extra income.

I'm not sure about where you live, but here in western NY, restaurants generally don't get paid for their used fryer oil. Rather, it costs $35 a month to rent an oil dumpster and to have it emptied (at least it did at the restaurant I managed up until 2 years ago). We had someone offer to take the oil for free from us to convert to bio-diesel, but it actually cost us more money to give it away to him since we had to waste time opening and closing buckets, being sure to carefully pour it, etc. At 10 extra minutes per night (2 employees at 5 minutes each), that's an extra 5 hours (300 minutes) a month at roughly $11 per hour (don't forget the business costs above paid wages to employ someone and NY's minimum wage is higher than the federal one). Further, we had to go through the hassle of keeping a second bucket to transfer waste oil around since we couldn't dump the stuff from the grease traps on the grills into his buckets because he didn't want to deal with separating the impurities.

What are restaurants going to do? They can't just dump the oil into the garbage (and you don't want to see what happens to your plumbing when you dispose of used oil in a sink) or else the garbage company and environmental agencies will be after you, so they have to pay the disposal fees. The marginal cost is passed on to the customers as part of the cost of doing business. Even if the restaurants got paid by someone picking up the oil, you don't think they're going to lower their prices by that marginal amount, do you? It'll just be a way to make more money (and then we can hear about big chains that have LOTS of oil making obscene profits at the expense of their poor customers).

Anyway, much like used vegetable oil, there will be increased costs associated with separating and storing a specific waste item. If just 10 minutes a day is wasted on it, then you're just breaking even with your $60 projected revenue stream. In fact, other work that could be getting done is getting delayed in that time (and anyone that has ever worked in, much less managed, a restaurant knows there's always something that can be done). It's just not worth the hassle.

Re:Citation needed.

[RustinHWright]

LOL. Well, now I can sleep. Thanks ;->

Re:Citation needed.

[Anonymous Coward]

You tell me, is $60.00 bigger than $4.00? It's been a while since I took arithmetic but I seem to remember that this is so

Confirmation on that, chief. $60 is more than $4.

But I thought less was more?

Re:Citation needed.

[sleeponthemic]

But I thought less was more?

It was, but it grew and now it is more or less more than less.

Re:Citation needed.

[Rogerborg]

Dude, he's a "former logistics and process consultant". He's way ahead of you.

Re:Citation needed.

[maxume]

You drive to Michigan for the $0.10 deposit.

Re:Citation needed.

[Shotgun]

You place the price of the unprocessed oil at $.50/lb. Oil weighs a little more than 6lb/gal. You are saying that the raw, unprocessed stock is worth $3/gal? That's going to make for some expensive fuel.

Re:Citation needed.

[DriedClexler]

Confirmation on that, chief. $60 is more than $4.

Under which axiom set, though?

Re:Citation needed.

[jdevivre]

Confirmation on that, chief. $60 is more than $4.

Unless, of course, the two dollar signs are from different currencies...

Re:Citation needed.

[Yaleman]

Well, it's bigger because there's a whole extra digit. Rendered on an 8-led display there's more lights just changing from the four to the six. Any sort of representation with actual currency it's likely to be bigger especially if it's coinage :)

Re:Citation needed.

[Mr Z]

I suppose that's more or less true.

So is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?

Re:Citation needed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite.

A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, or 350 lbs. Currently, this sells for $45 a barrel, or 12.85 cents per pound.

At this price, you get $1.54 per square foot, per pickup, subtracting transportation costs, which normally in the course of business is $500 per pickup. -5000 + 15.42 is not > $4.

You would have to have 324 feet of space, or approximately 6500 lbs of grounds per month to break even.

Re:Citation needed.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Are you saying that it will use up a pound or more of oil to transport that to somewhere to process it?"

Well, one gallon of diesel weighs about 7 pounds. If we guess high for the truck mileage and say the truck gets 30mpg, that's a bit under 4.3 miles per pound, so 4.3*3 = 12.9 miles. So if you do a round trip from factory to coffee shop to factory to pick up that little material and it's 13 miles, you gained nothing.

Of course, pickups could just as well be weekly, so we're talking about 140 pounds of grounds (which will yield about 21 pounds of oil, which will be about 3 gallons of fuel, which would carry the truck about 90 miles), and if it's one truck that goes out on thursdays and gets ten shops worth of grounds all in one pass, then even if that's 90 miles of driving, it's only used 10% of the future output of the collected grounds.

Retail floor space can go significantly over $4 per square foot, according to a quick googling... but in practice, that's the space where the merchandise is put out. You'd be dumping the coffee grounds into a bin out back. And, of course, the biofuel factory won't be paying you anywhere near what the yield from your grounds will cost at the pump.

Re:Citation needed.

[fataugie]

You do know that a gallon of water...much less viscous than oil, weighs 8 lbs. So I would estimate that 1 lb of oil would be about a pint to a quart. So, yeah, if a diesel van is doing the rounds...and they get maybe 15 mpg to 20 mpg, I doubt they can move the grounds using a pound of oil. Unless the plant is right next door, it's going to take a lot more.

Re:Citation needed.

[RustinHWright]

Okay, you had me until you took it as a given that "In the course of business" a "pickup" costs $500. Could you point us to a citation for that?

Have you heard of the substitution effect?

