Amazing stuff coffee. In addtion to it’s other amazing properties, including being good for the roses, the grounds can be used to produce biofuel.
The estimates are the coffee ground biodiesel industry could generate as much as $8,000,000 in profits annually using waste from Starbucks stores here in the United States alone. Ok, probably less given falling crude oil prices, but I’m still a big fan of any domestic fuel souces.
To add to the overall awesomeness of coffee, at the end of the biodiesel extraction and conversion process, the leftover grounds can be turned into fuel pellets for wood stoves and boilers.
Not only does coffee keep you moving, it can keep your car moving and heats your home!
Filed under: alternate energy, biofuel, Energy | Tagged: alternate energy, alternate fuel, biofuel, coffee |
Urbin Technology 
Rather than burning it as fuel pellets, it makes more sense to use it as compost. burning stuff means you lose all the work the plant went to, to convert sunlight and water into valuable organic compounds.
This is my main beef with most biofuels – where turning food into fuel, which drives up food prices, and saves little, if any fuel. If they can make it from nonfood sources, like switchgrass, and farmers don’t convert over to growing it because of juicy subsidies(which is why both corn AND wheat are having such huge price spikes), only then does biodiesel make sense.
Well, in this case, burning fuel pellets from used coffee grounds isn’t a case of turning food into fuel. The food value of the coffee bean has already been extracted.
Most of the coffee from coffee shops ends up in landfills, which isn’t the most efficient way to compost.
Turning those grounds, and vegetable oil from fryers, into vehicle fuel is attractive on a couple of points. One being that it’s a domestic source, so the money made from it stays in the US, rather than going to the House of Saud or to Hugo Chavez.
The used grounds do make very good compost though. That is where my used coffee grounds go.
I agree completely on the switchgrass vs. corn issue. I’ve been harping on that one myself for a while.
I do make the exception of turning corn into fuel where the “fuel” is corn whiskey. That’s OK in my view. Otherwise, keep corn as food.
It would actually be much cheaper, and more efficient to make ethanol from sugar beats than corn. The sugar beats could be imported in quantity and cheaply, from Brazil if Congress would remove the import fees from Brazilian sugar beats.
I’d rather see American grown switchgrass used.
Especially as it makes good use(and profit!) of agriculturally marginal areas, like Wyoming, Arizona, etc. It will grow in places that right now, almost no crops do.
And corn squeezins isn’t “fuel”, It’s “brain lubricant”. 🙂
I have mixed opinions of Starbucks but that would be awesome if they promoted green. They need a good campaign to keep their remaining stores open and this would help both them and the cause for energy independence.
Best Regards,
Mike Kendall michael.kendall@ymail.com
Well, as a coffee snob ™, I have to go on the record as stating that Starbucks over roasts.
You can get a better cup o’joe from Dunkin’ Dounuts.
This would fit well in Starbucks marketing model and give them another revenue stream. Double win.
I also like this idea because it uses the coffee grounds after the coffee has been made. So none of this using food crops as energy sources instead of food nonsense. Hell, you get a triple win out of this: Coffee, biofuel and finally heating fuel pellets.
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