That oh so humble and innocent looking dark, warm liquid that greets your mornings, coffee, is anything but. Its full intriguing tail has dancing animals, sex, Ethiopian shepherds, a pope, prohibitions and several religions in it. It is one of the largest traded commodities in the world, has side effects most drugs could only dream about and has been involved in smuggling, slavery and ecological disasters waiting to happen. Do you still think that swirling cup of dark liquid is as innocent and humble as it looks?
Researchers at the University of Nevada have found that ground coffee is 10-15 percent oil, which is easily extractable and turned into bio-diesel. What’s more, it could be offered for as little as 60p per US gallon – that’s around 16p per litre!
Coffee is in abundant enough supply to provide hundreds of millions of gallons of fuel every year, and the oil can be extracted from leftover grounds – so we shouldn’t find ourselves missing out on our morning coffee for the sake of fuel.
And the find was stumbled across by accident, according to chief researcher Mano Misra, who said: “I had left my coffee out one night, and the next morning, I noticed that there was a kind of oil around the edge of the cup.” Misra then collected used ground coffee from Starbucks and found extracting the oil was easy.
There are over 7.2 million tonnes of coffee produced worldwide each year from which to extract fuel and it’s also more stable than traditional bio-fuel because of coffee’s high antioxidant content. A larger scale pilot scheme is now underway to see how viable coffee could be as a genuine fuel source.”
Source: Yahoo. com
