This Thanksgiving, hold the gravy dear. Instead, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is asking city residents to put their turkey drippings in a jar and take them to local supermarkets to be collected by the city and turned into biodiesel fuel and methane to make electricity and run city vehicles. The commission is using public service announcements airing on local radio and television stations to get the word out to residents. Collection points include a Costco store and all of the city’s Whole Foods Markets. The city has been collecting and stock piling grease from 500 restaurants since November 2007 to turn into biodiesel, said Tyrone Jue, San Francisco PUC spokesperson. It plans to pick a biodiesel-making company soon to turn the yellow grease it collects into high quality biofuel for up to 1,600 city diesel vehicles. It also is breaking ground on its own biodiesel production plant at a city sewage treatment plant in February, he added. There it plans to use brown grease to make lower grade biodiesel to run diesel engines that make electricity at the wastewater facility. What’s left over it plans to put in its digester to produce methane for making additional electricity, he explained. The plant should begin producing power with biodiesel sometime in 2009, Jue said. Yellow grease—of which the city produces about 1.5 million gallons a year—generally is collected from deep fat fryers and has little debris in it, according to Jue. Brown grease typically comes from pans and contains considerable amounts of debris, he said. The city produces more than 2.5 million gallons a year of brown grease. The prototype program to make biodiesel from the brown grease to power sewage treatment plants could save considerable amounts of electricity, according to commission general manager Ed Harrington. Sewage treatment plants use about 3 percent of the nation’s power. The city also benefits by keeping grease from going down the drain where it can clog sewer lines. The California Energy Commission is helping to fund startup of the city commission’s biodiesel program with a $1 million grant, with additional money from the Environmental Protection Agency, said Jue.
