Coconut Crude

Coconut Crude | Ethan Zuckerman

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Price of gasoline got you down? If you're driving a diesel vehicle in the South Pacific, you may be in luck. Vanuatan entrepreneur Tony Deamer has adapted his fleet of rental cars to run on coconut oil, a plentiful local commodity. Unlike with many biofuels, coconut oil doens't need to be transesterized - mixed with sodium hydroxide and alcohol to change its chemical composition - to run in a diesel engine. Filtered and warmed to temperatures about 25C, coconut oil is a better than satisfactory substitute for "mineral diesel" - it burns more slowly, which produces more even pressure on engine pistons, reducing engine wear, and lubricates the engine more effectively. Deamer runs most of his vehicles on a mixture of 85% coconut oil and 15% kerosene, but has demonstrated that modified diesel engines run filtered coconut oil quite happily.

Even before recent price increases, diesel fuel was extremely expensive in the South Pacific due to the cost of shipping fuel from refineries. Coconut oil, on the other hand, is comparatively cheap - produced locally by boiling copra (dried coconut flesh) in water, it retails on the world market for $0.55 a liter, as compared to significantly higher prices for mineral diesel. Used as a basic ingredient in margarine and in cosmetics, copra prices tend to fluctuate widely, destabilizing economies like Vanuatu's which are heavily dependent on copra exports. An increased use of copra to produce fuel oils would likely raise copra prices and benefit local economies, as well as reducing the costs of imported fuels.

SOPAC - the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission, based in Fiji, is funding projects to study the use of coconut oil for power generation and transportation - their introductory paper is a useful overview of efforts thus far to utilize this promising biofuel. UNDP's Equator Initiative also has an excellent case on "Coconut Crude", focusing in part on Tony Deamer's work.

Posted by Ethan Zuckerman at September 22, 2005 11:34 AM
Source: worldchanging.com