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Factory To Make Biodiesel From Chicken Fat
telekon writes "Tyson foods has finally found a use for chicken fat and leftover food grease that isn't McNuggets — they've partnered with Syntroleum to produce biodiesel from the stuff. Their first plant in Louisiana will be able to churn out 75 million gallons a year. The question is, will the exhaust smell like fried chicken?"
What else to say?
Life is not for the lazy.
Well at least, if it smells fried chicken, it will be better than actual truck exhaust!
I know that the exhaust of falafel oil does smell like falafel. So it means that the exhaust of this "biodiesel" will probably smell like fried chicken.
As a vegetarian, it really disgusts me... (I wonder, though, if this smell is better than regular diesel).
PS: I am disappointed that the article is so short.
hemi
What was the previous use?
My guess is they mixed it in with the chicken feed to fatten up the next batch. They'll need a new source of oil. Maybe corn oil?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
From experience with homebrew biodiesel, the exhaust really does smell like the fat/oil used to produce it. My dad's truck smelled like french fries or chinese most of the time.
Life is going to be a lot harder for those poor vegetarians
Eat the crap; Makes you fat. Need a bigger car to lug your fat ass around. Burn it in your car; Exhaust smells like it, making you hungry. Repeat. Also 75 milllion gallons sounds like a lot, but when compared to the annual gasoline consumption of the US (~140 billion gallons), you'll need to eat a lot of chickens to make a dent. Sound like some gov't make work program.
There was a plant owned by Renewable Environmental Solutions near Carthage, MO that would take leftovers from Tyson's chicken plants and turn it into various oils, including fuel. Problem was that the plant *stank* and the wind sometimes blew the odor into town, leading to many complaints and attempts to fix it.
Eventually the state shut 'em down because they were unable to control the smell. Maybe this place in Louisiana is way out in the middle of nowhere, so they won't have to worry so much about the neighbors complaining.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Schmaltzy !
We already know Men living in areas with polluted air may be more likely to develop lung cancer, according to scientists. .
So we thought this biofuel should be great. But now recent studies have found some evidence that indicates that biofuel is even worse for humans! Norwegian researchers have found this (published in a large norwegian magazine named technichal weekly).
Read this article. The findings are new, but disturbing for the future of biofuel.
But hey, after all it's environment friendly. :)
I am sure we have more human fat...
Great, now I'll have to add Lipitor(tm) to my diesel tank so my car's fuel line doesn't get plaque build-up.
When you're threatened by a stranger,
When it looks like you will take a lickin', (cluk, cluk, cluk)
There is someone waiting,
Who will hurry up and rescue you,
Just Call for Rendered Chicken! (cluk, ack!)
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
As a vegetarian, it really disgusts me... (I wonder, though, if this smell is better than regular diesel).
As an omnivore who's also a hunter, I'm glad that they're finding a green use for what would otherwise be a waste product.
This is a kind-of 'old tech' come back in a new form. Animal fat used to be used to produce candles and lantern oil; so the idea of using it for power isn't a new one.
BTW, this is old news; I first heard about this factory several years ago.
MUCH better article
- Hmm... Looks like a new plant, and it'll also produce fuel for the B-52. Sweet.
Ah, here's what I was remembering - light crude from turkey fats and other waste via thermal-depolymerization .Article dates from 2003.
I don't read AC A human right
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/The-mysterious-death-of-the-chicken-fat-car-45445497.html
The mysterious death of the chicken-fat car
By: Timothy P. Carney
Senior Examiner Columnist
May 20, 2009
As President Barack Obama unfurls his fuel-economy standards and Congress takes up global warming regulations, it’s useful to remember that what emerges from environmental policymaking is not necessarily what’s best for the planet, but instead what’s best for special interests.
Consider the epic and somewhat bizarre struggle over clean fuels that ended last week. As usual, special interests were central to the drama. But the antagonists seemed right out of a Monty Python sendup of Washington politics: An oil company, hoping to profit from making trucks run on chicken fat, was thwarted by the soap industry’s lobby.
The chicken-fat story is a cautionary tale about how environmental policy actually gets made.
It began in 2005, when President George W. Bush signed an energy bill including a $1-per-gallon tax credit for “renewable diesel” fuel created through “thermal depolymerization.” Writer Rina Palta reported in the liberal American Prospect that Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., wrote the measure “to benefit a floundering company in his home district that produces boiler fuel from turkey offal, which did not qualify chemically as ‘biodiesel.’ ”
At the time, Congress was eagerly providing subsidies to turn plants and animals into fuel, so it didn’t seem farfetched to boost the cause of fowl entrails. But unintended consequences soon arrived, proving once again that the biggest companies usually find a way to profit from government intervention.
