Biodiesel from Coffee Grounds
Used coffee grounds can contain up to 20% oil
What can you do with old coffee grounds? Compost them or trash them, or maybe use them to power your flux capacitor if you happen to have a Mr. Fusion lying around. Now researchers in Nevada are reporting that they have succeed in extracting leftover oil from used coffee grounds. From the article on EurekaAlert:
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 American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication.
In the new study, Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi note that the major barrier to wider use of biodiesel fuel is lack of a low-cost, high quality source, or feedstock, for producing that new energy source. Spent coffee grounds contain between 11 and 20 percent oil by weight. That’s about as much as traditional biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm, and soybean oil.
Growers produce more than 16 billion pounds of coffee around the world each year. The used or “spent” grounds remaining from production of espresso, cappuccino, and plain old-fashioned cups of java, often wind up in the trash or find use as soil conditioner. The scientists estimated, however, that spent coffee grounds can potentially add 340 million gallons of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply.
Definitely an interesting potential source of biodiesel feedstock.
-Ben Connor Barrie
Photo Credit: avlxyz
December 15th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
[...] post on the evolution of poisonous birds, or a post from Sustainable Design Update on using coffee grounds as a source of biodiesel, or Greg Laden’s Congo Memoirs, or… Go. [...]
December 24th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
[...] the environment and sustainability. The most recent edition (found here) features the “Biodiesel from Coffee Grounds” from last week as well as several other fascinating articles, including one I wrote for [...]
May 18th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
This is certainly a very interesting feedstock, as this does not compete with food for land. Neither does it require additional resources because used coffee ground is waste anyway. However the collection and trucking to central processing plants my spoil the overall carbon footprint a bit.
August 27th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Bio diesel is the new energy star, the name is a general one for a variety of ester-based oxygenated fuels made from soybean oil or other vegetable oils or animal fats