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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?"
Well at least, if it smells fried chicken, it will be better than actual truck exhaust!
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.
Schmaltzy !
Because sea kittens are fluffy.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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
fluffy and delicious.
The findings are new, but disturbing for the future of biofuel.
To put this in perspective, the newspaper article you link to describes some scientists who've done a computer simulation of burning mixtures including biodiesel (a particular type of biofuel), and predict that it will produce a greater amount of PAHs, which are known to cause cancer, than simulated pure fossil fuels. As far as I can see, they've not even burnt anything.
Assuming real experiments match their simulation, the mixture will most likely be tweaked a bit--some chemical change, some additive, or something--to bring down the resulting amount of PAHs. We already drive around with catalytic converters bolted to our cars to clean up various pollutants. What you've described is a minor pothole in biofuel development, not the roadblock you seem to be implying. By far the greater challenge is how to devote the necessary land to grow biofuels while we simultaneously increase food production to feed a growing world population, and try to conserve land for nature.
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.
You post is rationalization at best. Your claims for vegetarianism are easily refuted and shown as the ramblings of someone who gets halfway through a problem and assumes they have the answer.
1) health wise
Wrong. Vegetarian diet is so unhealthy that you can frequently spot vegetarians by sight. They tend to be gaunt. Low in muscle mass and low in muscle tone. When vegetarian from childhood, they tend to be shorter due to malnutrition.
2) environmentally - At current rates of environmental degradation and population growth, the mass of humanity will be vegetarian very soon of necessity. We won't be able to continue wasting 99% of our food.
The problem you are describing is overpopulation. Humans overbreeding for their food source. If populations continue to grow as you suggest, being vegetarian will not stop starvation. At best it will only delay it. I suppose eating as vegetarians COULD reduce the populations health enough that the population drops off, but humans are biologically pretty robust. I doubt the poor health of being a vegetarian is going to be enough to reduce our population.
3) ethically
Eating meat is not unethical. If we are going start playing the "killing lower life forms is unethical" game, then it is vegetarians that are unethical. They kill the most helpless life forms on the planet. They line them up and force them to live unnatural lives in unnatural environments. They genetically manipulate them to suit their needs, and consume them while they are still alive.
Life includes killing. It is unavoidable.
4) the stomachs of the poor to have to compete with the gas tanks of the rich
There is not one single person on the planet that is going hungry due to ethanol-from-sugar. World hunger is a byproduct of corrupt governments, (to a lesser extent) parental irresponsibility and the inherent difficulties in distribution. Here in the US, my aunt is actually paid NOT to grow corn. She is not alone. As long as there are thousands of farmers who are paid not to grow corn, any claim of people going hunger because there isn't enough is at best misinformed. At worst an outright lie.