[RustinHWright]

Every vehicle anywhere that switches away from gasoline to diesel or some other fuel cuts the demand for gasoline. Demand goes down, prices for gas go down.

Re:Have you heard of the substitution effect?

[theaveng]

Gasoline doesn't have to be gasoline. If demand for gasoline drops, the low-octane gasoline can be refined into diesel or home-heating oil, some of it can be converted to kerosene, and the rest used for plastics.

 

You're missing the point.

[RustinHWright]

This isn't about COFFEE FIXES THE ENTIRE WORLD. It's about yet another proof that we are surrounded by hundreds of viable sources of sustainable fuel. That now that we're finally waking up to it, gasoline and diesel and the lot are just carbon and hydrogen and a few other plentiful elements, all of which are quite literally common as dirt and easy to shift from one simple set of molecules to another. It's only being subjected to over a hundred years of propaganda and sabotage by the oil companies that made us forget that in the first place. Henry Ford and Rudolf Diesel, to name two, certainly always knew better.
 
  Do you consider a single teacher useless if she or he can't personally teach every student in the world at once? Do you consider a meal useless unless it means you'll never have to eat again? Do you consider RAM useless unless each piece can hold all the files you'll ever need to store?

This isn't "a scale mismatch". It's just people going out and significantly decreasing the problem. And with them cutting it down by maybe a third of one percent this week and somebody else finding another approach that cuts it by another half a percent next week and so on, the work gets done. Thats what real life is. You go out and make things better. And with six billion of us, you don't need to assume that one little development will fix the problem. Only that it moves us forward.

Re:You're missing the point.

[squoozer]

I fear you are actually missing the point. The point is not that coffee grounds can or can't make oil it's how much effort it requires to do it for what gain we get out the other end. For a start I doubt very much if the figures for the amount of diesel produced are realistic. This person is trying to sell this idea so he's going to have given the best case scenario where every used coffee ground is processed into diesel which simply isn't going to be the case in reality. For arguments sake though lets say he is correct and in a year his process can produce about enough one days worth of fuel for the US.

I wonder though how much effort went into collecting and processing all that coffee. Obviously we will mechanize as much of it as is reasonable but it's still going to require machines and people to operate them. Even if we use the best case of having the delivery drivers collect the used coffee we are still talking about some additional staff.

I'd bet that if you looked at the number of people required per million gallons of diesel produced this system would come out very poorly against just pumping it out the ground and that is the crux of the problem.

Re:You're missing the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't "a scale mismatch". It's just people going out and significantly decreasing the problem.

No, this particular solution very definitely has a scale mismatch. Energy demand is fundamentally an economic problem: you have to get more economic benefit from your energy source than it costs to produce. In the present case, they're saying you can take 50 pounds of grounds and produce one gallon of diesel, or a half ton of grounds to fill your fuel tank. The sheer volume of spent grounds required for this process means that its application is limited to commercial coffeehouses and coffee processors. It seems like a heavy individual coffee drinker might produce enough grounds in a year to produce one gallon of biodiesel. It seems unlikely that even your local starbucks uses enough coffee in a day to fill one tank.

What this probably is, is an option for, say Nescafe, to extract some extra value out of their waste. Personally, I suspect that they would extract more value by directly burning the oil-laden grounds to heat their brewing water, but maybe the could do both processes economically. It's a niche solution, much smaller than reprocessing deep fryer oil from the local Chinese restaurant.

Re:You're missing the point.

[Jesus_666]

Obviously we will mechanize as much of it as is reasonable but it's still going to require machines and people to operate them. Even if we use the best case of having the delivery drivers collect the used coffee we are still talking about some additional staff.

So... additional jobs generated are bad now?

Re:You're missing the point.

[necro81]

A problem with your teacher analogy is that a teacher is a whole and complete unit, concentrated and readily able to teach some number of students, even if it isn't the whole world.

When it comes to coffee beans, however, you have a teensy, tiny resource that is distributed all over the world. It would be like saying that the teacher's eyes are in Papua New Guinea, the legs on either side of the Urals, the hands in Africa, and the ribs scattered across the Americas. How useful is a teacher like that? Not very, unless you could collect all the pieces in one place.

If all the coffee beans were concentrated in one corner of one country already, and could be used to offset a significant portion of that corner, that would really be something. But in this case, even if each Starbucks reclaimed all their grounds and has a spigot that shot out pure Java biodiesel, just how much has that gotten us?

Re:You're missing the point.

[squoozer]

No additional jobs aren't a bad thing but we probably have close on full employment now unless we start taking pretty draconian measures to force people to work (e.g. in the 19th century if you didn't work you went cold and hungry). That means that either would would need more people or we would have to take people from one job and put them on making diesel. This would increase demand for labour and drive up prices.

The problem is not the lack of energy, it's how widely dispersed that energy is and how much effort it takes to collect it. More than enough energy is coming from the sun and hitting this planet we just can't economically collect it.

Re:You're missing the point.

[RustinHWright]

More like the "eyes", "ribs", etc. are on 12th street, 17th street, 20th street, etc. You're pushing the scale. I don't know. Maybe it's being a Portlander. Maybe it's having studied the data on just what the distribution of Starbucks outlets is as a monopolistic practices issue. But I seem to be considerably more aware than many of y'all of just how much coffee is brewed in this country.
Howsabout you walk through your nearest downtown and actually count the density of coffee consumers? And remember that we're largely talking about not just pure cases of coffee and not much else. We're largely talking about IHOP, Dunkin' Donuts, and others who generate tons of waste oil otherwise who are or will be getting pickups of biowaste for oil generation already.
This is, as I point out in my other main post, about the specifics of things just like that and frankly, I'm not sure I can be bothered to post anything more in response to people who simply don't seem to know where to place the commas and decimal places in their numbers for this situation.

