Have you ever wondered what McDonalds DOES with all that leftover French fry grease?

Whatever they have been doing–including selling it to soap manufacturers, or as a cattle feed additive–is not nearly as interesting as what they could be doing–making it available as an alternative energy source for conversion to vehicle fuel.

Fuel generated from plant oils–“biodiesel”–is actually one of the up-and-coming contenders for a place on the podium in the alternative energy Olympics–and what’s at stake is far more than a gold medal and a nosegay.

With the world exhausting its fossil fuel supply at an unprecedented rate, the party or parties who devise a practical and cost-efficient alternative to petroleum-based fuels will become the OPEC of the 21st century, and their product, the alternative energy, will be to 21st century mankind what fire was to the Neanderthals.

So where does McDonald’s fit in? Some 10% of its annual waste is in the form of used oil, and if just half of those billions of burgers were served with fries, that’s a lot of oil.

What if that all oil were made available for conversion to alternative energy in the form of biodiesel? The Internet provides information, both on the process, and on a number of enterprising Americans already using small amounts of home-made biodiesel as alternative energy for their vehicles.

Palm, soy, and corn oils have all made the trip from the kitchen cupboard to the alternative energy laboratory, with corn oil’s distillate ethanol finding current favor as a gasoline additive.

The future of biodiesel is so bright, in fact, that nine palm-oil-ethanol processing plants are now under construction in Southeast Asia and Singapore, and two of them are being funded, in part, by U.S. and German interests.

In light of the rewards to be heaped on the winner of the alternative energy Derby, is it entirely beyond the realm of all possibility that we may one day be pulling into Mickey D’s for a Big Mac, fries, and a fillup–with MickeyDiesel?