Starbucks to fuel your car?

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Coffee is well known for being able to power the economic engine that is the global workforce.  It might fill the tank of an individual but certainly won’t fill your car.  Beyond compost are there any alternative uses for coffee grounds?

New research at the University of Nevada shows used coffee grounds can be repurposed into biodiesel to power vehicles, trains, and even airplanes.  The waste from Starbucks alone could turn into 3M gallons of fuel and $8M in profits.

One of the main limits to the acceptance of biodiesel as an alternative fuel is its price premium above regular diesel. To bring the price of biodiesel down, the industry uses as much waste material from other industries as possible to make it — such as used fryer oil and animal fats from poultry processing.

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Coffee grounds are actually about 15% oil.  The research team said that it concludes that the coffee-ground oil feedstock would cost between $0.45 to $1.84 less than feedstocks such as corn or soy, is more stable than comparable feedstock oils, and the grounds can be further processed into fuel for pellet stoves.

Given that Starbucks (NasdaqGS: SBUX) generates 210 million pounds of spent coffee grounds per year in the US, the researchers calculate that it could amount to almost 3 million gallons of biodiesel and 89,000 tons of fuel pellets.   Should gas prices reverse direction and move back over $4 per gallon then the researches estimate as much as $8M in profits from Starbuck’s waste alone.

One of the main drivers for adoption of biodiesel is energy security. This means that a nation’s dependence on oil is reduced, and substituted with use of locally available sources, such as coal, gas, or renewable sources.

Biodiesel production capacity is growing rapidly, with an average annual growth rate from 2002-2006 of over 40%. For the year 2006, the latest for which actual production figures could be obtained, total world biodiesel production was about 5-6 million tons (over 80% of this production comes from Europe).