Butter for Fuel?

Every year at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, hundreds of pounds of butter are used to create artwork. And the same is wasted at the end of the show. But in 2007, when the organizers began to think of ways to use the waste, the idea of making biodiesel out of it came up. Dr. Haas first submitted this idea of making biodiesel out of it. He worked with BlackGold Biofuels, a company created for making biodiesel out of fats and oils. They first removed the water from the butter, which then goes through a conversion process. During the process, the glycerin heads of the fat molecules is replaced with methanol, making biodiesel. The glycerin heads also are not wasted but are used in wastewater treatment plants. The idea of using butter as fuel in America is still not tangible. For one reason, butter is too costly. But making fuel out of butter is not the main goal says Ms. Landsburg, the owner of BlackGold Biofuels. Instead she wanted to show how flexible her technology was. This has proven to be somewhat successful since San Francisco has built a biodiesel plant using BlackGold technology to convert grease and oil from the city to biodiesel. The city is now running tests with the new technology and will soon be able to turn a waste into a resource.

This article relates to many scientific concepts. The molecules in butter, which is classified as a lipid, are made up of glycerol heads and fatty acid tails. The butter is also considered saturated because the fatty acid tails consists of only single bonds between the carbon and hydrogen atoms. They needed to know the molecular structure of butter in order to make biofuel out of it because they needed to change that structure.

Making fuel out of waste such as oil is very important especially in the world we live in where tons of waste is created everyday. Converting butter into fuel may not be tangible but it proves that we can use other materials for energy instead of fossil fuels. This is also important because it shows that alternative energy sources are coming closer and closer to us. And who knows maybe in the next few years the world’s largest cities may be powered wholly by renewable energy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/science/10butter.html?ref=science