Put a Watermelon in Your Tank: From Picnics to Biofuel

One out of every five watermelons rot in the field because they don’t look absolutely perfect for the grocery store.

That’s a lot of wasted food.

But researchers at the USDA are working on a watermelon-to-biofuels system that can use those wasted melons for ethanol production.

“If you took 10 tons of watermelon—about the amount of culled watermelons per acre—and fermented both the juice from the flesh and the rind, you would get about 115 gallons of ethanol.” – Wayne Fish, USDA researcher

Turning corn into ethanol requires treatment with enzymes to break the starch down into simpler sugars. Watermelons, on the other hand, are already full of simple sugars, which means a more efficient conversion process for the production of ethanol. However, researchers say that because the melons are only about 10% sugar, the fruits may be used more efficiently as a supplement to other biofuel feedstocks.

Watermelons are also rich in the nutrients lycopene and L-citrulline, which could be extracted before the fermentation process and add another possible source of income for farmers who would normally leave them in the field to rot.

One other piece of the watermelon to biofuel process that needs innovation is the transportation aspect. Bringing all of those melons from the field to the processing plant could be quite expensive for both labor and transportation, so the search is on for a mobile processor that can be brought right to the field for processing. Wayne Fish believes that by next year’s crop of melons, a prototype mobile processor will be in the fields.

Image:Kanko* at Flickr

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