Driving on the fat of the land

Yesterday I received one of the more interesting press releases lately. It was from Emerson Process Management and described the company’s participation in a project with Dynamic Fuels, Syntroleum, and Tyson Foods. Long story short, the partners are building a plant in Geismar, LA, that will turn waste fat from meat processing into synthetic Diesel fuel. EPM is providing the control infrastructure for the plant. (Read a more comprehensive treatment from Control Engineering.)

The story also appeared in different form in the Austin Statesman, hometown newspaper for Emerson. It makes the point that animal-fat-derived Diesel has higher energy content than the veggie variety, and eliminates critical pollutants found in the conventional stuff. Moreover, it’s made from a waste product (although that waste is not without its uses). The question will be, how much of it can be produced? The pilot plant under construction is estimated to cost $138 million and should generate 75 million gallons of the synthetic fuel annually using feedstock from Tyson’s processing sites. If the technology is scalable enough to be practical for small installations, it could eliminate much carting around of the raw material.

If it works well, we might find ourselves returning to a WWII mindset of homemakers saving cooking fats and oils for collection. Of course back then much more cooking was done from scratch and people weren’t so concerned about lean meat. I remember the soup can in the kitchen in my childhood that held all manner of disgusting waxy white stuff drained from the frying pan.

I suppose if this shift becomes large scale in the future, companies that deal in fat rendering and fatty acids could find their feedstock becoming more expensive. I recall a visit to one of those plants in an earlier life, and it was like the soup can on a vastly larger scale. Fortunately it was during January.