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Yellowstone employee serving french fries to park guests--and creating green energy.
Next time you enjoy an order of french fries while visiting Yellowstone National Park, you’re not only satisfying your appetite, but you’re also helping provide green energy for heating the park’s hotels.
Xanterra Parks & Resorts, a concessioner in Yellowstone, recently designed innovative new equipment for its boiler system to allow for the direct burning of used cooking oil for fuel.
Yellowstone’s operations include a sizable food service component. On a typical summer’s day, Xanterra prepares over 22,000 meals in seventeen restaurants and eight employee dining rooms. On an annual basis, food preparation generates between 9,000 to 11,000 gallons of cooking oil. In the past, the used cooking oil has been shipped offsite almost 250 miles for recycling.
With this new initiative, the used oil will be put to good use in the park by displacing diesel fuel and reducing pollution. Chuck McNab, who recently completed his thirty-fifth year with the company, helped design the system from scratch. He installed the first unit in the historic Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel this year. He’s proud of the project’s accomplishments, both in terms of engineering and sustainability: “It was a challenge developing the system, but I think we’ve come up with a great solution that helps us reduce our environmental impact.”
This project achieves significant environmental gains, most notably by reducing annual carbon dioxide emissions by over 200,000 pounds from the replacement of 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel with cooking oil. The project also eliminates the fossil fuels (and the associated CO2 emissions) needed to transport the material offsite for recycling. Additionally, the potential exists for an even greater environmental gain by utilizing this technology at Xanterra’s operations in other national parks, and accepting the cooking oil from the other park concessioner and restaurants in the surrounding communities of Yellowstone.
So don’t feel guilty about ordering that large fry in Yellowstone on your next trip—you may gain calories, but the park is gaining a sustainable fuel.
Comments
very interesting article Beth. Good use of something that would otherwise be thrown away.
Great article - too bad the fat we gain from the french fries can't be recycled. Ha!
Great article .
As you stated, hopefully other national parks follow this example.
I'm looking forward to having some fries at Mammoth on my September trip to Yellowstone. If Xanterra at Yellowstone can do it economically, why can't others? Good article!
Very interesting article. I wonder if other Xanterra Parks do it as well.
that is a great idea. great article
Way to be green and still enjoy french fries.
Another fabulous reason to eat fried food!!
That's a great transition. But why isn't geothermal energy being tapped for heating? Seems like a uniquely perfect opportunity of location. Is retrofitting to geothermal heating cost prohibitive to the NPS?
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