Vegetable oil for fuel

Seems that alternate fuels keep getting attention. From today's Washington Post, I found this article,Oil that fries your burger can run your car. Considering my earlier post on the German company taking the French McDonald's waste grease for diesel, this caught my eye. The Post provides a quick tour of what is going on here in the U.S. and that was a bit of an eye-opener. Here is an especially interesting bit:

If all the estimated 3.8 billion pounds of U.S. restaurant grease produced annually was used, it would make 495 million gallons of biodiesel or heating fuel, equivalent to just 1 percent of the country's diesel consumption, Bantz said, quoting figures from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

While vegetable oil and restaurant grease may never make a big dent in overall energy needs, the existence of such enterprises underlines the urgency of the search for alternatives to fossil fuels, said Bantz.

"We have to look under every rock and down every drain for alternative energy sources," he said.

Someone send the Governor a rock. Put a message that ethanol is not the only alternative fuel.

While this may not make a big dent in overall energy needs, using restaurant grease as fuel offers the additional benefit of not having to store it in a garbage dump. That will help decrease the growth of landfills. Benefits, benefits.