Coffee no longer grounds for beheading

We all know coffee powers us. Now, it’s helping to power the planet. Thankfully, it can no longer get you executed.

Starting with that last part, NPR’s Adam Cole just recounted the history of coffee prohibition, including 17th-century Ottoman ruler Sultan Murad IV’s habit of walking around Istanbul dressed as a commoner so he could personally decapitate coffee drinkers with his hundred-pound broadsword.

Murad apparently thought coffee would inspire indecent behavior. Other rulers also banned the drink out of fear it would roil the populace.

In 17th-century England, however, wives reportedly complained that coffee sapped their husbands’ ability to be suitably indecent with them.

Flash forward to 21st-century North Dakota, where the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota is leading a project to turn coffee-processing waste into energy.

The center is working with Vermont-based energy solutions company Wynntryst produce synthetic gas from coffee residues, plastic packaging, paper, cloth or burlap, and plastic cups coming out of Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. Green Mountain sells Keurig individual coffee cups and supplies coffee products to Starbucks and McDonald’s, among others.

The “syngas” would then be used in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell to produce electricity and heat or be converted to high-value biofuels or chemicals.

“The EERC system has already produced power by gasifying forest residues, railroad tie chips, turkey litter, and other biomass feedstocks and burning the produced syngas in an on-site engine generator,” center Deputy Associate Director for Research Chris Zygarlicke said in a news release. “The coffee industry residues will be similarly tested.”

Based on the outcome of the pilot project, the center plans to propose a full-scale system for use at various Green Mountain sites.

Speaking of beverages that incite people and can be used for power, Edinburgh Napier University’s Biofuel Research Centre just launched Celtic Renewables Ltd, a company intended to commercialize a process for producing biofuel made from whisky by-products.

The “biobutanol” is made from “pot ale,” the liquid from the copper stills, and “draff,” the spent grains. It can be used as a direct replacement for gasoline, or as a blend, without engine modification, and with less emissions, according to the company.

“Scotland’s whisky has a world-wide reputation for excellence and generates huge benefits for our economy,” Fergus Ewing MSP, Scotland’s minister for Energy, Enterprise & Tourism, said in a news release. “It’s fitting, then, that the by-products of this industry are now being used in an area where we have so much promise – sustainable biofuels.”

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