Re:You're missing the point.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's about yet another proof that we are surrounded by hundreds of viable sources of sustainable fuel

I want my Mr. Fusion now!

Re:You're missing the point.

[Jesus_666]

Given that the financial crisis has caused US unemployment figures to raise at a very fast rate I don't think that everyone willing to work has work. Of course this infrastructure wouls require investments but I think the government would be willing to contribute if it can expect oil prices to sink as a result.

As for the energy required to collect the waste: I'm fairly certain that it'd be possible to do so without expending more energy than we can generate from the process. Small distributed processing plants coupled to a decently-designed collection network that leverages trips that already happen anyway (eg. putting up coffee grounds containers where glass recycling containers are or collecting the stuff at malls) could do the trick. Of course driving a truck to everyone's front door to collect their used coffee grounds won't.

Re:You're missing the point.

[justinlee37]

Yes, if there's something more worthwhile they could have been doing as a job instead.

How would you feel if we put a law through congress saying that the federal government would hire people at $10/hour to stand on their heads?

What, you don't like that idea? So additional jobs are bad now?

Re:You're missing the point.

[Jesus_666]

So you think that alternative sources of oil are completely pointless and a waste of everyone's time?

Re:You're missing the point.

[justinlee37]

No, I was just operating on the other person's assumption (and it is an assumption, albeit an intuitive one) that the sum of the energy we gained would be less than the sum of the energy invested in processing the coffee. If that were the case then the job would be worthless. If not then they can knock themselves out. But just saying "it makes jobs" never justifies anything, on it's own.

Re:You're missing the point.

[Jesus_666]

However, most of the time the people saying "that requires more energy than we can possibly get out of it" seem to think that their argument is self-evident and automatically applies. The closest to a supporting argument I've ever heard is "it is like that for corn ethanol" but nobody seems to even consider that other sources of fuel might work differently.

There seems to be some kind of knee-jerk reaction where some people disregard anything connected to alternative fuel sources out of hand - they will always consume more energy than they produce, they will always cost more than gasoline, it's better to be unemployed than to work producing them... That stance might have been appropriate in the 80s but oil becomes ever more expensive and we do need to mitigate that.

Amen

[justinlee37]

You said it brother.

Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoable?

[RustinHWright]

Funny how people keep talking about fuel used to transport other fuel being some sort of dealbreaker. How do these people think gas is transported now from, say, the Middle East? Magic elf slippers? If transporting gas half way across the world, which is what we do now and have for generations, isn't a big deal, then why do people keep thinking that transporting some other fuel a few hundred miles will eat up all of its net energy advantage?

Why bother turning it into diesel?

[InakaBoyJoe]

.. or you could just leave the grounds out to dry, then toss them into an ordinary furnace. Generate heat or steam or electricity or whatever without the nasty chemicals and energy required to process the stuff into biodiesel...

Re:Why bother turning it into diesel?

[Virtually Sane]

Kenco in Banbury, UK, do this already - saved a fortune in energy

Re:Why bother turning it into diesel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is what most coffee growers and processors do. They use their coffee waste as a fuel

This makes even less sense than corn ethanol

[dontmakemethink]

Let's assume spent coffee grinds are easy to collect (they're not), and that those making biodiesel from grands will have a free supply of spent grinds (which they won't). The amount of usable fuel oil from grinds will require more spent fuel than the process produces.

Corn ethanol has the exact same problem. By the time you've farmed the corn and processed it for fuel use, you're expended more fuel than it saves. Sure the corn is renewable, but it's fossil fuels that are being burned to make it and ship it.

Re:This makes even less sense than corn ethanol

[Jesus_666]

Care to quote your numbers?

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[irtza]

Well, to answer your question, one must think of the volume of gas produced. Right now, each supplier has output that greatly overwhelms any other aspect of the equation. There is little cost going into extraction, purification and transport because the source itself has an abundant supply.

Now, lets move to the coffee situation. The supply of coffee in each are is relatively limited. It needs to be transported back to a central point for processing. Obviously moving one canister of used coffee to say ohio from washington (state or dc in this case) will not be efficient. Of course no one would do that, so local systems to gather and purify would be needed. The question then is, what is the net energy cost of transporting the spent biofuel to the processing center, and what is the cost of producing diesel from it? Once the diesel is made, will it be in adequate volume to fill tankers and have it moved back out? If collecting a towns coffee only produces twenty gallons, was it worth it? Yes you can move it back out, but it will only supply one or two people.

Perhaps a more realistic view would be that some public service vehicles - say the town trash pickup can actually run off of biofuel being thrown out in the town. Might work out to be a more realistic model.

Now, at the end of this, you might be right. If biowaste other than just coffee grounds are considered, we may have enough to collect and redistribute, but not according to what is stated in this article and links provided in other posts.

If It Can Be Done With Used Coffee Grounds...

