(hat tip: Distributed Republic )
I've been reading articles and seeing news clips about people who have been powering their diesel trucks with used oil from restaurant deep fat fryers. They've been extremely pleased at being able to use fuel that is, essentially, free for the hauling away.
Of course, that's a situation that can't last. As long as only one or two trucks have been modified to run on vegetable oil, used oil from restaurants will be free, or very cheap. But there's got to be a certain minimum number of such vehicles any one city can provide oil for, and once you exceed that number, you have more people who can use the oil than you have oil to give away. What happens then? Well, people start having to compete for it. In a free market, people compete by offering something in exchange for it. In other words, the used oil goes from being free to costing money -- how much depending on how many people are bidding up the price.
"Fryer grease has become gold," Damianidis said. "And just over a year ago, I had to pay someone to take it away."
Much to the surprise of Damianidis and many other people, processed fryer oil, which is called yellow grease, is actually not trash. The grease is traded on the booming commodities market. Its value has increased in recent months to historic highs, driven by the even higher prices of gas and ethanol, making it an ever more popular form of biodiesel to fuel cars and trucks.
In 2000, yellow grease was trading for 7.6 cents per pound. On Thursday, its price was about 33 cents a pound, or almost $2.50 a gallon. (That would make the 2,500-gallon haul in the Burger King case worth more than $6,000.)
Of course, with diesel fuel going for over $5 per gallon, even $2.50 a gallon is cheap. (Depending, of course, on the cost of refitting a truck to burn it, how efficient is compared with diesel, and other factors.)
Economics may still be in its infancy, but this application was a no-brainer.
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