Fast-food giant McDonald’s will be fueling some of its delivery trucks in the United Kingdom on the leftover oil used to cook its french fries and chicken nuggets.
This story in London’s Financial Times says 155 trucks could be running on the fuel made from the grease by the end of the year:
The fast-food group, which to date has been running trucks on 95 per cent diesel and 5 per cent biodiesel, will initially use a blend of 85 per cent biodiesel and 15 per cent rapeseed oil.
Matthew Howe, manager of McDonald’s UK supply chain, said the cost of using biodiesel was expected to be the same as the restaurant group’s diesel costs in the long term. “In the short term, we think it will cost a little bit more,” he said, adding this extra cost could amount to “a couple of pennies a litre”.
The company expects to convert an annual 6m litres of oil, comparable to the 6.1m litres of diesel used in its trucks last year.
McDonald’s will collect oil from 900 of its 1,200 UK outlets every week and have it made into biodiesel. Company officials say it will produce a 78% reduction in the company’s carbon emissions. It’s also seen as a test as whether the idea would work in the United States.
DuPont is dropping $58 million into a joint venture with British Petroleum (BP) and British Sugar to produce the biofuels, biobutanol and ethanol. Biobutanol is a renewable energy source similar to ethanol in that its is obtained by fermenting some of the same feedstocks, but biobutanol is closer to unleaded gasoline in energy content. It is also more compatible with existing pertoleum-based fuels pipeline systems.
To celebrate independence from foreign oil on Independence Day, MFA Oil Company – which currently sells E85 at more than 40 locations in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri – will be giving away a Ford F-150 FFV for the second year in a row. 
“Our goal is to help educate consumers so that E85 becomes their fuel of choice,” said Jerry Taylor, president of MFA Oil Company. “In doing so, we continue to demonstrate MFA Oil’s commitment to strengthening rural economies through support of the biofuel industry and by decreasing our dependence on foreign oil.” 
Roughly half of the cattle and hog operations in a 12-state region either fed ethanol co-products or considered feeding them to their livestock last year, according to a 
According to Dan Kerestes, chief of the USDA NASS Livestock Branch, USDA contacted some 94-hundred dairy cattle, cattle on feed, beef cattle and hog operations in 12 states. Kerestes says USDA didn’t have too many expectations going into the report – but he says the percentage of operations already feeding co-products was a surprise.
Great thing about going to meetings is getting to meet people you only know by email. I got to meet a couple of fellow bloggers at the Fuel Ethanol Workshop in St. Louis. 
I also met Nathan Schock with 
Thanks to the 
Many of the exhibitors at the 2007 Fuel Ethanol Workshop were offering new technology and equipment to make ethanol production better, faster, easier, more efficient – you name it. 
According to their website, BetaTec is the new application arm of the Barth-Haas Group. The Barth-Haas Group was founded in 1794 and is the oldest and largest hops company in the world. As part of the Barth-Haas Group, BetaTec draws on over 200 years of hop experience and our vertically integrated operations which include every aspect of hops…growing, harvesting, processing, marketing, distribution and sales. We know hops!
The growth of the ethanol industry was most obvious at the 2007 Fuel Ethanol Workshop last week in St. Louis on the expo floor. Some 700 exhibitors were there, an increase of 60 percent from last year alone. 
There’s a new player on the block in the alternative energy group sector: The American Biofuels Council.
Just less than a year ago, the prospects for a biodiesel plant in Minot, North Dakota seemed pretty promising as the state’s governor, a U.S. Senator, and North Dakota’s ag commissioner attended the groundbreaking at the Dakota Skies Biodiesel plant.