Dining Services implements used cooking oils as transportation fuel

By: Jyotirmoy Sircar

Posted: 4/12/07

Texas A&M's Dining Services, which serves 33,000 meals a day, is implementing an innovation that makes it among the first to use its own waste oil to power its delivery services, said Robyn McCarthy, assistant director of marketing and communication for Dining Services.

In partnership with Central Texas Biofuels of Giddings and Texas Cooking Oil Recycling Services of Rosser, Dining Services is applying a process to help fuel its campus delivery truck with biodiesel fuel made of used cooking oils from its facilities.

This process will effectively ensure usage of a significant quantity of what is otherwise a waste product and puts A&M at the forefront of this kind of innovative practice, McCarthy said.

"As a country and a major U.S. campus, we have a responsibility to implement practices that are sustainable and create less dependency on products that we have no control over," she said. "Dining Services is very conscientious about waste, and we realized that our delivery truck could be converted to utilize what is considered waste, and so we moved forward."

Sergio Capareda, an assistant professor in the department of biological and agricultural engineering, said biodiesel is a cleaner fuel compared with diesel primarily because of the absence of sulfur compounds.

"Biodiesel will reduce the country's dependence on imported crude (oil) and will play a much larger role in the fuel industry in the future, if we can find the right oil sources," Capareda said.

There is strong evidence that biodiesel can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, particularly when emissions generated during its full production-to-consumption life cycle are taken into account, according to a report by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Abhinav Guha, a graduate student studying agricultural and biological engineering, said research needs to substantiate the economics of using biodiesel.

"It might actually require more energy to produce biodiesels than what will be the output from it, and so we need to devise ways to change that," Guha said.

Oil refining issues such as removal of gum, wax and phosphorus need to be looked into, Capareda said. The use of methanol and catalysts during biodiesel production is to be addressed as well.