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Website: http://noisyballoonist.org

Chocolate Biodiesel Experience

February 4, 2008 3:01pm

This makes my brain all twisty. I happen to be both a chocolatier and a longtime 100% biodiesel user (yes, 2003 diesel Jetta), and fairly intimate with the process used to transform oil into fuel. It's worth noting that you can't simply chuck a few blocks of Hershey into your biodiesel reactor and wind up with fuel. You got to begin with pure fat. If you were to extract cocoa butter from chocolate for the purposes of making fuel you'd be an idiot, as cocoa butter is just about the most expensive commodity fat on the planet. Upon further investigation, the BioTruck team suggests they're processing their "waste chocolate" into ethanol/methanol (a key component in manufacturing biodiesel, regardless of the source oil). This appears here. Such chemical magic tricks I have never heard of, and would almost certainly require a cost- and labor-intensive "cracking" of the chocolate into its constituent parts before further processing.

President Bush's travel entourage

November 29, 2007 11:13am

Well: line cook, grill cook, saucier and pastry chef. And all those dogs to make sure all those chefs are on the up-and-up.

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