According to foreign media reports, coffee can not only serve you as an afternoon tea, but also become a biofuel that drives your car. This statement comes from a study by scientists at the University of Nevada in the United States. American scientists have found that cooked coffee grounds can also be used to extract biodiesel.
In a published article, the researchers stated that the technology for making diesel from coffee grounds is not difficult and can be extracted using chemical solvents. According to the statistics of the United States Department of Agriculture, there are more than 16 billion pounds (one pound of approximately 0.4536 kilograms) of coffee produced each year, and coffee residues contain 11%-20% of biodiesel. Therefore, scientists estimate that the annual coffee residue can provide more than 340 million gallons of biodiesel.
The study was conducted jointly by three professors: Mano Mishra, Nara M. Harvard Komodadi, and Susita Mohapatra, professors of engineering at the University of Nevada. Scientists have known for decades that there is bio-oil in coffee, but Mithra is the first person to scientifically analyze coffee powder. Mishra and his colleagues believe that cooked coffee grounds may contain a certain amount of bio-oil available. So they ran to several Starbucks coffee shops, where they collected a total of 50 pounds of coffee grounds, oven-dried them, put them in a solvent, and extracted oil from them. These solvents can be reused and the residue can also be used as fertilizer, ethanol feedstock and fuel pellets.
The study found that the content of bio-oil in coffee grounds reached approximately 15%, which is comparable to soybean, rapeseed and palm oil. But coffee oil is more stable because it contains more antioxidant ingredients. Dr. Mishra said that the entire process does not consume much energy. They estimated that the biodiesel thus produced could be sold for about 1 US dollar per gallon.
However, Dr. Mishra also stated that there is a problem with the extraction of biodiesel from coffee slag, that is, coffee slag cannot be collected with high efficiency. Therefore, large-scale production is estimated to be problematic. Several researchers plan to establish a small pilot coffee circulatory system next year to collect coffee grounds from the Starbucks coffee shop and send them to biodiesel processing plants. However, even if coffee slags throughout the world are used to produce biodiesel, their biodiesel output is not as much as 1% of the amount of diesel consumed in the United States each year.
Dr. Misra said: “The use of coffee grounds to produce diesel does not replace gasoline to solve the world’s energy problems, but the hot milk coffee will one day reduce our impact on the environment. Moreover, our goal is to use waste materials to convert it into Useful fuel.†Moreover, there is a benefit to using biodiesel from coffee grounds, which is that the production of fuel from coffee grounds will have a strong aroma of coffee in the exhaust.