14 DAY TRIAL // Haifang Wen, a researcher currently working with the Washington State University in the US, claims to have come up with a way to use good old cooking oil to make a new type of bio-asphalt that the scientist says is not all that different from its petroleum-based sibling.
In fact, Haifang Wen says that his cooking oil-based asphalt not only looks like its petroleum-based counterpart, but can also be manipulated in much the same way.
Talking to the press, the Washington State University scientist says that his main drive in creating this new type of asphalt was the fact that, for the time being, this material is rather costly.
More precisely, just one ton of run-off-the-mill asphalt comes with an impressive price tag of $700-800 (€509-582).
Interestingly enough, this is despite the fact that the ingredients used to make it are residues resulting from the production of gasoline, plastics, and the like.
“Every year in the U.S., we use about 30 million tons of asphalt binder for roads, even more if you include roofing shingles,” Haifang Wen said. “It's easily a multi-billion dollar business,” he added.
By turning to using waste cooking oil instead of petroleum to make asphalt, the researcher expects that not only will the costs of making this material be reduced, but that the industry will somewhat improve on its ecological footprint.
“Building roads is a big investment in taxpayer money. In general, a one-mile road in a rural area costs at least a million dollars to build,” the Washington State University researcher wished to stress, as cited by Phys Org.
“With the waste cooking oil technology, we can reduce the cost of asphalt binder to under $200 (€145.5) per ton, making road building much cheaper,” Haifang Wen went on to detail.
By the looks of it, it was just recently when the Federal Highway Administration in the United States agreed to offer this scientist a $1 million (€0.72 million) grant intended to support further investigations into the production of cooking oil-based bioasphalt.
Apart from this, Haifang Wen is the recipient of a $190,000 (€138,253) grant from the country's National Science Foundation, the same source tells us.
The Washington State University scientist says that, judging by how well things are going, it will probably be sometime this year when the country's first road made from cooking oil-based asphalt is built.
“We are shooting for summer 2014 to construct a trial road - probably at least a quarter mile (0.4 kilometers) long,” Haifang Wen said in a statement.