The residents of London are known for tea drinking, but in fact each of them consumes an average of 2.3 cups of coffee a day as well. But now, it won’t just be commuters that are running on coffee in the morning. London buses will in part run on oil produced from coffee grounds.
City authorities have mandated that buses be fueled by B20, a mixture of ordinary diesel and biofuels, typically made from products such as waste cooking oil and tallow from meat packing companies. It requires no modifications to be made to bus engines.
But as of late November, the fuel mix now contains small amounts of the product of a start-up company called Bio-Bean. Working in partnership with Royal Dutch Shell, the oil produced from coffee grounds now forms part of the fuel mix. So far, the company has only produced about 1,600 gallons of the fuel, enough to power one bus for a year. But they are working to make much more.
Londoners’ coffee habit produces about 200,000 tons of used grounds each year. Bio-bean collects that waste from coffee shops and factories and processes the sludge into oil. In case you are wondering, even though coffee-based oil has a strong coffee smell, by the time it is processed, distilled and blended into the other components of the B20 fuel, the smell is gone.
London still struggles with serious air pollution problems. Its 9,500 buses are major contributors to the poor air quality. About a sixth of the fleet are hybrids and the city wants to convert buses to run on electricity or hydrogen. But meanwhile, at least to some extent, London buses now run on coffee.
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Wake Up and Smell the Traffic? London Tries Coffee to Power Buses
Photo, posted May 1, 2010, courtesy of Joe King via Flickr
‘Coffee Power’ from Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
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