Coffee-Fueled Car Is Surprisingly Practical

Great, so it requires about 140 litres of fresh water to grow the beans for one cup of coffee. Scale that up to 5-7kg of coffee beans for producing 1 litre of biofuel, that's an enormously impractical amount of water.

Practical my eye.

http://www.portlandonline.com/WATER/index.cfm?a=211320&c=46265

Not to mention a horrible misuse of coffee.

What would my morning coffees cost now?

Switch to Tea. Join us on the dark side.

Tea is only suitable for Chinese cars...

What I want to know is, does it make the car jumpy?

That doesn't matter - it starts FIRST thing every morning.

Do sports cars need espresso?

Something sounds suspicious! The article says "the US estimates we use 7 tons of coffee which would produce 340 million gal of biodiesel" ??? B.S.! The reporter can't count zero's. But this would use the USED coffee grounds,not fresh coffee grounds, which are discarded anyhow. So, no adverse effect of the morning java. MIght be better than using corn or soy beans for oil instead of food.

Great,

Now we can use nearly all traditional food to power cars.

Next step: find a way to eat crude oil as it will be the only thing left over.

Would Starbucks fuel cost more than Dunkin Donuts fuel?

I think the principle of ngetting a "second bite" of a product before it goes to waste is an incredibly smart thing to do. I do know that coffee grounds should always be washed down the sink, rather than tipped in the refuse bin. They act as a useful disinfectant for your grease traps as well as greatly improving the biological "fuel" value for breakdown when it reaches your septic tank or sewage treatment plant.

Obviously the amount of useful energy that is left in what is normally considered a waste product, should be made better use of, and I think this idea has a lot of merit. The argument that it takes so much water to grow a cup full of coffee is unsupported, as this process offers to use a product that is already created and is only waste and generally discarded. If the coffee was grown purely for use as biofuel, THAT would be a huge waste of water, as there are far more efficient crops that do the same or better job.