Animal Fats Touted As Future Fuel Source

Jerry Bagby is typical of the oil men who are prospecting for a fortune in the Midwestern biofuels boom. He's convinced there's oil in these hills and he's found a well that no one else is using.
Bagby and a longtime friend have cobbled together $5 million to build a new biodiesel plant on the lonely croplands outside this southeast Missouri town. They're betting they can hit paydirt by exploiting a generally overlooked natural resource that's abundant in these parts chicken fat.
There's a virtual gusher of the stuff at a nearby Tyson Foods Inc. poultry plant. Currently, the low-quality fat is shipped out of state to be rendered and used as a cheap ingredient in pet food, soap and other products.
Bagby and his partner Harold Williams plan to refine the gooey substance, mix it with soybean oil and produce about 3 million gallons of biodiesel annually.
Today, only a tiny fraction of U.S. biodiesel is made from chicken fat, but that seems likely to change. The rising cost of soybean oil which accounts for roughly 90 percent of all biodiesel fuel stock is pushing the industry to exploit cheap and plentiful animal fats.
The nation's biggest meat corporations have taken notice. Tyson Foods announced in November it has established a renewable energy division that will be up and running during 2007. Competitors Perdue Farms Inc. and Smithfield Foods Inc. are making similar moves.
As meatpackers enter the field, they bring massive amounts of fuel stock that could make biodiesel cheaper and more plentiful.
The shift to animal fat as a fuel stock could be key to making the budding biodiesel industry a reliable fuel source for U.S. trucking fleets, said Vernon Eidman, a professor of economics at the University of Minnesota who has extensively studied the biofuels industry.
Eidman estimates that within five years, the U.S. will produce 1 billion gallons of biodiesel, and half of it will be made from animal fat. By that time soybean-based biodiesel will account for about 20 percent of the total, he said.
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