Factory To Make Biodiesel From Chicken Fat 207
telekon writes "Tyson foods has finally found a use for chicken fat and leftover food grease that isn't McNuggets — they've partnered with Syntroleum to produce biodiesel from the stuff. Their first plant in Louisiana will be able to churn out 75 million gallons a year. The question is, will the exhaust smell like fried chicken?"
Re:That's disgusting (Score:1, Informative)
>> As a vegetarian, it really disgusts me... (I wonder, though, if this smell is better than regular diesel).
Just about anything smells better than diesel exhaust, even with modern small car engines.
Re:What was the previous use? (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike cattle, chickens are not "fattened up". Marbling is not a desirable feature in chicken meat. They get plenty of residual fats from the soybean meal that constitutes nearly half of typical feed. The chicken fat was probably used in pet food or cattle feed previously.
Re:Schmaltz (Score:5, Informative)
Moderators need to find out what schmaltz [wikipedia.org] is.
Not really sure THAT was the reason... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/The-mysterious-death-of-the-chicken-fat-car-45445497.html [washingtonexaminer.com]
The mysterious death of the chicken-fat car
By: Timothy P. Carney
Senior Examiner Columnist
May 20, 2009
As President Barack Obama unfurls his fuel-economy standards and Congress takes up global warming regulations, it’s useful to remember that what emerges from environmental policymaking is not necessarily what’s best for the planet, but instead what’s best for special interests.
Consider the epic and somewhat bizarre struggle over clean fuels that ended last week. As usual, special interests were central to the drama. But the antagonists seemed right out of a Monty Python sendup of Washington politics: An oil company, hoping to profit from making trucks run on chicken fat, was thwarted by the soap industry’s lobby.
The chicken-fat story is a cautionary tale about how environmental policy actually gets made.
It began in 2005, when President George W. Bush signed an energy bill including a $1-per-gallon tax credit for “renewable diesel” fuel created through “thermal depolymerization.” Writer Rina Palta reported in the liberal American Prospect that Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., wrote the measure “to benefit a floundering company in his home district that produces boiler fuel from turkey offal, which did not qualify chemically as ‘biodiesel.’ ”
At the time, Congress was eagerly providing subsidies to turn plants and animals into fuel, so it didn’t seem farfetched to boost the cause of fowl entrails. But unintended consequences soon arrived, proving once again that the biggest companies usually find a way to profit from government intervention.
In April 2007, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that Blunt’s tax credit had broader applications. Within two weeks, ConocoPhillips and Tyson Foods saw that the IRS had opened the door for a joint venture to melt chicken, cow, and pig fat into diesel fuel. Conoco Chief Executive Officer James Mulva was honest about his unusual undertaking: “It’s not profitable without the $1 per gallon tax credit,” he said at a news conference.
But this renewable fuel had enemies. First, Democrats didn’t like any subsidy that helped an oil company like Conoco. (Blunt, for his part, said he never wanted to help oil companies, and that the law should be changed.)
Second, business lobbyists were also working to kill the subsidy for chicken fat. The obvious opponents were chicken fat’s competitors — the companies that turn vegetables into diesel fuel. The National Biodiesel Board, which spends nearly $1 million a year on lobbying, pushed hard to ensure the $1-per-gallon subsidy for clean diesel didn’t also apply to the Conoco-Tyson operation.
But the issue of “renewable biodiesel” also turned up on the lobbying filings of the Dial Corporation and the Soap and Detergent Association. Just as ethanol subsidies have driven up the price of food, it turned out that fat-to-fuel subsidies boosted the cost of manufacturing soap, which is also made of animal fat. So Dial and the Soap and Detergent Association, displeased that Tyson now had somewhere else to peddle its fat, also lobbied to kill the chicken-fat diesel subsidy.
While their own interests were obvious, the soap and biodiesel lobbies argued that chicken-fat diesel was not good for the environment. But the Environmental Protection Agency ruled this month that “biodiesel or renewable diesel made from animal fat or used cooking oil results in an 80 percent reduction from carbon emissions versus petroleum diesel,” according to Darling International, a company that deals in animal-fat diesel. Darling added in its first-quarter 2009 report, “That is the highest level of carbon reduction available
Re:Environment friendly, but not human-friendly (Score:4, Informative)
The findings are new, but disturbing for the future of biofuel.
To put this in perspective, the newspaper article you link to describes some scientists who've done a computer simulation of burning mixtures including biodiesel (a particular type of biofuel), and predict that it will produce a greater amount of PAHs, which are known to cause cancer, than simulated pure fossil fuels. As far as I can see, they've not even burnt anything.
Assuming real experiments match their simulation, the mixture will most likely be tweaked a bit--some chemical change, some additive, or something--to bring down the resulting amount of PAHs. We already drive around with catalytic converters bolted to our cars to clean up various pollutants. What you've described is a minor pothole in biofuel development, not the roadblock you seem to be implying. By far the greater challenge is how to devote the necessary land to grow biofuels while we simultaneously increase food production to feed a growing world population, and try to conserve land for nature.
