How much biodiesel could a country make, if a country could collect all restaurant grease?
We know all about biodiesel homebrewers running to the local Chinese restaurant or fast food joint and collecting buckets of used fryer oil. Thousands of people run their cars on this waste product and in some areas – Kalamazoo, Michigan, for example – there is a unified collection system to run city buses on biodiesel. So, why not a national, coordinated waste grease collection system?
That's the idea of Oren Rubin, business development general manager for the California biodiesel company BiOil (which hasn't produced gallon one, yet). Rubin's $97 million plan calls for a national disposal center network that would collect a lot of the 3.9 billion gallons of waste vegetable oil used at fast-food restaurants each year. Then, Pacific Biodiesel will turn the oil into biodiesel to sell to truckers (read more about Pacific Biodiesel and the Bio-Beetle here). BiOil would pay the restaurants a few cents a gallon, which is better for them, as they often need to pay to have waste grease hauled away currently.
This CNET article, where we found Rubin's idea, mentions other waste-fat-to-biodiesel plans going on around the country, but they're ones we've covered on AutoblogGreen before (like Tyson Chicken's plan).
[Source: Michael Kanellos / CNET News]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tim 12:46PM (2/08/2007)
You know recycling is working when people start fighting over what was once considered trash. CAN FIGHT!
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Mulad 7:56PM (2/08/2007)
Well, if CNet's right in saying that 62 billion gallons of petroleum diesel fuel is used each year in vehicles, the 3.9 billion gallons of grease seems like it'd be enough to get the whole country up to at least 2% biodiesel, and maybe as high as 5%. Add in Tyson and other places which turn out animal fat, and there's probably another billion gallons or so. Of course, with such a wide variety of feedstocks, there would have to be a lot of research put into techniques which make the fuel product more consistent. Two to five percent is a reasonably sized dent considering it's ordinarily something that just goes to a landfill or whatever.
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Aaron 10:19PM (2/09/2007)
Mulad, the grease doesn't usually go to a landfill. It's frequently turned into livestock feed.
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