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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."
If lucky, probably just enough to power the trucks to go get it at 47 pounds of coffee grounds per gallon of fuel.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
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.
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.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Well, if you find 50 different sources which each provide about 2% of the needed fuel, you get 100% of your needed fuel.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
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?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
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.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
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.
Bitter and proud of it.
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.
You want to "wean people off" "current fuels" by subsidising their price?
And Slashotters think this is "insightful"?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
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.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
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.
Well, if we made biofuel out of all the bullshit that appears on /. ... the OPEC countries would go bankrupt.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.