[Soloact]

...then one would think that the fuel could be made out of all biodegradeable "waste" plant matter. Collecting it would just be a small step for many, as they already sort out glass, paper, plastic, etc, for recycling. Out here, they already have the separate green bins for plant matter recycling. Would also drastically reduce the amount of garbage that people generate.

Re:If It Can Be Done With Used Coffee Grounds...

[EmagGeek]

Recycled plant matter is better used as organic fertilizer, rather than producing oil from it, then producing toxic chemical fertilizer from that oil. Far less energy is required in the former process, and it is healthier and produces better quality food.

Re:If It Can Be Done With Used Coffee Grounds...

[maxume]

Toxic chemical fertilizer is an oxymoron.

I suppose you could be talking about phosphate runoff, but that has as much to do with farming practices as it does the particular source of the fertilizer.

it's all coffee's fault

[z-j-y]

If we ban coffee, the world energy demand would drop to 10% of current value.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[squoozer]

The difference is really in the scale of the transportation and the concentration of the fuel source. The fuels that we currently consume such as oil and coal have very large deposits in comparativly small areas. Used coffee grounds on the other hand are widely spread across the whole world making collection harder. I'm sure if oil was spread thinly everywhere rather than being localized in wells it wouldn't be any where near as economical (from an energy point of view).

There is one mitigating factor with used coffee grounds however, a truck had to deliver the coffee in the first place so presumably it could take the used coffee back. Since you have to return the truck anyway you are only paying for the additional weight which shouldn't be great compared to actually moving the truck. Of course this has got to be weighed up against the fact that even if all the coffee grounds were collected the amount of fuel produced is tiny in relation to what is used.

Yup. It's all just the same bits.

[RustinHWright]

Couldn't agree more. Not only that, we're getting much better at turning vegetable-sourced feedstocks into all of this, including the plastics. Gawd, I love the future. At least these parts of it.

I did that already.

[RustinHWright]

Take a look again at my pricing. I give fifty cents a pound as the net value for oil. Which is a damned conservative valuation even including those costs. Think of what oil sells for now. Dude, I'm a former logistics and process consultant; I'm way ahead of you.

Oh, and for future reference, comedy shows, especially ones meant to undermine respect for thinking and work, are rarely good guides to framing the utility of an activity.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Alsee]

How do these people think gas is transported now from, say, the Middle East? Magic elf slippers?

Everyone knows elves go barefoot.
Oh wait, no, that's hobbits. Nevermind, my bad.

-

Two hours and 20 minutes

[Eunuchswear]

Scientists estimate that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply.

I assume they mean 340 million gallons a year.

World oil production is around 83 million bbl a day (2004 est.), about 10 times as much (1bbl = 42 gal). So this would keep us going for about two hours and 20 minutes a year.

Re:Two hours and 20 minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

340 million gallons would be about 0.85% of the [url=http://genomicsgtl.energy.gov/biofuels/transportation.shtml#consumption]40 billion gallons of diesel[/url] used in the U.S. for transportation each year.

Re:Two hours and 20 minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, the world apparently uses 83 million bbl/day (http://www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html) of petroleum. However, not all petroleum ends up as the gas in your tank. I'm not sure the biodiesel from coffee grounds would have the same number of uses as petroleum, so more of it would go to vehicles. Overall, not quite a fair comparison.

Re:Two hours and 20 minutes

[bxwatso]

yup. the same is true for most bio-waste products - there aren't enough raw materials (like waste cooking oil) to make even the slightest dent in the overall supply. also, the OP said 'potentially' 340 million gallons. that would presumably mean the forced recycling of all coffee grounds - hardly likely.

Re:Two hours and 20 minutes

[cparker15]

Does that account for the manufacture of non-fuel products, like plastics, lubricants, etc.?

more on coffee

[irtza]

just finished reading this in the last front page article http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1059759&cid=26086943 and they throw this at us. Just think, "McDonalds biofuel burned my car after I crashed it!" I would laugh, but I am too scared it may happen.

How much is 340 million gallons of diesel?

[Noonian]

To put everything in context :

1 barrel of oil (bbl) is 42 gallons, so 340 million gallons of oil is a little over 8 million bbl.

How many bbl do we use in the US? According the the CIA world factbook, the US consumed 20.8 million bbl/day in 2005. (It's almost certainly higher today.) That means we've just found enough oil to replace about 2/5ths of one day's worth of oil demand in the US.

It's a baby step in the right direction...

As you said, your numbers are out of date.

[RustinHWright]

Sure. In some places. Two years ago or even longer ago. Times have changed since then. Check it out. These days there have been increasing problems with waste oil being *stolen* from behind restaurants. Around here waste oil tanks are chained, locked, and covered in PROPERTY OF.. stickers these days. Certainly, not everybody has figured it out yet but the economics of used oil have changed, even with fuel prices now dropping back down. For a while.

As for the mechanics you're talking about, just like anything else, a new approach is taking a while to get new infrastructure. Waste oil containers *designed* for transfer. Sealed transfer means that are more like the effluent pipes for a motor home than like the kind of manual lift, turn, and scrub you're used to. Catalysts to reduce residue in tanks. Spinner filters that push all that goo out of the way with far less use of consumables.

This kind of thing not only has to deal with half a dozen categories of health and safety regs, it also gets alternately obstructed and improved by big, semi-monopoly firms like Waste Management. But it's also being addressed by more engineers and private designers than the Manhattan Project.

