Thanksgiving thoughts: biodiesel from a deep-fried turkey
In the last few years, there have been a lot of people who have changed the cooking device for the holiday bird from the oven to a big deep fryer. As our DIY readers probably know, all of this frying oil can create a great opportunity to later make biodiesel. Since it takes around 3-5 gallons of oil to fry a turkey, the days after Thanksgiving are a great time to collect for your home Appleseed reactor. This is what my friends and I did a few years ago and it worked quite well.
If you're a cooker but not a biodiesel brewer, you can still contribute. Last year, Reuters had an article about biodiesel producers in Plano, Texas (north of Dallas) that says that in the week following Turkey Day they gathered up 500 gallons of used oil from people who had friend their birds. Not a bad idea. So, on this American day of giving thanks, if you're going to fry a bird but don't know what you're going to do with the leftover fuel, call up a local biodiesel organization and tell them that you've got something to give them. They'll probably thank you for it.
The deep-fried turkey photos in the gallery are by Nukeit1, NikiSublime and Dnigh. CC 2.
Gallery: Deep Fried Turkey biodiesel
[Source: PlanetArk and Flickr]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
TX CHL Instructor 7:53PM (11/22/2007)
The main problem with WVO is that while it's cheap, 2-3 gallons of WVO isn't going to make a lot of difference in your yearly fuel bill. Also, only a tiny minority of the population is deep-frying turkeys (I had some that was prepared by a friend, and it was delicious, but I wouldn't go to the trouble to do one myself).
If enough people start using it, WVO will suddenly become scarce -- and expensive. There just isn't enough WVO to power more than a small fraction of the existing diesels. A typical small restaurant's output of WVO is going to *maybe* enough to keep ONE diesel auto running. Maybe a high-volume McD's could supply 5 or 6 (or 1/2 of an OTR tractor-trailer rig).
Likewise for SVO. Veggie oil production would need to increase by a couple of orders of magnitude before there would be enough to make a noticeable dent in this country's current diesel usage. There just isn't enough VO and animal tallow combined to make much difference. The only real long-term hope for commercial quantity economical biodiesel is a high-yield crop grown for than purpose, such as algae.
I'm definitely pro-biodiesel (I think SVO has definite advantages), but this sort of pie-in-the-sky innumeracy doesn't help the cause any.
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