Company to turn poultry fat into fuel

Elevance Renewable Sciences, based in Bolingbrook, Ill., plans to convert poultry fat into jet fuel at an Iowa biofuels plant, reports the Associated Press.
The $15M facility could be approved by local government officials by the end of January 2010, according to K'Lynne Johnson, Elevance's chief executive. The company has received $2.5M from the U.S. Department of Energy for the plant.
Johnson said that poultry fat will contribute to a quarter of production in the first year, with the rest coming from plant oils. The converted fat could be used as a petroleum chemical substitute in jet fuel, lubricants and consumer products, such as cosmetics.
Johnson said the 1.4 billion pounds of poultry fat produced annually in the United States could be converted into 250 million gallons of petroleum replacement products, such as diesel and jet fuel. That’s equivalent to about a gallon of fuel for every 50 chickens.
Lucy Norton, managing director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, told the Associated Press that the Elevance facility would be the first biofuels plant in Iowa to make jet fuel from animal fat.

Recovered poultry fat studied as alternative fuel

The Poultry Science Association and Dr. Brian Kiepper, a poultry scientist at the University of Georgia, are working to convert recovered fat from poultry wastewater streams into an economically viable alternative fuel source for processors.
Waste fat, oil and grease are major components of many food-processing wastewater streams, including poultry production. According to Kiepper, recaptured fat can be purified and then burned to heat water in a processing plant's boilers. It can also be used to make biodiesel.
Such uses can be attractive economically for the processor, particularly when compared to the traditional means of disposing of offal by selling it to rendering facilities, at a rate that values the fat at $0.22/gal. By comparison, once purified, fat recaptured from food processing wastewater can be used instead of fuel oil, which is currently priced at around $2/gal, to fire a plant's boilers.
Kiepper estimates that recovering only 10% (a conservative number) of the 44.6 million gallons of fat produced in Georgia each year would result in an estimated annual savings of nearly $9 million on fuel-oil purchases.