June 17, 2014

Could you run your car on coffee?




New research from our Centre for Sustainable Chemical Technologies shows that waste coffee grinds could be used to make biodiesel.

Oil can be extracted from coffee grounds by soaking them in an organic solvent, before being chemically transformed into biodiesel via a process called “transesterification”. The study, recently published in the ACS Journal Energy & Fuels, looked at how the fuel properties varied depending on the type of coffee used.