Manoranjan Misra of the University of Nevada at Reno may have solved a good chunk of the world's energy problem, while also giving coffee addicts like myself reason to drink that umpteenth cup of the day. Turns out that coffee is a biofuel and a pretty good one to boot. The Economist, which pushes coffee-as-fuel in an editorial, says "researchers found that coffee biodiesel is comparable to the best biodiesels on the market."
By now, all the biofuel pessimists like myself are going, "yes, but coffee prices will go through the roof like corn and ethanol." Not true. The beauty is the oil is in the coffee grounds. People have been putting coffee grounds on plants as fertilizers for hundreds of years and if plants can turn the grounds into fuel, so can we.
It gets even better.
Unlike many vegetable oils, which give off a fried smell when burnt,
coffee grounds give off a light (surprise) coffee aroma. And while diesel engines can use frying oil when fitted with special equipment, coffee diesel would require no special equipment.
So
when can you start using coffee? Hopefully soon. Misra has built a small
production facility that makes one gallon of oil out of 50 pounds of
coffee grounds. A gallon of oil weighs around 7 pounds, meaning the
team can get a 14 percent extraction rate. The team
also estimates it would cost about a $1 per gallon to extract the oil
from coffee grounds. According to this article on ethanol,
the current extraction rate from corn to oil is a little over 4 percent
and it costs $1.74 to make one gallon of oil. Clearly coffee is the
winner.
The Economist ran its own stats and estimates that if
7 million tons of coffee is consumed in America each year, that
would create 340 million gallons of coffee fuel. That's a little less
than one week's worth of diesel fuel use in America. Obviously we can't all drive on coffee all the time, but it could perk up our situation.
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