Fuel from Garbage

I really did a double-take when I first heard that the massive meat-packing company Tyson Foods was jumping into the biofuels market, but the more I thought about it, the more I had to give them credit for creative thinking.

Meat and diesel – where’s the connection? Easy. One of the byproducts of butchering thousands of beasts every day is a huge amount of animal fats. And all that natural goop, that horrible-smelling, greasy, slimy fatty slop, can be converted into biodiesel.

Tyson is forming a joint venture operation called Dynamic Fuels, with Syntroleum, a company that specializes in producing fuel from a variety of organic materials, including animal fat. The beauty of this partnership is that it allows the chicken company to get rid of its waste material, stuff that often collects in huge ponds outside meat-packing plants. In other words, it turns garbage into gas, and allows the company to make money from its waste instead of paying someone to take it away. Oh, let’s not forget the potentially significant benefits to anyone who has to live within smelling range of the plant.

Tyson, which already has a well-established network of trucks and trains, will also handle transportation. Even better, Tyson wants to get other meat packers to provide their waste products as well. I’m not sure if Tyson will pay for it, or just offer to take it off their hands for a really attractive rate, but the economics of this arrangement are hard to ignore.

The two companies are expected to kick in $75 million each, and hope to start construction on a new refinery next year. They hope to produce 75 million gallons of fuel per year, starting in 2010.