Used coffee grounds could be used to make biodiesel
There's more energy in that morning mochachino than just the caffeine. You know that bit of foam you get on the top of your espresso before you start adding all the steamed milk, sugar, and assorted flavorings to the point where you can't even taste the coffee anymore? That foam comes from the fact that coffee beans contain oil. Even after the beans are ground and brewed into assorted drinks, some of the oil still remains. As a biomass product with 15 percent oil in it, those leftover coffee grounds from the tens of thousands of coffee shops around the country could be a feedstock for biodiesel. A team of chemical engineers from the University of Nevada is working on a process for extracting that oil and turning it into a different kind of liquid fuel. Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra, and Mano Misra believe that the anti-oxidants in coffee can also help overcome one of the drawbacks of other biodiesels, namely the tendency to break down. After extracting the oil from the used coffee grounds, the team used a conventional transesterification process that's commonly used with other plant oils to make diesel and got a 100 percent conversion rate. The team calculates that, worldwide, 340 million gallons of biodiesel could be produced annually from used coffee grounds.
[Source: ArsTechnica]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mark 8:07PM (12/08/2008)
With the price of coffee, we're better off using gasoline..
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Chris M 11:39PM (12/08/2008)
Have you checked the price of USED coffee grounds lately? Most restaurants and coffee shops would be happy to give it away for free just to reduce their garbage haul out!
Since the oil isn't very soluble in water, most of that oil remains in the spent grounds, and if it can be efficiently recovered it might make a dent in our petroleum use.
Arnold Schneider 10:12PM (12/08/2008)
That's wonderful: Get's people of the drug and into the green-land. :-)
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wave54 12:36PM (12/09/2008)
Great... how many gallons of fuel will be used worldwide to collect and process all these coffee grounds from hundreds of thousands of coffee shops to make the 340 million gallons of biofuel?
Next!
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Brn 1:00PM (12/09/2008)
With the downturn in the economy, didn't people pretty much stop going to Starbucks and the like? There goes the easy acquisition of used grounds.
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Debra 8:18AM (12/10/2008)
I can't imagine that the cost of collecting the beans will be more than the cost of drilling for oil.
http://weblog.greenpeace.org/cars/
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melaku esu 4:39PM (2/27/2009)
Bravo wonderful research,but i just want to know how the production process takes place. i am from Ethiopia one of the highest coffee producing country.
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