IS CHICKEN FAT AN ALTERNATE FUEL?
By Yvonne Sweeney I can remember my mother rendering chicken fat to add flavor to that well-known delicacy “chopped liver.” The yellow jar of rendered chicken fat would stay in the refrigerator and be pulled out whenever she felt a preparation needed a flavoring that one could not get from butter or margarine. Now, some oilmen from Missouri want to use the same kind of fat to help create biodiesel. My mother would have been amused. Jerry Bagby and partner Harold Williams are building a biodiesel plant in Southwest Missouri –not far from a Tyson Foods poultry plant. Currently, this chicken byproduct is shipped out to be used as a low-cost additive to pet foods, soap and other products. The biodiesel entrepreneurs see it as an untapped resource. They intend to mix it with soybean oil and product about three million gallons of biodiesel annually. Now, that’s a lot of chopped liver! Right now, very little chicken fat is rendered into alternate fuel, but the cost of soy bean oil is rising a