But the bottom line is that these kinds of things are very new and to judge long term viability, let alone net pricing, based on the cobbled together amateur hour stuff you're talking about is like judging what a PC can do based on a badly soldered Altair. Demand is there. Supply is there. McDonalds and the other fast food chains, plenty of non-profits, and several hundred governments are funding the creation of better ways to do this. In fact, McDonalds has been selling their waste oil in Europe for quite a few years now. For, mind you, a hefty profit.

Oh, and fwiw, I'm well acquainted with the mechanics of this. I was just pricing retail space last night, I've been through quite a few waste oil facilities and have gone over things like transfer techniques, residual water percentages, and so on, with people up to and including the head of process engineering for Kettle potato chips and various demand side folks in both east and west coast biofuels processors, including ones from near you. Just talked last month with the New York State head of such things a few months back about the lack of publicity the NY State programs done upstate under Pataki got. I think that you'll find that Patterson will change that.

It ain't over yet, dude. And if you check into petrochemical processing from a hundred years ago you will find that it was messy, awkward, wasteful, and far more dangerous. These things take a little time. And they're improving fast.

Dude, have you looked into modern oil refining?

[RustinHWright]

It's been a hell of a long time since anybody just "pumped it out of the ground". Oil these days is forced up with thousands of tons of pressurized (and now toxic) water, run through hundred million dollar curving, shifting pipe complexes that are prone to breaking waaaaaaay down in the ground. If, that is, the platform can be kept on station, the local government doesn't collapse, the pipeline isn't blown up by rebels or simply competing power groups, and on and on. If you think that we're comparing biofuels to a process where people just dig a hole a few feet deep and oil just politely spurts into a tank, then I think that you need to take a look at how these things are done in the modern world.

feel good fluff?

[circletimessquare]

can they turn feel good fluff journalism into biodiesel?

"i'm drinking my morning coffee and... they can turn my coffee waste into fuel! awww..." **hugs**

anyone actually interested in solving the energy crisis?

Re:feel good fluff?

[Jesus_666]

anyone actually interested in solving the energy crisis?

For example scientists working out ways to generate fuel from various kinds of waste, which, when combined, might fill a significant part of the gap that fossil oil leaves?

We're not going to find some magical process which will instantly replace fossil fuels. But if we find fifty renewable sources of oil that each produce 1% of our current need then we have already cut the problem in half. And if we find new technologies that allow us to reduce the amount of oil used then that further reduces the problem. Even a tiny step forward is a step forward.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Anonymous Coward]

How do these people think gas is transported now from, say, the Middle East? Magic elf slippers?

It has to do with energy density and locality of the energy source and energy sinks.

So in the oil/gas case you have:
Single Source --> High density -->Multiple Sinks.

In the coffee case
Multiple Sources --> Low density --> Multiple Sinks.

a question of infrastructure

[oenone.ablaze]

I'm wondering whether this production of biodiesel requires different equipment and processes than the filtration of used cooking oil, or any number of other sources. Otherwise, we'd have this expensive, bulky equipment just for purifying coffee grounds, and additional expensive, bulky equipment for processing peanut shells, and any number of other sources, all for producing less than one day's worth of oil demand all year. If the biodiesel is extractable using some kind of "standard method," perhaps the coffee conversion process could follow something like the recycling model--all biodiesel-containing waste products in one bin, plastics in another, etc. But at what level of efficiency could this possibly happen?

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Anonymous Coward]

If transporting gas half way across the world, which is what we do now and have for generations, isn't a big deal

News for you: it is a big deal. It's only done because without environmental damage being accounted for, it is still hugely profitable. Your logic is what is destroying the life basis of future generations.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Shotgun]

I welcome the new supertankers coming to a Starbucks near you.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention, Billions of US tax dollars go to oil subsidies. That is one of the reasons we don't pay shit for gasoline in the US. Until we have government programs that subsidize sustainable fuels, then we are stuck with some dirty fuel.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it's because of the vastly different amounts of easily releasable energy in coffee grounds compared to fuel oil.

Whoa, whoa, whoa

[Anonymous Coward]

Part of searching for an alternative fuel is the problem of scale.

Richard Branson invested 1,500,000 coconuts to make enough coconut oil to run ONE engine of a 747 for a SINGLE trip from London to Paris (or wherever). He seemed to think that was some kinda breakthrough but he didn't seem to take in the math.

Powering the OTHER three engines, multiplied by the number of aircraft, multiplied by the number of trips taken per day....all the sudden you're into exponential notation!

Similarly: 340 million gallons per year is a tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the fuel used for ground transportation each DAY.

It's not that I don't want a solution. It's just the repeated lie that there *is* an alternative fuel. The media and the Liberals would have you think a few trillion dollars here-n-there and we'll all be driving on solar power. It's just not true- we're still a LONG way away.

I'm thinking nuclear power plants, scourge of alternative-fuel Liberals, could recharge a lot of cars while at the same time saving diesel fuel, ethanol, methanol etc for semi trucks.

But while PART OF US is still hypnotized by dollar-hunting-science (Global Warming) a solution will be hard to find.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[maxume]

Ship freight is significantly more efficient than truck freight. Significantly. And it uses cheaper fuel.

After that, much of the overland transport is done using pipes, which are even more efficient.

Finally, the U.S. only derives ~1/3 of it's oil from places that are far away (roughly 55% of the oil consumed in the U.S. is produce in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and Venezuela makes up the difference).

