Coffee powered cars?
Coffee has been an universal fuel for late nighters for thousands of years and those who are the largest consumers of coffee – scientists – have apparently taken their fuel for the all-nighters and turned it into fuel for vehicles.
A University of Bath study has found that the waste material of beans originating from a variety of places around the world, and the beans themselves of different varieties of coffee, can actually be used to produce biofuel.
The concept isn’t exactly new, back in 2011 for instance , a car running on coffee grounds broke the world speed record for a car powered by organic waste and at the same time companies such as Beanergi in the UK are actively collecting coffee grounds from London cafes to turn them into pellets used for the heating of homes and offices.
This latest study however has found that all waste coffee grounds have a reasonably standard composition and the relevant physical properties, irrespective of their source.
Scientists have been working for years on methods of turning organic matter into biofuel, but the difference with the coffee approach is that there’s no need to grow fields of crops for the sole purpose of energy production.
The coffee grounds would normally end up as landfill and considering the sheer amount of coffee consumption all over the world, this could be a sustainable fuel source.
The researchers from the University’s Centre for Sustainable Technologies were able to turn ten kilograms of coffee grounds into two litres of biofuel.
In one approach to using coffee grounds as fuel, coffee shop retail chains could power their delivery vehicles, but there is a long way to go to reach that point though. At the current production rate, people would have to consume a lot of coffee in order to keep the biofuel flowing.
