Restaurants can help trim foreign oil reliance

Locally produced
Burgerville restaurants now produce about 7,500 gallons of oil a month that can be turned into 6,400 gallons of biodiesel, company officials said.

The conversion reduces the need for relying on distant refineries and avoids much of the cost of transport because biodiesel can be produced locally, as other potential biodiesel users and producers have discovered — including Salem-based Kettle Foods Inc., which makes potato chips.

“We power three company vehicles, Volkswagen Beetles, with diesel engines we call ‘biobeetles’ — our own little fleet,” said Jim Green, Kettle Foods spokesman.

“We’ve gotten real good in reusing our oil and not having as much waste, but all of our waste does go to be processed into biodiesel,” Green said.

Carlo Luri, biofuels manager for Bently Agrowdynamics in Minden, Nev., said that each American uses about 10 gallons of cooking oil a year. He said recapturing just half that amount of oil could trim conventional diesel fuel consumption by 1 percent to 2 percent nationally, along with cutting down on pollution. Diesel fuel accounts for about 24 percent of oil refinery production nationally, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Luri said there also is an economic incentive to recycle old cooking oil because it generally is cheaper than “virgin” vegetable oil produced directly from crops such as soybeans.

In California, the Orange County Sanitation District is taking the recycling process a step further by recovering grease from sewer systems and traps.

But the district would like to develop a system that keeps the grease out of the sewer system altogether.

“We look at it like renewable fuel, if we can get it out of the sewer and get it into the market,” said Nick Arhontes, the engineer who directs regional services for the Southern California agency that already uses biodiesel in its trucks.

Beyond the restaurant
“It goes beyond restaurants to school cafeterias, jail cafeterias, hospitals — to get them to have their fats, oils and greases collected and get them into some alternative use,” Arhontes said.

Kelly King, vice president of Pacific Biodiesel Inc. in Hawaii, said the company founded 10 years ago by her husband, Robert King, now converts most of the waste cooking oil collected around the island state.

The couple began on the island of Maui, where Robert King had the contract to maintain generators at the central landfill. He teamed up with University of Idaho researcher Daryl Reece to recycle discarded cooking oil into biodiesel in order to reduce the impact on the environment.

Kelly King noted that Hawaii has already reached the goal of providing 2 percent of the total diesel consumption that Luri said could be reached nationally. Now the challenge is to find more renewable fuel sources.

“We’re already there with used cooking oil,” King said. “We need to come up with another oil seed crop to seriously displace diesel fuel.”

Processing used cooking oil into fuel offers a grassroots alternative to produce biodiesel at the neighborhood and even household level, using readily available equipment such as an old water heater, said Lyle Rudensey, co-founder of The Breathable Bus Coalition and a member of the NW Biodiesel Network.

Rudensey, also known as “BioLyle,” holds biodiesel workshops in the Seattle area.

“Bring your own water heater, and we’ll show you the plumbing and how it works,” he said.

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