Less than a drop in the bucket

[chiangovitch]

In 2003 the annual global consuption of diesel fuel was 684,022 million liters. That's almost 181 Billion gallons. The 340 million gallons they speak of is about 0.2% of annual consumption, if my math and units translations are right -- haven't finished my first cup o' diesel this yet this morning.

Coffee Grounds? How about tons of seeds and stems?

[TrentTheThief]

How many tons of seeds, stems, and leaves are wasted every year?

Coffee grounds is just another freaking hype buzz word. Henry Ford was using hemp for bio-diesel 60 years ago.

"Make the most of the hemp seed and sow it everywhere." -- George Washington.

Get with the plan, people. Don't toss those seeds in the trash, toss them into fields and gardens everywhere.

OPEC member here I come

[olddotter]

My coffee habit should get me on a list of major Bio-diesel feed stock suppliers. :-)

La-dee-dah

[shking]

spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world's fuel supply

Approximately 2 gallons per car in the USA, or one gallon per American, or 1 liter per "first world" citizen (N.America, Europe, Japan and a few others)

Increased Efficiency

[Nom du Keyboard]

And you can increase efficiency even more if you can harness those caffeine overcharged individuals who just consumed the coffee to peddles to help power their vehicles.

I'd post this to my biodiesel co-op's web site...

[haaz]

If only, A) I remembered the password, and B) it would be a way for us to get biodiesel sooner rather than later. Biodiesel *is* the bomb (although it's non-explosive), but I'm somewhat skeptical about these things. That said, I can see how this would be a good way to get biodiesel, and for once doesn't involve fry grease!

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Anonymous Coward]

If only we had some sort of world-wide series of tubes....

Wars over coffee

[bussdriver]

No single thing will replace oil.

Coffee is one of the top traded commodities in the world, I've even heard it listed as #2 just behind oil. So does this mean Coffee will get the #1 spot that much sooner?

So... will the USA have to force the world to buy coffee in US Dollars in order to prop up its dead currency? (FYI: why do you think it's kept going this long-- its the oil.)

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Hillgiant]

Who says you have to have a centralized processor? Biodiesel scales down much better than the desulfurization units required for ULSD. Instead of putting the processor in Ohio, put the processor next to the coffee shop (or between the coffee shop and the gas station).

Okay, it won't scale down for a single pot to a single tank (as far as I know). But there is no reason why any given mid- to large-city could not have a single processor processing all the local waste oil for local consumption.

Look at the biodiesel plants that are making money today. I guarantee every one of them is using this sort of business plan.

Instant Coffee

[Morosoph]

http://www.answers.com/topic/instant-coffee-1

As an owner of a Rancilio Silvia, I find that link in equal parts fascinating and horrifying.

before you get too excited

[roc97007]

These types of articles usually give raw numbers instead of percentages because it sounds more impressive if you don't put it in perspective. A few minutes on google and a few seconds with a hand calculator (if you went to public schools) shows what a tiny, tiny fraction of total usage this would be.

Mr. Fusion

[RustinHWright]

Don't we all?

Truth is, with things like thermal depolymerization getting more common, we may be closer than you think.

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Sounds like grounds for excitement!

[Slicebo]

:)

Re:Really, what difference does it make? SILENT?

[davidsyes]

Kewl. Don't be SILENT! Be... SOYLENT. This "Green" thing is getting out of control. Maybe there are enough corrupt, puffy politicians to fill the "Spent/Used Politicians" hoppers. Don't they drink enough coffee. Between the CORRUPT politicians and the coffee in their systems, AND the spent grinds...

Soylent GREEN is PEOPLE.... Well, it might be green/brown sludge if the "oil" pressed from polician (hyoomon) beans..., hehehe

Starbucks ....

[wtansill]

now has a completely new business model and revenue stream...

Re:Have you heard of the substitution effect? Wait

[davidsyes]

a sec...

For a moment I was thinking that sounds like:

"Sex doesn't HAVE to be sex", and
"Vaseline doesn't HAVE to be Vaseline", but,

tell that to their respective proponents...

Re:Ridiculous

[JSBiff]

Tiny, and marginal, yes. This won't solve the energy crisis. But, hey, why turn down 340M gallons of Biodiesel if you can get it cheaply?

I think that, for the near-term future, we should throw everything at the problem we can, as long as the solutions are efficient (I don't know if this coffee-ground idea really is efficient, but I'm willing to consider anything), even if they are small, they still add some energy to the world supply.

There are a lot of potential 'small gains' that could be made in human energy efficiency, but that aren't considered because they are considered 'small'.

Take, for example, the idea of District Heating. Every modern electrical generating plant that either burns hydrocarbons, or uses nuclear fission, generates electricity using a 'heat engine'. I think the figure I've seen is that the best heat engines, are, basically, about 50 percent efficient. That is, if you generate 1GW of heat, you produce 500MW of electricity, and 'waste' 500MW of heat energy (that's a pretty much best-case scenario, I believe). District Heating is the idea that you can use that 'waste heat' to heat up cold water (from a lake, river, ground water, etc), then use pipe-works to distribute the hot water to nearby houses, apartment buildings, office buildings, shopping centers, factories, restaurants, pretty much any kind of building. That hot water can be used to heat the buildings when the weather is cold, and can be used with heat exchangers to heat up treated water for human use (drinking, cooking, showers, etc). That is, you wouldn't directly drink or cook the lake water used in the district heating, but your 'hot water heater' in the basement, instead of using electric or natural gas to heat your treated water, would instead use the hot water from the district heating system as a heat source to heat the treated water).

