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More Studies Show Coffee Can Power Our Cars

Many of us need a cup of hot coffee in the morning to kickstart our body and go through our daily business. But have you ever thought that the coffee grounds you throw away could some day also power your car to go to work? What a wonderful thing coffee is...
Coffee biofuel 1 photo
Photo: edited by autoevolution
Well, the subject isn’t all new and several attempts to power a car with coffee have been made in the past (here and here). But scientists took no break and they now found another way to transform coffee into fuel.

The previous attempts to use coffee as a fuel source were based on a process called “gasification”, in which pellets made from the chaff that comes off of coffee beans during roasting are heated and broken down into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The hydrogen then gets injected into the internal combustion engine and bang goes the theory.

Recently, scientists at the University of Bath published another study in the Energy Fuels journal, which shows that coffee waste can be a viable way of making biodiesel.

Their method to obtain biofuel is by extracting oil from the waste coffee grounds and soak them in an organic solvent, process called “transesterification”. Around 2 liters of biofuel can be obtained from 22 lbs (10 kg) of waste coffee, averagely thrown away by a coffee shop in normal circumstances.

Each coffee shop can locally produce its own fuel to power their delivery vans, or the process can be expanded by a collaboration with major fuel companies to collect the waste, turn it into biodiesel and offer it at a gas station near you.

The best part is that biodiesel can be extracted from any type of coffee, including decaff, and the study actually managed to make fuel out of coffee coming from 20 different parts of the world.

And when you think that around 8 million tons of coffee are produced globally each year, the process seems even more interesting. Unlike other ways of creating biofuel, you don’t need special crops occupying space only for creating fuel, you just use something you were throwing away until now.
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