Orange Beach makes fuel from Shrimp Festival cooking grease

Among the many things that the National Shrimp Festival produces in great quantity — traffic, tourists, tax revenue — is grease.

Last month's four-day festival in Gulf Shores featured about 40 food vendors.

Most of them peddled something fried, be it eggplant or alligator, sweetened batter or scallops, turkey or shrimp. And in feeding an estimated 300,000 festival attendees, vendors accumulated some 1,300 gallons of used cooking oil.

Enough food-flecked grease to fill a couple dozen 55-gallon drums isn't normally much to get excited about. But for the Orange Beach Public Works Department, which began last year to brew its own biodiesel, the coagulating cache was worth thousands of dollars.

"Say diesel's $2.50 a gallon," said Public Works director Tim Tucker. "Well, we make it for 63 cents."

And with those fuel savings in their sights, Orange Beach employees were dispatched to the early morning dismantling of the Shrimp Festival with truck-mounted pumps and 275-gallon vats.

Eight hours later they had gathered enough oil to fuel several pieces of heavy equipment through the winter.

For about $8,000, city employees built a reactor in a small garage at the Public Works yard off Canal Road. Since they began collecting grease, they've produced about 2,200 gallons of biofuel using a process in which lye and methanol are added to the cooking oil, said Shawn White, who oversees much of the production.

The byproduct of the process is glycerin, or soap. And that is either thrown away — it's biodegradable — or used around city garages as a degreaser.

The end product, which smells like a dirty stove, is mixed with regular diesel to make it last, White said. Typically, it powers the city's backhoes, large mowers, leaf vacuums and an incinerator used to burn tree limbs.

Orange Beach has plenty of other trucks and heavy machinery that continue to run on petroleum-based diesel for no other reason than the city doesn't have a steady enough supply of grease. Engines need to be weaned slowly from petroleum-based diesel by blending in increasing ratios of biofuel, and can require frequent adjustments if the ratio of fossil fuel to biofuel swings widely, Tucker said.

Beyond the annual boost it expects from the Shrimp Festival, the city has started a program similar to those in Daphne and Bay Minette to collect small quantities of cooking oil from residents.

Orange Beach currently collects spent oil from two eateries in town and one in downtown Mobile. And utilities in neighboring Gulf Shores and Foley have begun to collect cooking oil for Orange Beach in a preventive move: Fryer oil is the cholesterol of sewer systems.

But Orange Beach, which spends in excess of $50,000 a year on diesel, is looking for more, Tucker said.