At an individual level (that is, you as a consumer), you might not save much money by using district heat instead of electric or natural gas, because of the fact that district heat does require expensive insulated pipeworks, and pumping stations. So, district heat is not widely deployed, because there isn't a driving market benefit (individual cost savings) to drive it. However, if we look at the big picture, as an economy, if we can move millions of homes to district heating, that is a *lot* of electricity and natural gas which is *not* being used to heat homes or water any longer. But, because individual consumers might not see significant short-term savings, no one is really willing to invest in district heating systems.

Also, to be fair, district heating is only efficient a certain distance from the power plant. After that, it's too hard to keep the water sufficiently hot, even with well insulated pipes, so district heating couldn't serve the majority of America. Still, it could serve millions of Americans who do live sufficiently close to power plants, and thereby save a lot of energy every day. But without some sort of government mandate, it would probably never happen.

Re:Ridiculous

[JSBiff]

Actually, I'm thinking more about this. I don't believe this coffee ground biodiesel idea could ever possibly be efficient. The problem with this whole idea is collecting and transporting the coffee grounds to processing facilities. How much energy are you going to 'spend' transporting the used coffee grounds to be processed? I'm almost positive you'll spend more energy collecting the coffee than you get back.

I still like the idea of District Heat, though, unless there is something inefficient about it that I'm not currently aware of.

Oh, I've got it! District Coffee!

[JSBiff]

Have one giant 'coffee factory' per city, with insulated pipeworks to distribute hot coffee to businesses and residences. Then all your coffee grounds are in one place, where you can collocate the coffee refinery.

. . .

No, I'm not serious.

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How many gallons of fuels will be used...

[Grendel_Prime]

To haul all those coffee grounds around? Could we get an adjusted number instead of that "340 Million Gallons"? It doesn't all smell like cake from where I sit.

Instant?

[WED Fan]

What would certainly get more expensive is instant coffee, because that doesn't produce waste coffee grounds.

Instant bio-diesel? 2 scoops of powder, add water. Cream? Sugar?

So, if you don't want the exhaust to smell like your breakroom after the dipshit from IT grabbed the pot off the hotplate while it was still dripping, do we want to add Irish Creme to the mix?

Will they someday insist that we switch to decaf biodiesel to protect the environment? Do I have to stop telling the Barista to make mine leaded?

Since my cardiologist told me to cut down on caffeine, do I have to avoid traffic jams?

Is Ford going to come out with a special "Juan Valdez" edition Explorer?

Re:Coffee Grounds? How about tons of seeds and ste

[21mhz]

My drug (coffee) is better than yours, pothead.

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how people keep talking about fuel used to transport other fuel being some sort of dealbreaker. How do these people think gas is transported now from, say, the Middle East? Magic elf slippers? If transporting gas half way across the world, which is what we do now and have for generations, isn't a big deal, then why do people keep thinking that transporting some other fuel a few hundred miles will eat up all of its net energy advantage?

Consider that Rome and London had very large populations back when high-tech transport was a rowing galley or an oxcart. If those "primitive" people could do it, why are we so afraid?

Also people should consider that fuels like gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc are made by distillation. In the refinery, they boil the crude oil to drive off the vapors which are condensed to make various fuels. To boil the crude oil, they have to heat it to over 1000F (600C). How many people factor the energy used to boil the oil into the cost of fuel?

Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl

[RustinHWright]

Thank you. Actually, I'm hoping that a friend of a friend who is a chemist at an oil company will be joining this thread soon. Seems like plenty of folks have no idea how much processing takes place to get that stuff to and ready for the gas station.

Re:Coffee Grounds? How about tons of seeds and ste

[TrentTheThief]

My drug (coffee) is better than yours, pothead.

You made false assumptions, my friend.

First, besides the fact that although Coffee smells really nice, it still tastes like shit. Second, I don't get high or even drink alcohol.

Don't let yourself be blinded by decades of propaganda. Hemp is a weed. It requires no pampering or care to grow anywhere a seed can take root. Perhaps two or three times per year. The raw materials it provides creates an excellent linen, clean paper made without the use of acids to break down lignins in cellulose, an extremely nutritive food product for human or animal consumption, a cleaner fuel, etc.

You could, of course, have discovered all of this on your own with very little effort. Do some investigation on your own so avoid further embarrassment in public forums.

Re:Coffee Grounds? How about tons of seeds and ste

[21mhz]

I don't care much. It just amuses me how some people get all energetic and eloquent prozelytizing advantages of hemp, when in all other respects they're, well, potheads.

Re:Have you heard of the substitution effect? Wait

[theaveng]

Well there are different types of sex.

I know some women who will swear that old "man-based" sex is passe' and that machine-sex is the way to go.

Re:Coffee Grounds? How about tons of seeds and ste

[TrentTheThief]

Yeah. It's easy to wax poetic when you're wasted. But be that as it may, they are still parroting valid points.

Even a cursory investigation into the politics of the marijuana prohibition shows that it was almost entirely enacted to provide sinecure for the soon to be jobless alcohol hounds. Nothing more, nothing less.

