Wednesday, January 23, 2008

damn good coffee

one of the less obvious byproducts of my twin peaks obsesh has been the reintroduction of coffee into my daily life in a major way. I haven't really had tea in months, and the daily coffee ritual(s) are becoming increasingly reverent. not to mention Jeff found a motherfucking working coffee grinder lurking in one of our disused kitchen cabinets last night! just smell those freshly ground beans!

and, today - a U of Nevada, Reno chemist has patented a process for converting used coffee grounds into biodiesel! Starbucks could apparently churn out 3m gallons a year from all of its waste, which tbh seems like kind of a shockingly small amount considering how much waste we're taking about (200m pounds!)? I'm a fan of the niche biofuels news story genre but this is kind of disappointing. that said I bet my coffee waste from the work week could at least get me to Williamsburg or whatever on the weekend? tbd

3 comments:

back40 said...

See Coffee-based solid fuel composition: "coffee has an energy content in excess of 10,000 BTU/lb." That's with the oils intact. It's not clear how good the stove pellets Misra makes after the triglyceride is extracted will be, but they should be counted too. My guess is that just doing pellets with the oils in will give a greater net benefit.

I use my grounds for home heating, though there aren't enough of them to matter much.

Anonymous said...

There Will Be Coffee. Tomorrow's Daniel Day Lewis's character doesn't own oil fields. He simply drinks 1 billion times more coffee than anyone else in the world. He sells the grounds as biodiesel fuel. He's grumpy all through the movie because of all the coffee. Cafe grumpy. Especially during the funny tacked-on-feeling ending. I DRINK YOUR COFFEE I DRINK IT UP. Nice coffee improv sesh you guys. Cut print

johnnn said...

I hope you don't mind me saying but this comment struck me as quite shower feelingish in the best possible way. is that you, Andrew?