In April 2007, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that Blunt’s tax credit had broader applications. Within two weeks, ConocoPhillips and Tyson Foods saw that the IRS had opened the door for a joint venture to melt chicken, cow, and pig fat into diesel fuel. Conoco Chief Executive Officer James Mulva was honest about his unusual undertaking: “It’s not profitable without the $1 per gallon tax credit,” he said at a news conference.
But this renewable fuel had enemies. First, Democrats didn’t like any subsidy that helped an oil company like Conoco. (Blunt, for his part, said he never wanted to help oil companies, and that the law should be changed.)
Second, business lobbyists were also working to kill the subsidy for chicken fat. The obvious opponents were chicken fat’s competitors — the companies that turn vegetables into diesel fuel. The National Biodiesel Board, which spends nearly $1 million a year on lobbying, pushed hard to ensure the $1-per-gallon subsidy for clean diesel didn’t also apply to the Conoco-Tyson operation.
But the issue of “renewable biodiesel” also turned up on the lobbying filings of the Dial Corporation and the Soap and Detergent Association. Just as ethanol subsidies have driven up the price of food, it turned out that fat-to-fuel subsidies boosted the cost of manufacturing soap, which is also made of animal fat. So Dial and the Soap and Detergent Association, displeased that Tyson now had somewhere else to peddle its fat, also lobbied to kill the chicken-fat diesel subsidy.
While their own interests were obvious, the soap and biodiesel lobbies argued that chicken-fat diesel was not good for the environment. But the Environmental Protection Agency ruled this month that “biodiesel or renewable diesel made from animal fat or used cooking oil results in an 80 percent reduction from carbon emissions versus petroleum diesel,” according to Darling International, a company that deals in animal-fat diesel. Darling added in its first-quarter 2009 report, “That is the highest level of carbon reduction available
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I read in a few places that I can't remember right now that it takes feeding an animal 26 calories to get 1 calorie of food out, by eating their meat. In other words you have to put more energy in than you get out. This is good for Tyson's if this is about waste they could not do anything else with. It isn't an alternative energy solution though. It isn't even an efficient way to get food.
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I assume the submitter was joking, but chicken fat is also added to pet foods. I saw the chicken fat on ingredient labels at Costco. We just switched from a dog food that had corn in it, based on a friend's advice that a corn allergy is common in dogs. Wish we had known 6 years ago.
I come here for the love
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It's rather shocking that one company can actually *source* 75 million gallons of chicken fat per year in one country. How many billion chickens have to be slaughtered to make 75 million gallons of chicken fat?
Wishing I had mod points... well written retort
You dont have to feed cows grain- Grass fed beef is healthier and natives grasses grows
over large parts of the United States. If you know any people who can digest grass let me know.
Grain fed beef is only popular because its cheap, but grass-fed beef is healthier and less prone to ecoli
in addition to being more humane.
Just so that everybody is clear, this is NOT better than burning fossil fuels in terms of CO2 released.
All of that chicken fat would simply have been put into a land fill, thus acting as a CO2 sink (kind of like fossil fuels right?).
I have a friend who produces biodiesel semi-professionally (sells to local farmers to run their tractors and other farm equipment, the rest is unofficially sold to friends) and for a while he was using rendered chicken fat. The raw material stinks like hell, but the resulting biodiesel doesn't really smell like much of anything. Remember that the manufacture of biodiesel is a chemical process that changes the oil into something else. The chicken fat no longer exists at the end of the process. Any odor is due to particulate or a fraction of oil that wasn't completely converted.
Generally all biodiesel smells the same unless it's been manufactured improperly. I've managed to get some in my mouth before (a siphoning error). It doesn't have much of a taste but it coats your mouth with a terrible film that is very hard to get rid of.
One time I was over at the plant with my dog. She managed to find an open container of chicken fat and stuck her head in there. I don't know how much of it she ate (drank? gulped?) but you can imagine, if you dare to, what sort of things were coming out of the other end of the dog for several days afterward. Oh god... Oh, oh god.
That's .054% of the fuel the US uses in a year, but I guess it's a start.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Biodiesel For The Soul.
Why not just get fat from Americans, there's a lot larger supply.