Re:That's disgusting (Score:1, Informative)
and gum it up with glycerin - modern vegetable oil needs to be processed to remove the glycerin by-products, or you do risk gumming up the works.
(next door neighbor owns a bio-diesel facility - why am I driving a gasoline powered vehicle?)
Re:That makes a lot of faulty assumptions (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, you're quite right, some beef is fed on grass, and that beef is healthier to eat, and people can't digest grass.
And some grass fields aren't arable no matter what, while others are irrigated and could be used for crops instead, which people could eat.
It's a complicated picture and yes, excuse me for over-simplifying: grain-fed beef is an energy loser, grass-fed less clearly so but possibly so (and maybe we'd be better off eating something else grass-fed).
The point is, right now 50% of US grain is fed to animals, 40% worldwide, and 99% of that 50%/40% is wasted.
Vats of chicken fat (Score:5, Informative)
I have a friend who produces biodiesel semi-professionally (sells to local farmers to run their tractors and other farm equipment, the rest is unofficially sold to friends) and for a while he was using rendered chicken fat. The raw material stinks like hell, but the resulting biodiesel doesn't really smell like much of anything. Remember that the manufacture of biodiesel is a chemical process that changes the oil into something else. The chicken fat no longer exists at the end of the process. Any odor is due to particulate or a fraction of oil that wasn't completely converted.
Generally all biodiesel smells the same unless it's been manufactured improperly. I've managed to get some in my mouth before (a siphoning error). It doesn't have much of a taste but it coats your mouth with a terrible film that is very hard to get rid of.
One time I was over at the plant with my dog. She managed to find an open container of chicken fat and stuck her head in there. I don't know how much of it she ate (drank? gulped?) but you can imagine, if you dare to, what sort of things were coming out of the other end of the dog for several days afterward. Oh god... Oh, oh god.
Re:That's disgusting (Score:2, Informative)
See reply above [slashdot.org].
And I don't know about northwest Scotland, but around the world it is much more common for meat to be a luxury item and for plant-based human food to be the easy, inexpensive course. In most cases, meat animals compete with humans for plant-based food sources, and eating meat is a less efficient use of land than just eating the plants.
Re:That's disgusting (Score:3, Informative)
I commend you on your choice to be a Vegan.
However, you should realize that it's nothing about our "pleasure and convenience" involved with the food industry involved with livestock.
Look at the teeth in your mouth. If you were purely an herbivore, you wouldn't have what we call the eye-teeth in your mouth- you'd have a mouth more resembling a horse's or a cows. Seriously.
You should note, that your body is an omnivore's meaning that it doesn't give a flip about your sensibilities and feelings and is designed to eat meat as well as vegetative matter- in combination.
There are several crucial fatty acids you will have some major difficulty obtaining solely from plants. This SHOULD be a hint to anyone that insists that we don't have to eat animals. There's
some other crucial amino acids and sugars you need that simply will not come from eating nothing but meat. That SHOULD be a hint to anyone holding the polar opposite of your position.
Eating nothing but plants is actually something of an unnatural act for humans- as is eating solely meat.
So, it's not "pleasure and convenience" that it's done.
Re:That's disgusting (Score:3, Informative)
As a vegetarian, it really disgusts me... (I wonder, though, if this smell is better than regular diesel).
Chicken or ancient lizard, them's your choices.
Re:That's disgusting (Score:1, Informative)
We can run the deer into the ground. The deer is startled and sprints away. We catch up. Repeat and the deer quickly becomes exhausted and can no longer run. Then we move is and smash it with rocks. That is how we hunted before we developed traps and projectile weapons.
haha. Captcha is startled.
Re:That's disgusting (Score:3, Informative)
I guess you think modern tools are the first ones ever built and that we never could trap or hunt in packs. I've got news for you. Humans are more like wolves socially than like sheep. Knives and spears have existed for millions of years. Deadfalls, pit traps, and snares have existed for quite some time, too. Humans didn't wrestle the woolly mammoth one on one. Stampeding a herd over a cliff is a lot easier than strangling a steer. Fishing, snake catching, grabbing birds in the nest, throwing rocks at rabbits or squirrels, and sticking sharp sticks into knot holes and burrows have been used to get smaller animals as meals. We even tamed some of the wolves and taught them to help us hunt.
Humans are resourceful. Just because you'd only eat nuts and berries doesn't mean someone who wants meat couldn't find a way to get it without following lions around like hyenas do.
BTW, chimps [usc.edu] eat [google.com] monkeys [jrank.org], and they hunt them in organized groups sometimes using weapons. They also have been known to eat bush pigs, baboons, termites, and antelopes. Sometimes they eat other chimps. They use and even fashion tools to catch termites. They have even been known to rely on certain medicinal plants under the proper circumstances, which leads some researchers to believe they have some idea of which plant helps which malady. These and bonobos are our closest living animal cousins.