Watermelon: Beer Or Biofuel? Maybe Both!Lite Green by Sebrina Smith
Whether you like the taste or not, watermelon homebrew may be the future for fueling your car.Watermelon, long considered the perfect base for making refreshing summer beverages, may soon be fueling your car, too. At least that’s what findings published in the Biotechnology for Biofuels journal found, anyway. According to the study, unwanted watermelon juice could be a promising new source for making ethanol—or possibly a new flavor of beer. "In terms of the actual process that goes on, it is no different than making homebrew," said study co–author Wayne Fish, a chemist with the Agricultural Research Service in Lane, Oklahoma. On a larger scale, and with a few special laboratory tweaks, you get basically, watermelon beer. Each year, up to 1/5 of all watermelons grown are not even harvested due to superficial blemishes that render them unfit for consumer outlets like grocery stores. Since farmers regularly leave these rejected melons on the vine, Fish decided to collect and use them to experiment with ways to extract antioxidant compounds from the juice. But he soon realized the sugary pulp that made up the waste stream could be a new source of ethanol. Researchers brewed up several batches of the experimental fuel, and produced 23 gallons of ethanol from roughly an acre's worth of the unused fruit. Since a typical watermelon field may yield up to 100 tons per acre of watermelon, it doesn't make good economic sense to haul the unwanted watermelons to a processing facility. Fish envisions a system where mobile breweries go from farm to farm collecting and processing the watermelon pulp. The biofuel could then be returned to farmers for their personal use or larger farms might co–op with each other and pool their supply for sale at biofuel outlets. Fish said researchers were focused on the energy potential of the watermelon homebrew, not it’s flavor, but in the end they did decide to sample it. How did it taste? "It's not going to kill you, for goodness sake," Fish said. Read more at: National Geographic Compare the costs and benefits of different biofuels
Related Stories: Share
More Blogs By LiteGreen
|
News
|
Print
E-mail