I'm not a vegetarian so not too worried about the air smelling like fried chicken, but I'll bet if that's all you could smell any time you walked outside you would get sick of it. I would be more concerned about the impact this would have on Tyson land use, run-off, and disease control (antibiotics). It's already pretty f#cked up.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
who cares what it smells like as long as we are fuel independent nation from it!
cue the accordions and clarinets to play "If I was a rich man"
In general, the exhaust from a diesel engine running on biodiesel made from vegetable oil is odorless. If made from animal fat, it smells like popcorn. [Yes, I'm serious.]
The cars! The cars! They run on people! They RUN ON PEOPLEEEEEEEEE!!!
Or,
"No no, this corvette doesn't need gas! It runs on the fat of the land!"
That rumbling?
It's a stampede of trolls with racist jokes headed for this discussion! Take cover!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Go ahead and laugh if you want to, but I knew a guy who converted his (diesel) car to also run on oil from deep fryers. He had to start it on diesel, and run it for a minute on diesel before shutting it off (if he had been running on oil). He had a converter and emulsifyer attached to the car, and had to use fine strainers to remove potato (and depending where he hot it fish, and chicken), then send it past a coffee filter to remove very fine particles. It worked well, and was cheap to run the car (unless the restaurant owner insisted on being paid to let someone remove his waste oil), but when he drove around, it either smelled like KFC or french fries, or fish.
Animal are tasty. That is enough for me. Call me egoist , but I have only one life, so feel free to eat your cow-chow, I will eat the cows.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Now if only we could find a way to convert the fat sucked out of celebrities via liposuction into a biodiesel...
They're sacrificing chickens at the alter of biofuels.
How deliciously accurate. They've admitted biofuel are a desperate, unsupportable hail mary to the Gods. --
Considering how badly poultry is handled (and killed) compared to cows and piggies, this means breeding huge batches of chickens, let them develop physical injuries while trapped in a small box with 1000 other chickens, share space with dead chickens no one is taking care of, and get killed while being skinned alive. Exactly the same as the "for food" poultry industry.
I am no PETA guy, but the treatment of birds by farmers and laborers is remarkably cruel. From the designers of the cages (filthy and lacking hygiene, stacking as many birds as possible in a tiny space, allowing dead birds to just rot there with MEAT FOR PUBLIC CONSUMPTION) to the laborers (who abuse birds during handling, smashing them around, hitting them just because they had a bad day, crushing and kicking them when putting 20 in a minuscule cage, etc.) and the chemicals used (even seen mutant chicken chicks? I have, and it's really sad)
The minimal hygiene you find in those places is because of inspections and such, and to avoid shipping poisoned meat. Imagine how much worse it's got to be when a factory is not using them for food.
The way they will be fattened is likely to be similar to how ducks and gooses get their livers ready for use in foie-gras. Check it around, it's not nice. Foie-gras farms are the bird equivalent of Hellraiser, with pierced throats and deformed organs.
I worked at a poultry farm for a while. It's hellish. I can't eat any form of poultry anymore. (while still cruel, life for beef and pork is practically luxurious in comparison.)
I'm so glad we have yet another excuse to raise animals in torturous, inhospitable conditions of untold amounts of suffering so that we may be able to drive our cars more "cleanly." How disgusting.
You are now manually breathing.
then burn it in a combustion engine and feed the exhaust fumes to the next-gen chickens?
beware he who denies you access to information for in his mind, he already deems himself to be your master (SMAC-ish)
It's amazing what hostility I am seeing for suggesting that people merely think about the consequences of their diet.
Here's what the American Dietetic Association ("the world's largest organization of food and nutrition professionals") has to say:
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life-cycle including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence and for athletes."
And more specifically:
Vegetarian diets are often associated with health advantages including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of heart disease, lower blood pressure levels and lower risk of hypertension and type 2 diabetes, according to ADA's position. "Vegetarians tend to have a lower body mass index and lower overall cancer rates. Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol and have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E, folate, carotenoids, flavonoids and other phytochemicals. These nutritional differences may explain some of the health advantages of those following a varied, balanced vegetarian diet."
I have no doubt that we are omnivores by nature. Also, by nature, we should die of old age in our 30s. I don't care what is "atural." I am just talking about giving some thought to the quantitiy of meat in the average diet.
The people who run their diesel cars on used & filtered french fry fat drive cars that smell very tasty.
Unless they strip that out, the cars would smell of chicken.
Personally, I think I would prefer a stripped-down version. Don't make the smell overwhelming, but keep a sprinkle of good smell in there.
Mmm.... Chicken Soup for the Kia Soul!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.