Chicken Fat Biodiesel Research
Arkansas, home to the Tyson chicken empire, could be the home to a new feedstock for biodiesel… chicken fat.
This story from UPI says researchers in that state are looking at ways to perfect the chicken fat-to-biodiesel process:
Chemical engineers at the University of Arkansas were successful in using so-called supercritical methanol to transform chicken fat and tall oil fatty acid into biodiesel fuel, the university said Wednesday in a news release. The yield was greater than 90 percent, the university said.
Graduate student Brent Schulte subjected low-grade chicken fat and tall oil fatty acids to a chemical process known as supercritical methanol treatment. Substances become “supercritical” when they are heated and pressurized to a critical point, the highest temperature and pressure at which the substance can exist in equilibrium as a vapor and liquid.
The process is more efficient than other methods of turning chicken fat into biodiesel… as few other chicken fat biodiesel plants have started to pop up, mostly near poultry-processing plants.