LSU cooks up biodiesel

• By GARY PERILLOUX
• Advocate business writer
• Published: Mar 21, 2008 - Page: 1D - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Bill Carney lifts a beaker of amber fluid and invites visitors at LSU’s W.A. Callegari Environmental Center to take a whiff Thursday.

An aroma wafts up and stirs the stored memory of vegetable oil cooking — for good reason.

About 24 hours earlier, Carney and his staff completed the first batch of biodiesel refined from LSU cafeteria cooking oil diverted from the landfill.

“From the early testing we did on it, it’s beautiful stuff,” Carney says in another take at capturing the essence of biodiesel. “It looks almost like a beer color — without the head on it.”

Seeds of the Callegari center’s experiment were planted more than a year ago when former Chancellor Sean O’Keefe challenged the LSU Agricultural Center to find a path toward producing alternative fuels. Goals included boosting campus recycling and energy efficiency and transferring a cost-savings energy solution to state farmers.

In the past year, Carney spoke to a Jefferson Davis Parish rice farmer who decided against planting a crop merely because fuel prices had climbed too high.

With petroleum diesel costs approaching $4 a gallon, Carney said the BioPro 190 bought for $8,200 from a California manufacturer can refine a gallon for little more than $1, not counting the efforts of the Callegari center staff Carney directs and about 25 people across the campus who are contributing to the AgCenter’s biofuels initiative.

To start, Carney, laboratory manager Javed Iqbal and equipment operator Titus Gray will make 50-gallon batches twice a week from cooking oil collected at The 459 Commons, formerly the Laville Food Emporium, at LSU. Over time, they hope to increase production by collecting oil at all LSU dining facilities, including the Union.

That would produce about 6,000 gallons annually.

By early summer, Carney will organize workshops for farmers and others who want to learn how to make biodiesel using the same process.

“We’re not trying to get into the commercial business,” Carney said, but he’s leading research that could aid industry refining and help farm cooperatives become their own fuel supplier.

Beyond spent cooking oil, the center wants to create long-term refining solutions using the oil from Chinese tallow trees, palms and even algae — feedstocks that won’t drive up demand and prices for food products, as has been the case with corn and ethanol.

But cooking oil-based biodiesel won’t fuel research alone at LSU. Tractors, heavy equipment, compost grinders and trucks at the AgCenter’s Central Research Station three miles south of the main Baton Rouge campus will run on the fuel and benefit from its better lubricating qualities and emissions. It contains practically no sulfur, the heavy pollutant federal regulators have cracked down on in petroleum diesel.