America’s Addiction Fuels Desire For Coffee Ground Biodiesel
Researchers are reporting they have successfully made a high quality biodiesel from spent coffee grounds. They estimate that the coffee ground biodiesel industry could generate as much as $8,000,000 in profits annually using waste from US Starbucks stores alone.
One of the main limits to the acceptance of biodiesel as an alternative fuel is its price premium above regular diesel. To bring the price of biodiesel down, the industry uses as much waste material from other industries as possible to make it — such as used fryer oil and animal fats from poultry processing.
In holding with the idea of cheap biodiesel feedstocks, a team of researchers in the Chemical and Materials Engineering Department at the University of Nevada figured that maybe spent coffee grounds would fit the bill too.
- » See also: Biofuels Breakthrough: Making Fuel From Air With Engineered Microbes
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And boy do they ever. Not only do spent coffee grounds have a relatively large amount of oil (about 15% — almost all of which can be converted into biodiesel using standard methods), biodiesel made from the grounds has a long shelf life due to the large amount of antioxidants in coffee. Antioxidants slow the process of rancidification.
There’s a bonus too: at the end of the biodiesel extraction and conversion process, the leftover grounds can be turned into fuel pellets for wood stoves and boilers, closing the waste loop (or at least putting most of the carbon and nutrients that had recently been used by the plant to grow back into the atmosphere where they can again be used by plants to grow).
Given that Starbucks generates 210 million pounds of spent coffee grounds per year in the US, the researchers calculate that it could amount to 2.92 million gallons of biodiesel and 89,000 tons of fuel pellets. After taking out operating costs, and assuming a sale value of $4.50/gallon of biodiesel and $225/ton of fuel pellets, that amount equals just over $8 million of profits per year (view calculations).
Conducting my own calculations, even at $3/gallon for biodiesel, profits would be in the $4 million per year range.
Anybody in Seattle listening?
Photo Credit: How can I recycle this’s Flickr photostream under a Creative Commons License.
Sources: ArsTechnica and Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry (subs req’d)
Doug,
You’re absolutely right.
One big problem - the coffee grounds obviously aren’t in one location, but scattered all around the world at the 15,000-odd stores. So you have to include the transportation costs to collect and centralize the grounds so they can be processed. There goes your profit…
But, no difference from the waste veggie oil from restaurants. They could be collected hand-in hand even though they may have different destinations.
Also less trouble than drilling in the ground, planting and harvesting, and or growing a fuel source. Also have to add the fact that this prevents millions of tons of waste from hitting the landfills. If this is actually true than this could be a huge boost to bio fuel.
@Roystarman : Why can’t it be both? Obviously, commercial scale bio-diesel is going to have to come from a variety of sources, and here we have one that has the added benefits of making high-quality fuel AND removing tons of waste from landfills. Seems like a win-win.
Revenue != profit.
Ship the used ground back to a central location on the same trucks that ship the food to the restaurants. No additional system needed, and the companies would comply for the additional profit
After taking out operating costs? Shipping the spent grounds to a location and cost for processing? These are not small costs. It is still a good idea, even if it just breaks even, but $8 million seems like a pie in the sky.
Yeah, EcoDude! That also was my first thought.
The other issue, I perceived a downplaying of emissions from “standard methods”. So, the suggested method has economic and environmental costs, some of which are offset because it is a waste feedstock stream.
A cooler idea would be if Starbucks were to convert the waste coffee grounds in situ (which is Latin for Triple Shot) to electrical energy.
Then, maybe a Starbucks on Dumpling Island, eh?
does anybody knows if claims for the hydrogen devices added onto regular gas engines are for real ?