Summary
Trappings of an idea The quest for Fry-o-Diesel began about five years ago. The Energy Cooperative, a nonprofit regional energy supplier, was looking for a source of biodiesel for home-heating oil. The closest production facility was in Ohio. Trucking it that far made no sense if the idea was to be environmentally friendly. So they thought about making their own. "We did a quick scan of Philadelphia. No soybeans," joked Nadia Adawi, president of for- profit Fry-o-Diesel and operations director at the Energy Cooperative, its parent. A National Renewable Energy Lab study about restaurant trap grease perked them up. Based on the data, Adawi's group estimated that food facilities in the land of the cheesesteak produced 10 million gallons of grease per year. "We were too stupid to be scared," Adawi said. With a $369,696 grant from the state, they moved into an old gasket factory and got to work. -- The Philadelphia Inquirer Powered up Recently, after an independent testing lab reported the fuel met the required specs, plant operator Steve Kasprzyk siphoned fuel from a barrel and poured it into the tank of his silver 2002 Volkswagen Jetta. "It's been running great," said Kasprzyk, who is now on his third tank and getting 40-plus miles per gallon. The test fleet is using a 20 percent blend of Fry- o-Diesel through June. One of the volunteers is Cory Suter. He figures it fits the mission of his small Philadelphia remodeling company, BioNeighbors Sustainable Homes. Later this summer, Philadelphia Fry-o-Diesel plans to form a coalition of restaurants that commit to sending in their trap grease. "We're trying to make this a community project," said Emily Bockian Landsburg, the company's manager of business development. On energy security and global warming, she said: "We all have a part to play." They hope to have a commercial-scale plant making three million gallons of Fry-o- Diesel a year by mid-2008.
PHILADELPHIA - Of all the raw sources of experimental "green" energy, the stuff that comes into a tiny Kensington plant is perhaps the nastiest: a brown sludge clotted with food and other goo you really don't want to know about, laced with grease.See the full content of this document
Extract
Gunk Goo
A few treatment tanks and chemical processes later, out comes a strange brew, indeed. It is clear and smells slightly herbal...
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