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San Francisco, California has started a program to turn the waste cooking oil from the city’s many restaurants into biodiesel.

This story in the San Francisco Chronicle has more details:

Today the city launches SFGreasecycle, a free program in which the city will pick up used cooking oil and grease from local restaurants, hotels and other commercial food preparation establishments. Those substances then will be turned into biodiesel, a fuel made of plant oil that burns cleaner than petroleum-based fuels.

“This is a case of taking what could be a bad situation and turning it into a win,” said Susan Leal, general manager of the city’s Public Utilities Commission, the agency behind SFGreasecycle.

Turning the grease into fuel also helps the city in that it costs $3.5 million a year to clean out sewer pipes clogged with illegally-dumped used cooking oil. Part of the plan is for the city to build its own biodiesel plant.

Some local biodiesel-from-grease makers are crying foul, however, as they say the city’s efforts are cutting into their feedstocks. Used cooking oil is getting to be a hot commodity, as you might remember from my story a couple of days ago.

The City of Eufala, Alabama has cashed in on the benefits of biodiesel.

This story in the Eufala Tribune says cost savings and tax credits are helping its bottom line:

By operating various city vehicles and machines on a co-processed bio-diesel mixture, the city currently saves approximately 90 cents per gallon of fuel. That’s big savings considering the city, even buying wholesale and without taxes, pays $2.31 per gallon for diesel.

Producing fuel locally cuts down on foreign oil dependency and also creates jobs throughout the country as more bio-fuel factories are established.

No wonder the city is known as an Certified Audubon Sustainable Community.

A West Coast company has joined a Texas-based company to form a joint venture to produce biodiesel in Montana.

This press release from Sustainable Oils… formed from Seattle-based Targeted Growth, Inc. a renewable energy bioscience company, and Green Earth Fuels of Houston, a vertically integrated renewable biodiesel energy company… has more.

The new venture will produce and market up to 100 million gallons of Camelina-based biodiesel by 2010, launching the single largest U.S. contract for the unique biodiesel-specific feedstock. Nearly all of the initial Camelina production is expected to be grown in Montana.

“This is an exciting opportunity for Montana – it represents a combining of two major thrusts of economic growth outside the boot,” said Governor Brian Schweitzer. “It is energy related and it is value-added agriculture. Having this sort of major commitment is great news.” This joint venture sets a precedent for continued research and development of dedicated energy crops.

Targeted Growth has spent years applying its suite of yield and trait technologies to Camelina to create the first Elite Camelina Seed. Green Earth Fuels opened one of the country’s largest biodiesel production facilities this month, in Houston (see my November 15th post), and is successfully developing additional projects to provide biodiesel that meets exceptional quality and ratability standards to leading energy companies.

Camelina development has been a three-year project for Targeted Growth.

“We have created a better feedstock for biodiesel,” said Tom Todaro, CEO of Targeted Growth. “Camelina can be rotated with current Montana crops, it grows in land with lower agricultural value, and it doesn’t significantly increase the use of fertilizer or irrigation water. We think this will be a model for the development and use of other biofuel-specific crops.”

As biodiesel has gained in popularity so has a feedstock that used to be just a waste product. Used cooking oil from restaurants can be made into some pretty high-quality biodiesel, and refiners are having to compete to get what used to be thrown out.

This story on the Oregonlive.com web site says it used to cost restaurants to have the old grease hauled away. Now, it’s become a second income for them:

Recycled cooking oil has traditionally been sold for use in cattle feed and cosmetics. But the segment going to biofuels has grown in recent years to account for about 20 percent of the used oil market, said Tyson Keever, co-founder of Sequential Pacific Biofuels, the state’s largest manufacturer of biodiesel.

“You have processors now in the metro area who are looking at using that grease for biodiesel primarily,” said Mike McCallum, president and CEO of the Oregon Restaurant Association. “There are restaurants who are being solicited for the use of the grease and are getting some money for it.”

The article goes on to point that each person in Oregon uses about a gallon of fryer grease a month. Now, if everyone of those gallons was tunred into biodiesel, the story says it would meet only half of what’s needed in diesel for that state. But I’m more a glass-is-half-full kind of guy. Isn’t that half of the diesel we wouldn’t have to get from foreign sources or even non-renewable American sources? And isn’t it better than throwing it into a hole in the ground? Seems to me that fryer grease biodiesel is about as green as you can get.