Green Promise: UC Team Seeking to Turn Fryer Fat to Fuel Competes in National EPA Event

Since 2007, the University of Cincinnati’s Mingming Lu, associate professor of engineering, and her team of students have collected about 35 gallons of waste fryer fat per month from campus eateries.

They’ve then routinely cleaned and treated the waste cooking oil, at a cost of about $1.35 per gallon, to make biodiesel. And in late 2009, after appropriate testing and needed Environmental Protection Agency approval, Lu partnered with UC’s power plant to use this biodiesel for campus power generation,  producing enough energy to sustain the electricity needs of four to five residence-hall rooms each year.

During Earth Day weekend – April 21 and 22, with Earth Day being observed on April 22 – a UC team led by Lu, in partnership with Bluegrass Biodiesel of Falmouth, Ky., and the Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati (MSD), will present on a hoped-for expansion of the fryer-fat-to-biodiesel effort. They will present their work to date and plans for the future at the U.S. EPA’s 2012

National Sustainable Design Expo

to be held on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

The event features a student contest – titled “P3: People, Prosperity and the Planet Student Design Competition for Sustainability” – where teams showcase innovative solutions to environmental problems in an effort to win EPA funding worth up to $90,000. At the expo, the projects will be judged by a panel of experts. A few teams will be selected for phase 2 grants up to $90,000 for students to improve their designs, implement them in the field, or move them to the marketplace.

The UC presentation is titled “

Community-Based Biodiesel Production from Trap Grease

: The Evaluation of Technical and Economic Feasibilities.” (Trap grease is the waste grease which restaurants trap before it goes down the sewer.)

UC and its partners would like to develop a community-scale biodiesel production system that would convert trap grease collected from sewers to convert to biodiesel. (Previously, the partnership had won a $15,000 EPA award for phase 1 efforts to survey the amount of trap grease that could be collected in Cincinnati sewers for possible conversion into biodiesel, the composition of trap grease in Cincinnati sewers, projected biodiesel yields and expected costs.)

According to Lu, the next goal, if the local effort could win phase 2 EPA funding, would include pilot demonstrations and setting up a pretreatment system with Bluegrass Biodiesel and MSD at a 100-gallon pilot facility. The team hopes to win the up to $90,000 EPA funding grant for that purpose.

UC’s team will be competing for that grant against

44 other U.S. colleges and universities

at the National Sustainable Design Expo, including Cornell, Princeton and Vanderbilt universities.

If the UC fryer-fat-to-biodiesel project could expand to a municipal level, the environmental and economic benefits would also expand. These include

• Reuse of what is now considered a waste product. Trap grease is now considered a burden and an expense in terms of disposal. It usually ends up in landfills.

• Waste cooking oil and trap grease (originating from vegetable oil or animal fats) are a renewable energy source found locally, thus reducing dependence on foreign energy sources. It could thus benefit the community b reducing waste and bringing fuel-cost savings.  

The UC-Bluegrass Biodiesel-MSD partnership should know by April 24 if their project has won phase 2 EPA funding.

• For Third Year Straight, Princeton Review Names UC a Top Green School

• Find out about more UC Earth Week events, including presentations, workshops and the planting of about 100 trees starting at 10 a.m., Sunday, April 22, on UC’s Victory Parkway campus, 2220 Victory Parkway, Walnut Hills. Those trees will be planted at the rear of the campus buildings.

• Economic and Environmental Savings Found in Recent UC Energy Efforts

• UC Converts Coal Boiler to Run on Waste Wood Chips