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.
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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)
Wow! soon all our cars will have a Mr.Fusion a la “Back to the Future”
I wonder if the exhaust smell will resemble a cafe
by all means subsidize bio fuels ,even unto 4 bucks a gallon
that way you can feel good as you enter the poor house…
In addition to retail brewing there are the large instant coffee plants. I always thought the Maxwell House factory in Houston looked like a refinery.
@oldpeter7up
Shipping back garbage in the same truck that’s delivering food would be against the law. (Health laws/cross contamination risk)
The obvious problem is the diffuse distribution of the grounds. They are all over the nation in low concentrations. Collecting the grounds would require serious transportation fleets.
And the working link to the “view calculations” broken link is:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/jf802487s/suppl_file/jf802487s_si_001.pdf?cookieSet=1
In the 1890’s, several large cities (Washington DC and Toledo Ohio were a couple) actually sold their residential trash to middlemen, getting free pickup and collecting a fee in addition. Household refuse then was heavy in animal fats, which were in demand for rendering into inudstrial lubricants. Except for limited-slip differentials, the whales were saved.
In much the same way as Californians boast of separating their glass by color and driving it to the pickup terminals under penalty of law while a Midwesterner just shrugs and lugs the recycle barrel to the curb, we’ll achieve real economies in biological recycling when the same guy who picks up the garbage reprocesses the garbage. Because, you know what soylent green is.
Someday we’ll mine the landfills. That was in a science fiction story just about 50 years ago.
We don’t have ‘diesel engines like in Europe’ because we have things like the Sierra Club and the EPA getting in the way. But our newer diesel engines are supposedly cleaner, so it’s a moot point now.
The problem here is the upstart costs - who’s going to shell out the money to build a refinery to make the biodiesel? The $8mil figure isn’t factoring in production costs, shipping, salaries, maintenance, and all of the other huge costs that go into a refinery.
Personally I’m surprised that McDonalds hasn’t gotten into the biodiesel game by collecting all of their waste oils at biodiesel facilities.
its important to squeeze out every bit of usage from things we consider waste (like coffee grounds), but this is not sustainable.
Producing renewable, cheap, and domestic petroleum that can replace current fuels w/o engine modifications etc is the way to go.
Check out LS9, inc. http://optimism.thorscave.com/?p=58
Is the extraction and processing to biofuel going to happen at the individual starbucks location? Or are another fleet of delivery vehicles going to be dispatched to deliver the used coffee from the stores to the processing plant? This runs into the same problem that is keeping ethanol off the table for the big ag companies… low density source material costs too much fuel and labor to deliver to a processing plant and remain profitable in the long run.
Calculations link is dead, so I’ll just ask: what allowance did you make for cost of collecting these grounds into the “refinery”? They’re necessarily “created” at a zillion street-corners across the land.