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London buses are being powered by a new fuel: Coffee

There's a new buzz powering public buses in London.

British startup bio-bean has partnered with Shell (RDSB) and Argent Energy to create a coffee-based biofuel that will be used in London's diesel buses.

The company has produced 6,000 liters of coffee oil for the pilot project with London's transportation authority -- enough to help power the equivalent of one city bus for a year.

"It's a great example of what can be done when we start to reimagine waste as an untapped resource," bio-bean founder Arthur Kay said in a statement.
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ORIGINAL: WhoreMods
The fumes from the buses will certainly smell a lot better than from a vehicle that burns biodiesel made from recycled chip fat...

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ORIGINAL: MercTech

Sounds like a side biz for Starbucks to me.

Almost any form of vegetable oil can be catalytically converted to a cetane based fuel.

Since used coffee grounds can be as high at 15% coffee oil by weight; the extraction should not be difficult. The usual use for extracted coffee oil is simply instant coffee.

As coffee beans are labor intensive and are geographically limited on where they thrive; peanuts which can be grown almost anywhere seem a better source for a plant based fuel.

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers

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ORIGINAL: MercTech

Sounds like a side biz for Starbucks to me.

Almost any form of vegetable oil can be catalytically converted to a cetane based fuel.

Since used coffee grounds can be as high at 15% coffee oil by weight; the extraction should not be difficult. The usual use for extracted coffee oil is simply instant coffee.

As coffee beans are labor intensive and are geographically limited on where they thrive; peanuts which can be grown almost anywhere seem a better source for a plant based fuel.

Henry Ford's first Model-T was built to run on hemp gasoline and the CAR ITSELF WAS CONSTRUCTED FROM HEMP! On his large estate, Ford was photographed among his hemp fields. The car, 'grown from the soil,' had hemp plastic panels whose impact strength was 10 times stronger than steel; Popular Mechanics, 1941.

Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, designed it to run on vegetable and seed oils like hemp; he actually ran the thing on peanut oil for the 1900 World's Fair. Henry Ford used hemp to not only construct cars but also fuel them.

As an alternative to methanol, hemp has at least one glowing report: the plant produces up to four times more cellulose per acre than trees. And a hemp crop grows a little quicker than a forest.

Hemp has been demonized and prohibited by law because it would bankrupt many industrial companies. There's our risk-averse capitalist again.

HERE

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ORIGINAL: WhoreMods

I should have been more clear I was talking about internal combustion, rather than steam boilers. My bad.