2010 Butter Sculpture Was Converted Into Biodiesel

Scott Detrow

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Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.

Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.

Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

January 13, 2012 | 1:16 PM

A follow-up to this morning’s post about the Farm Show’s butter sculpture: commenter Don Scott shared a link to a 2010 New York Times article about how another piece of butter art was turned into energy.

The impetus was an 800-pound sculpture of Benjamin Franklin and the Liberty Bell. Each year the Pennsylvania Farm Show, held in Harrisburg, commissions a masterpiece made out of butter. In 2007, the organizers solicited suggestions for what to do with the work after the farm show ended.
Dr. Haas submitted the idea of making biodiesel fuel out of it, and that is what was done. “It had never been reported in the scientific literature,” he said.
Dr. Haas collaborated with BlackGold Biofuels, a small Philadelphia company that has developed a process for making biodiesel fuel out of a wide range of nonedible, low-value “fog” — the industry shorthand for fats, oils and grease.

Penn State’s Glenn Cauffman mentioned the biodiesel conversion attempt when he was explaining this year’s butter-to-methane conversion. He said the fuel had one major shortfall: it smelled disgusting.
Since it was made out of rancid butter, that’s not too surprising.