MIGHT coffee grounds one day become a cheap, abundant and environmentally-friendly source of biodiesel fuel for powering cars and trucks? Researchers in the American state of Nevada think it could.
Spent coffee grounds contain 11-20% oil by weight. That’s about as much as current biodiesel feedstocks such as rapeseed, palm and soybean oil. Growers produce more than 16billion pounds of coffee around the world each year, apparently.
The Nevada scientists have estimated that spent coffee grounds could potentially add 340million gallons (1.287million litres) of biodiesel to the world’s fuel supply.
To test their idea, they collected spent coffee grounds from a multinational coffee-house chain and separated the oil. They then used an inexpensive process to convert 100% of the oil into biodiesel. The resulting coffee-based fuel, which actually smells like Java roast coffee, had a major advantage in being more stable than traditional biodiesel – due to coffee’s high antioxidant content, apparently.