French fries and onion rings, nature’s deep fried booty. If America ever takes a breath and pries its collective kisser out of that bag of Mickey-D’s fries it just might discover the next great alternative energy source. Bubbling away in restaurant deep-fryers everywhere (there are 935,000 restaurants in America) grease is our new best friend. Envision a scene in the not-to-distant-future, your pulmonary arteries have just closed down from consuming your 147,000th bag of Biggie Fries. The ambulance rushing you to the Emergency Room is running on low cost, low emissions, Brown Gold, better known as biodiesel.
In NYC there’s a new company called Tri-State Biodiesel being operated out of an East Village walk-up. Tri-State is collecting the cooking grease from over 20,000 New York City restaurants and businesses like Whole Foods, then taking it to a rendering plant, and finally selling the resulting biodiesel back to fuel-hungry diesel drivers. In Philadelphia it’s Philadelphia Fry-O-Diesel. Soybean oil may be the ingrediant of choice in biodiesel but fry grease is much sexier. Eliminate a waste product and create low emissions bio-fuel while expanding America’s waistline…what’s not to like? Biodiesel produces 75% less carbon dioxide, is four times more biodegradable than diesel and shows a 50% reduction in particulate matter at the tailpipe. I love that kind of talk. It does however create 10% more nitrogen oxide than traditional diesel fuel, which makes it a touch smoggish.
There is no question that commercial biodiesel production is booming. In 2006 production was expected to come in at 200 -250 million gallons, up dramatically from the previous year, according to the National Biodiesel Board.
One downer is that waste vegetable oil, fry grease and other animal fat resources are estimated to be able to sustain production of only around 1 billion gallons of biodiesel per year, or less than 3% of current diesel use. Widespread implementation of biodiesel would require growing crops such as soybeans specifically for the biodiesel industry — potentially creating another opportunity for giant agri-businesses to swallow up more land and experiment with bio-engineered crop strains and maximum-yield-farming practices, but that’s the way the economy works…. and all I really wanted was some biodiesel with those Biggie-fries.
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Hi, good report here.
This was intriguing so I thought I’d pass it along to your readers, re biodiesel, etc. in Massachusetts.
http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/070122/0205785.html
Thanks for the link. The Rivera Process looks very promising.
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