Turkey in the Tank:
High Price of Gasoline Is a Boon for Biofuels
Whether Leftover Poultry Bits Or Old Grease From Pubs, It All Has Diesel Potential
By PATRICK BARTA and SARAH NASSAUER
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
October 28, 2005; Page A1
What comes out of a small refinery in Carthage, Mo., isn't unusual: up to 500 barrels a day of diesel fuel. It's what goes in that sets it apart: turkey feathers, turkey bones, turkey fat and sometimes even whole turkeys.
With oil prices above $60 a barrel and pump prices soaring, drivers around the world are scrambling for alternative fuels. A little processing can make fuel out of all sorts of commodities, and today people are proving it not just with turkey-farm leftovers but with used cooking oil, coconut meat and cow dung. [Rudolf Diesel]
The Missouri diesel plant belongs to Changing World Technologies Inc., a West Hempstead, N.Y., company. It says its "thermal conversion process" is a speedier version of the geological drama that made petroleum -- crude oil being simply organic matter pressure-cooked under the earth's surface for millions of years. The difference is that this process uses turkey parts rather than the microscopic plants and animals of yesteryear. Waste from a nearby turkey-processing plant goes in, heat and pressure separate oils and gases, and diesel comes out. The company sells the fuel to a nearby industrial facility to generate power.
Chief Executive Brian Appel claims the turkey diesel is competitive with the petroleum-based stuff, thanks in part to recent U.S. tax incentives for renewable resources such as farm waste. Turkey oil, he declares, is "one of the most significant investments in the energy community" since the first commercial oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. A spokesman for ConAgra Foods Inc., which holds a minority stake in Changing World Technologies, says the company is in a "wait and see mode" with respect to the turkey-to-oil venture.
In the late 1800s, Rudolf Diesel himself envisioned a future in which farmers used everyday crops -- notably peanuts -- to fuel machines. Environmentalists have long touted the benefits of fuels made from renewable organic matter. These "biofuels" often burn cleaner than petroleum and could, if used extensively, push back the day when the world runs out of oil. The most familiar is "gasohol," gasoline blended with alcohol made from crops like corn or sugar cane.
Even at today's lofty crude-oil prices, biofuels typically require subsidies to be cost-competitive with standard petroleum fuels. In Germany, for example, "biodiesel" is cheaper than ordinary diesel -- because it's exempt from an energy tax.
The International Energy Agency in Paris figures the cost of biofuel often exceeds the cost of fuel from traditional crude by 35% or more, per unit of energy released. Such fuels now supply only about 1% of the world's transport-fuel needs, the IEA says.
United Kingdom-based Green Fuels began selling kits a year and a half ago that allow farmers and small businesses to use waste oil from restaurant fryers to make biodiesel. A closed system of plastic drums and pipes, the kit takes in methanol and caustic soda along with lukewarm vegetable oil, and produces a mixture of glycerin and biodiesel, from which it siphons the latter. Company President James Hygate says sales are so strong that a new energy crisis of sorts could emerge: a cooking-oil shortage. Mr. Hygate says five months ago the company was selling about eight machines a month. Today, it sells about 45 machines a month.
Richard Smith, a farmer in South Warwickshire in central England, bought a Green Fuels kit to run his farm equipment and cars in August 2004. Since then, the price of the used cooking oil he buys from a local collection firm has risen about 30%.
"It's just supply and demand," he says. Mr. Smith could save a little by collecting the oil himself from local pubs, but there's now competition for that -- plus the stuff from the collection firm has had the bits of potato and fish filtered out. And the firm will often haul away the glycerine free of charge.
"I'm not a 'green,' " Mr. Smith says. "I like big engines, big trucks, big machines, but [homemade biodiesel] is just less expensive."
In central Japan, near the foot of Mount Fuji, trucking company Chusun Transport last year installed a 5-foot-tall diesel brewer that turns cooking oil into fuel for three of the company's trucks and several forklifts. It collects its own cooking oil from local restaurants and a school cafeteria -- where it also makes daily food deliveries; the used oil returns poured into the same cans it arrived in.
Motome Endo, Chusun's president, says the cooking-oil fuel is less than half the cost of diesel oil, even with the cost of leasing the machine and the small fees he pays his oil providers. The company could haul the used oil away for free, but then the local government would require it to pay for a garbage-collectors license.
In some parts of Europe, a few drivers of diesel cars are so eager to avoid costly crude that they're skipping the home-brew kits and just pouring vegetable oil directly into their tanks. But that is not recommended.
"Those that are doing this are crazy people," says Raffaello Garofalo, the secretary general of the European Biodiesel Board, or EBB. "If you're lucky your car will run 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) -- and then die." The viscous vegetable oil gums up the fuel pump and injectors.
In Thailand, a Danish company is trying to develop a facility to turn meat from discarded coconuts into fuel oil for farmers' tractors. The idea surfaced a few years ago, says Kraisit Musikchat, a Thai adviser to the Danish dreamers. Back then, coconuts were costlier than diesel, and "everyone said it was such a waste of time," he says. But today the economics are turning their way. The company puts the meat into a machine that squeezes out the coconut oil, which it then mixes with diesel to create a hybrid fuel.
In India, people who want alternative fuel collect cow dung in a backyard box called a "digester" -- made of bricks and concrete or steel or even rubber -- and add water. Over time organic processes will produce gas. As pressure builds up in the digester, the gas can be piped into a home for cooking. Biogas experts say three cattle will generate enough gas to cook for a family of five. Larger models can produce enough gas to run a motor to pump water or generate electricity.
Indians are accustomed to burning dried cow dung as a fuel, and digesters are common in some areas, but high oil prices have given the idea of dung power new urgency. The government carpeted the country earlier this year with a pamphlet urging (in several languages) the development of renewable energy sources. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself contributed a couple of paragraphs of encouragement.
Oil may be growing harder to find, but as K.C. Khandelwal, an adviser at the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources in New Delhi, notes, "dung is always available."