Coffee Grounds Give Jolt to Crippled Japanese Energy Grid

ABC News
By AKIKO FUJITA (@akikofujita)
TOKYO June 6, 2011

That daily cup of coffee is giving one of Japan's large thermal power plants an eco-friendly jolt. Sumitomo Metal Industries says it has begun using coffee grounds as biomass fuel to power its Kashima Steel Works plant in Japan, a first for a large power generating facility in the country.

Sumitomo Metal says biomass fuel generated from coffee grounds currently only amounts to 1 percent of the total amount of fuel used at the plant, but it hopes to gradually increase that number. The company plans to buy 12,000 tons of coffee grounds in the first year of the project.

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MU researchers turn coffee to biodiesel fuel

TheManEater.com (University of Missouri)
By Samantha Sunne
Published April 27, 2010

Researchers at the biofuel lab have found a way to skip the drying step.

Coffee isn't just a fuel for people anymore.

MU researchers have found a way to convert the coffee grounds commonly found in beverages into biodiesel fuel.

Most biodiesel fuel in the U.S. is made from soybean oil, but the researchers developed an efficient process for extracting oil from used coffee, biological engineering assistant professor Bulent Koc said.

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Coffee grounds for biodiesel

art technia
By Yun Xie Published: November 25, 2008 - 01:36PM CT

Used coffee grounds may be garbage to most of us but, to chemical engineers at University of Nevada, they are a versatile source of green energy. Narasimharao Kondamudi, Susanta Mohapatra, and Mano Misra proposed that the solid waste from coffee brewing can do a lot more than act as compost for gardens. They set out to see if they could extract oils from old coffee grounds and chemically convert those oils to biodiesel.

Spent coffee grounds are about 15 percent oil, which is only slightly less than many of the other biodiesel feedstocks. Since the world produces over 16 billion pounds of coffee per year, there is a constant and cheap supply of solid coffee waste. Kondamudi, Mohapatra, and Misra also predict that biodiesel from coffee grounds would be more stable than those from other sources because coffee contains antioxidants that would slow down degradation.

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