I found the news of a tiny company, Syntroleum, very interesting and uplifting. The company is making fuel from a renewable resource, grease and fat. The company has plans underway to build a $150 million plant in the south central part of the U.S. so they can take the fat from Tyson Foods processing plants…turning the fat into liquid fuel to power everything from cars to jets.

They have a similar arrangement with ConocoPhillips, the Houston-based oil company. They will run slugs of Tyson’s fat through existing Conoco refineries and produce “renewable diesel” to mix at low concentrations into Conoco’s conventional oil-based diesel.

The $150 million plant of Syntroleum’s will crank out 75 million gallons of fat-based fuel annually, which is about 5% the size of a typical modern oil refinery. But it’s start of a new technology to generate liquid fuel, not to mention a way to recycle grease and fat.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 2:43 am and is filed under Global Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.