Waste Coffee Grounds Offer New Source of Biodiesel 276
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."
Re:shipping cost (Score:4, Insightful)
Really, what difference does it make? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
To put this in perspective... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:won't somebody think of the mornings? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:How practical? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, if you find 50 different sources which each provide about 2% of the needed fuel, you get 100% of your needed fuel.
Re:shipping cost (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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:To put this in perspective... (Score:2, Insightful)
You're missing the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoable? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Diesel in the USA..? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:won't somebody think of the mornings? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Multi-fuel is a bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Citation needed. (Score:3, Insightful)
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:won't somebody think of the mornings? (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to "wean people off" "current fuels" by subsidising their price?
And Slashotters think this is "insightful"?
Dude, have you looked into modern oil refining? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:won't somebody think of the mornings? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:To put this in perspective... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Iraq to US is fine but Seattle to LA is undoabl (Score:1, Insightful)
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:Diesel in the USA..? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:won't somebody think of the mornings? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:feel good fluff? (Score:3, Insightful)
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:won't somebody think of the mornings? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.