Live Off The Fat
Ever wonder why corn is the fav when it comes to ethanol production? Could it be the money? This list has corn with the lowest ethanol yield per acre. We’ve known for some time corn is a low yield energy source.
Soybean biodiesel returns 93 percent more energy than is used to produce it, while corn grain ethanol currently provides only 25 percent more energy.
So the soybean farmers are crying foul. It’s the subsidies, they say, that drive the ethanol producers to corn. Do they want to eliminate the subsidies? Don’t be silly. They want to get just as much as the next guy, more if possible.
The American Soybean Association is asking Congress to increase commodity subsidies by 32 percent over the next six years, with most of that money going to soybean growers.
The group says that the current subsidy rates are unfair and encourage farmers to grow corn and other crops.
What will these people do if a cheaper feedstock (algae?) becomes available?
Or, gasp, a replacement for ethanol altogether (hydrogen)? Will they ask for more subsidies? We all know there is an unlimited supply of money at the gov’t feeding trough. I, on the other hand, would love to do away with agricultural subsidies, pretty much any subsidy.
So where will the competition for fuel sources come from? To be clear there are multiple fuels – gasoline, diesel, and heating oil – that are the main three liquid fuels that can be, relatively, easily derived from sources other than petroleum. Another source of energy is biomass but that is a different subject.
Much has been written about different poo but little about the “less desirable” portions of the animal harvest (the poo is not part of the harvest, just a by-product thereof). Given that we process a HUGE amount of meat each day there must be some fat associated with it. Given that we “deep fat fry” a large amount of our food there must be waste from that as well. Combined, fat is fat (vegetable or otherwise) there seems to be a lot of it around. At least according to this professor.
“I estimate that we produce 2.7 billion pounds of yellow and brown grease per year. We produce 1.1 billion pounds of lard, 1.9 billion pounds of edible tallow, 3.7 billion pounds of inedible tallow and 4.2 billion pounds of poultry fat per year,” he wrote.
“If we can collect about 60 percent of the yellow grease, that could add 200 million gallons of biodiesel per year. If we can convert half of the inedible tallow and poultry fat, that could add another 500 million gallons.”
This related article covers the used cooking oil as well as the offal. Restaurants are where many biodiesel hobbyists get their fuel. Most just filter it and pour it in the tank. I doubt this free ride will last forever.
BiOil’s plan–which will require sizable funding–is to build a national network of disposal centers, with help from biodiesel producer Pacific Biodiesel, based in Kahului, Hawaii, to collect a substantial portion of the 3.9 billion gallons of waste vegetable oil produced at fast-food eateries, refine it and then sell it to trucking companies and drivers.
If anything, the economic circumstances of waste oil appear to make it an attractive feedstock. Most restaurants and fast food outlets, which are largely independently owned by franchisees, currently pay waste-disposal companies such as Waste Management 10 to 15 cents a gallon to haul away their used oil.
Waste Management Inc. is already in the alternative energy solutions business and I doubt the waste cooking oil is going unnoticed.
Even the raw animal fat has uses so it isn’t free. Especially that “Choice White Grease” :)
Interestingly a large market is feed for the same kinds of animals from whence it came. Kind of a “Soylent Green” for pigs. But it is still about who will pay the most – animal feed, or biodiesel.
Continued from the earlier article.
More significantly, big agribusiness has its eye on the grease bucket too. Last November, chicken giant Tyson Foods announced it has formed a renewable-fuel division. Rival Perdue has said it is exploring the idea as well.
Animal fat already costs 70 to 80 cents less than new vegetable oil per pound, according to Tyson…
Some day there will be a shakeout in the biofuel biz. It will be interesting to see which bets win. Gotta love the free market system – I can’t wait ’til we get there :)
- Posted in : Environment, In the News, Pictures, Positive Change, Renewable Energy, Science
- Author :Rt
Comments»
Odd, leaving a coment at your own post – but I couldn’t figure out how to work this in. Besides, if you take the time to read the comments you must be interested.
This is a dated (01-06) piece but it is full of interesting tidbits. I have always felt that farmers must be some of the most efficient people in the world. That may have been true in pre-industrial time (and may still be true for a very samll farm today) but in today’s large corporate farms the decisions are not made by the farmer, they are made by the corporate office. It’s not that the corporate office intends to be inefficient, they just don’t know the processes as well.
I can imagine the small farmer calculating what must be grown to provide the fuel needed for the farm equipment. Capital costs (and all that) enter in but the cogs are whirrin’. Local power, local consumption.
Read the piece – rather encouraging.
Rt, really great enthusiasm for all fuels other than the petrol family. I too hope that we reach a point where we see fuel that we at least have a better knowledge of being able to produce it versus the reserves game of finding oil beneath the earth’s rug. Ultimately, I think that it would be awesome if we embraced more of the Native philosophy of living off the earth in a manner in which we actually use everything that we harvest. So, in the end, we probably do have enough energy, it is the harder choice to look in the mirror and notice just how sloppy we are at the table of resource use than future generations were. Behavioral changes are the hardest to bring about, but the cheapest economically. So, let’s see some revized urban planning!
Using petroleum is “living off the earth “. Some belief systems might say it was put here for us to use to get to the point where we can move to the next source of energy.
We used the forests, then we used whale fat, then we used petroleum, then we used atomic energy.
What is the next logical step?
Efficiency is always the best idea regardless of the fuel.
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