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My current car lease is up in a few months, and I’m considering getting the new Volkswagen Jetta TDI, aka the “Clean Diesel,” which gets around 30 city / 40 highway and is one of the cleanest-burning cars on the road. It’s also capable of running on certain types of biodiesel — and why not; the original diesel engine, built in 1893, was designed to run on peanut oil, not petroleum oil — an enormously appealing idea to me. Especially given the recent news that it’s possible to make high-quality biodiesel from coffee grounds, which means I could aspire to be the ultimate yuppie just by driving my VW Jetta (sometimes called “the Apple of cars”) while both myself and my vehicle are powered by Starbucks.
Here’s the scoop: there’s a perfectly good reason that no one thought of powering cars with coffee grounds before now, and that’s that only about 15% of coffee grounds are oil, which is, as you might’ve guessed, the key ingredient when it comes to making fuel. (Most other biodiesel feedstocks, as they’re called, are a bit higher than 15%.) This would equal a big red stop sign for most other potential fuel technologies, except for the fact that we don’t grow coffee just to be used as fuel — it’s a by-product of extant human activity (to the tune of about 16 billion pounds of grounds a year) which can either end up in our landfills or our gas tanks.
Some numbers: as of right now, researchers believe this process could produce around 340 million gallons of coffee biodiesel per year, which could mean about $8 million in fuel-related profits for Starbucks alone. (Not bad for something that used to be trash.) Add this to the growing list of things I’d rather power my car with, like garbage (cellulosic ethanol) and hydrogen.
Image & link courtesy Ecogeek.
Comments (11)
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I love my Jetta! I say go for it! Mine unfortunately is not a diesel though. I have not read any studies on coffee grounds, but as for other bio diesel fuels, I’ve read numerous reports on how bio diesel is not worth the claimed benefits. Who knows how credible those articles were though.
I’d just research away before making the jump
posted by JC on 12-8-2008 at 11:27 am
Is there any research on how the brewing process affects the beans’ usefulness as a fuel source?
posted by Mike on 12-8-2008 at 11:32 am
I have a question on the stats here. The U.S. imports less than 3 billion pounds of coffee per year, so the 16 billion pounds of grounds doesn’t make much sense. Also, paper filters soak up some of the oils during the brewing process. Would that be captured?
posted by Mark on 12-8-2008 at 12:41 pm
I love this idea! In Brazil they use sugar cane to make bio fuels. The fuel comes from the by products of making sugar so it is extremely efficient. I think the neigh saying you might have heard about corn bio fuels is that it doesn’t come from a by product. The corn that is grown for bio fuels is used exclusively for fuel and nothing else which cuts into the food supply and thus is quite wasteful.
posted by kat on 12-8-2008 at 12:55 pm
My boyfriend owns a 2004 Jetta that runs on diesel. When he purchased it, gas and diesel prices were comparable, and the fuel economy of the car made it very appealing. Fast forward less than a year later where diesel prices jumped over a dollar higher than gas, and suddenly the cost effectiveness of it went out the window. But considering he can drive twice the mileage on the same size tank as my 25 mpg car is pretty nice. And being nice to the environment is pretty good too :)
But be warned – oil changes are expensive (but can be done on your own if you know what you are doing) and make sure you are on good terms with the dealership or have a good mechanic, because the German engineering makes it a little more difficult to find someone qualified to fix them.
posted by Kels on 12-8-2008 at 1:29 pm
I ordered a TDI in August for all the same reasons you cite in this article. The dealership called me two weeks ago and said it will be another 6 months before it comes in. After a few rounds on the phone, they agreed to return my deposit.
Sadly, I’ll never get my coffee-powered Jetta. Any other suggestions for a similar car?
posted by Shannon on 12-8-2008 at 1:56 pm
I have a 2006 Jetta TDI and a number of other people at work have diesel VW’s of various years as well. We have talked about alternative fuels. The only thing you need to keep in mind is when you switch from regular diesel to something else you need to change the fuel filter immedietly after and every time you change between fuel types. The reason is the different impurities in the fuel and the gunk in the tank and lines.
Bio diesel will remove all the sludge and build up in your egine and tank and lines created by regular diesel thus clogging all the filters up so to get optimum performance all the filters need to be changes (and none of the filters are cheap). So unless you are never going to drive across country or you know where every bio diesel station is in the area you are almost better off sticking with regular until the bio becomes more prevelant.
Plus to run something other than regular or bio diesel in the car you will need to make some minor modifications to the engine that will take it out of warrenty. Once ours is out of warrenty we are going to seriously consider making that switch. There are a number of web sites to explore on this topic.
FYI make sure to replace the fuel filter every 3 oil changes, you will notice a huge difference in acceleration and performance with new fuel filter.
BTW driving highway (long trips) we can get better than 50 mpg driving about 80mph – about 720 miles. city driving seems to average about 45mpg or 600 miles (we have a manual) – we basically need to fill up only every 2 weeks and as the tank is about 12 gallons at most even at the worst the gas prices were, we only spent about $100 a month on gas. If you put lots of mileage on a car this would be one I would choose again.
posted by Beth on 12-8-2008 at 2:41 pm
I think it’s a good to get as much biodiesel out of a byproduct we just throw away if we can. However, I agree that the possible yield we could get out of coffee grounds is questionable.
I personally think algae fuel is a better biofuel option, better than corn anyway. Higher yield and doesn’t affect food stock as much as using corn (I don’t know anyone that eats algae).
posted by Jason! on 12-8-2008 at 3:26 pm
How about biofuel from algae? I’ve seen a link or two in the Weekend Links post. Would love to see a full blog-post on it.
posted by Dawn on 12-8-2008 at 9:12 pm
so, just wondering, if cars ran on coffee byproducts, would the highways smell good? Woud a car drive past you on your morning walk or whatever and would the smell wake you up like in Foldgers ads?
posted by Emily on 12-9-2008 at 9:14 am
I love my Golf TDI. Aside from the low clearance which makes off-roading hard, its gets amazing fuel mileage, it is fun to drive, and has great little features you’d never think of – just wait until you get to use the tire change kit! You can’t put vegetable oil directly in the TDI like you can with the old diesels. The injectors are too narrow or something like that. You can put diesel made from veg oil, however.
I bought mine because I really needed a cost efficient car and I wanted a hatchback. I calculated the purchase cost, fuel, repair, and resale costs and determined that this car is more economical than anything else on the market.
My car is 5 years old and it has only lost 5k of the original value!
posted by Nicole on 12-9-2008 at 1:32 pm