The research is published in the American Chemical Society journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research.
Each year, the alligator meat industry in the US disposes of about 15 million pounds of alligator fat in landfills, while the meat winds up everywhere from roadside food shakes to high-end restaurants, like Arnaud’s Creole Restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
The US produces about 700 million gallons of bio-diesel annually, most of it coming from soybean oil and to a lesser extent, corn.
Inspired by concerns about using food crops to produce fuels, scientists have been investigating alternative feed stocks, including everything from algae to used cooking oil from restaurants.
Although in all likelihood it would play a small role in bio-diesel production if embraced by local producers, alligator fat could have an advantage of lower processing costs compared to some other feed stocks since it is a waste product, said lead researcher Rakesh Bajpai.
In interviews, Bajpai, a professor of chemical engineering at the university, has said because alligator fat has a high lipid content, the lipids could be recovered by micro-waving frozen samples and by using a chemical solvent.
Bajpai believes the 15 million pounds of fat that is currently being thrown away could become about 1.25 million gallons of fuel, with an energy content about 91 percent as great as that of petroleum-based diesel.
He has also suggested that a large plant could produce the fuel at about $2.40 a gallon, and that for each gallon of bio-diesel produced, the refinery would also make a few ounces of glycerol, a chemical valuable to industry.
Photo by Dan McCue
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