Buttering Up Biodiesel

It’s tasty on popcorn and delicious in cookies, but researchers now say that butter could also be used to make another product crucial to our insatiable appetites: biodiesel.

 

In a study conducted by Michael Haas with the Department of Agriculture and published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the researchers got the fat from a quarter-ton of butter and turned it into the fatty esters that make up biodiesel. Their final product met all of the biodiesel test standards except one. With just a little more purification, or with the addition of another biodiesel product, the butter could become a viable fuel product for cars and trucks, the authors state.

 

One billion pounds of butter are produced each year in the U.S., so the authors focused on that yellow material, which is made by churning fresh or fermented milk or cream, as a potential source for biodiesel. By 2022, the U.S. must produce 36 billon gallons of biofuel as required by the Renewable Fuels Standard signed into law as part of the 2008 energy bill, “with 21 billion gallons coming from so-called ‘advanced biofuels,’ which can be produced using a variety of new feedstocks and technologies. Of this, roughly 16 billion gallons is expected to be from ‘cellulosic biofuels,’ derived from plant sources such as trees and grasses,” according to an article by the Worldwatch Institute.

 

Right now, about 11 billion gallons of biodiesel are produced in this country each year, a number that is expected to increase sharply in the coming years. “Michael Haas and colleagues cite rising global demand for biodiesel, and the desire to expand the feedstock base, as motivating factors for their research,” a press release states. How’s that for greased lightening?