Go ahead and start a garden

[Randym]

Look, right now, all those grounds go into the garbage.

I've been composting coffee grounds for years. They work well with the vegetable waste (N) and the leaves (C) -- they make the compost a little acid, but not too much. My vegetables are gorgeous and 100% organic. It's a win-win-win situation all around for me.

So?

[RustinHWright]

And you think that you're adding something useful to the conversation why, again?

And that brings us to zoning, etc.

[RustinHWright]

My. Your points are exactly the kinds of reasons that folks like me are trying to get intentional communities to regulatory parity with nuclear family-oriented lifestyles.

You're right, living the way that you do and disposing of your "waste" the way that you do, every little change is tiny gain trying to justify significant cost. But out here in Oregon more and more people are living illegally, getting by with less access to mortgages, violating fire codes, and so on to live five to twenty people to a household. But since regulations are designed to obstruct adding more bathrooms, they tend to have to share them even though they would gladly pay the cost of building in more. Since water regulations make it a crime to put their greywater on their gardens, they sneak it out a little at a time and never put in efficient dedicated greywater plumbing. Since putting a greenhouse on the lot would also be a tell of those illegal people, not to mention unfundable with a second mortgage shared by all those people, instead they build cheesy little ones out of scrap and grow a third of the food they could, using twice the space and adding almost no living space to the house. And on and on.

Why do I bring all this up? Because in a two or three person household, you're right, this kind of thing is all pain almost no gain. But the larger the household, the more practical it gets to either sort into more categories or perhaps even build a little homebrew-style setup and do the diesel separation right there. Yet again we see that the real barriers to living sustainably trace back to our corporate-backed, fifties originated, "nuclear family" lifestyles.

You've got your analogies wrong.

[RustinHWright]

No, many of us would rather live in 21st century Europe (but with more space and less regulation) than in 1970's America. Because that's what the previous poster's world would most resemble. Dude, hate to break it to ya (no, I don't) but *you're* the one living the clumsy, outdated lifestyle. As for costs, I'm guessing that you haven't done the math on cost/benefit here. Those of us who eat our daily serving of clue know better. I've got three words for you: Tyson's Corner redesign.

Don't forget rooftop algal production.

[RustinHWright]

Thanks for the linkage. But let's not forget that modern algal production means could be done just fine on rooftops and over spaces like parking lots. Not only is this, in that sense, utterly unused land, it would even protect what's there now from the elements. Not to mention that the people "working the farm" could walk to work from city center apartments.

Do the math.

[RustinHWright]

Coffee grounds are nowhere near rich enough in oils to make your scenario reasonable. For coffee to be worth more as fuel than as tasty beverage, fuel prices would need to reach, oh, fifteen dollars a gallon, while somehow production, processing, and shipping costs for coffee stayed constant. You might as well say that people will stop eating shitakes because they might become more valuable as compost.

Yup. Diesel is emerging fast.

[RustinHWright]

I live four blocks from a car lot that is always filled with nothing but seventies and eighties BMWs and Mercedeses. There are quite a few of these in Portland and two that I know of in Eugene. Why? Because there are now companies that do nothing but buy up those old cars, clean them up, optimize them for biofuels, and resell them. There's even a company near me called (seriously) Lovecraft, that does just the conversions. They're busy all the time. (Should I say damned busy? Busy with tentacles on top?)

Yeah. I don't know about the rest of the country, but out here on the freaky west coast, diesel cars are already an everyday fact of life.

Don't believe the hype.

[RustinHWright]

Amazing how much disinformation there is out there on this one. So far I've only *occasionally* been able to track it back to oil companies. Do the research. The real primary reasons for increases in grain prices are massively increased Asian demand for meat, more and more crop blights (mostly from global warming and from agribusiness-caused problems), and ever heavier use of petroleum-derived fertilizers.
Yes, biofuels-destined crops have caused *some* of it, as well as boomtime increases in prices for some kinds of cropland. But even there we're talking about the kind of virgin sourced, feedstock inefficient approaches that nobody responsible in the biofuels community was ever recommending in the first place. The only reason that those crops were grown and used that way was that yet again the agribusiness companies like ConAgra and Archer-Daniels-Midland had undermined a social trend for their own short-term enrichment.

I must say, I've found this whole "biofuels caused the food price increases" meme impressively persistent and, if you look into it, one with a formidably fast rise time. Just kinda appeared out of nowhere in about a year and a half. Do the research, folks. Search on "grain crop blight" and things like that instead of terms that will just point you back to the disinfo.

Interesting post correlation.

[RustinHWright]

I was going to foe you but then found that you posted anonymously. Funny how most neocons do. Not willing to be accountable for your actions, maybe?

I'm thinking nuclear power plants
Oh, I don't doubt that you are. Which right there shows that you have no idea of the real comparative costs of various possible energy sources. Howsabout this, you go and build (not plan, actually build and get operational) a standalone, pays its own bills, unsubsidized and safe facility built that will store any and all nuclear waste in a form where twenty randomly chosen engineers with relevant expertise agree that your storage means is safe for at least a thousand years, regardless of what happens to management of the facility or possible sabotage or theft and then we can *start* to discuss how you're planning to do "cost effective" nuclear power.

Fucking anti-intellectual, cowardly, petty ass, right wing, mumble, grumble...