If coffee fuels you, it may also fuel your car. Java based biodiesel.

Posted by Jacqueline Church Dec 22, 2008

My old roommate used to call it motivation in a cup. Coffee is our morning wakie-wakie, or our afternoon pick-me-up. Biofuel we now know can have many ramifcations on the environment when corn is produced to feed engines rather than feeding people, it gets messy fast.

The American Chemical Society's (ACS) Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a bi-weekly publication recently announced that scientists collected spent coffee grounds from a multinational coffeehouse chain and separated the oil. They then used an inexpensive process to convert 100 percent of the oil into biodiesel.

The resulting biodiesel not only smelled like java - an added benefit if you ask me - but it also ran clean. The java based bio fuel ran more stable than traditional biodiesel due to coffee's high antioxidant content, the researchers say. Solids left over from the conversion can be converted to ethanol or used as compost, the report notes.

With a growing market for sustainable biofuel this could be a great business. Any investors out there?

And I came to this researching shade-grown coffee for my Coffee with a Conscience article. It's an idea whose time has come. We cannot ignore the loss of natural habitat from our agricultural practices. Some of the worst ones we export to fuel our coffee jones. It's ironic that the number one import to the US is petroleum and the #2 is coffee, which may someday replace at least some of the petroleum dependency.

This makes crazy good sense to me or maybe I just need a cup of Joe....