A blast from the past: The Marvelous Chicken (Poop)-Powered Car

[eppur_se_muova]

ABOVE: Who needs a tiger in their tank? Harold Bate, chicken farmer and inventor from Devonshire, England says that you can power your motor vehicles with droppings from chickens, pigs or any other animal of your choice... even with your own waste! To prove his statement is no idle boast, Harold has been operating a 1953 Hillman and a five-ton truck on methane gas generated by decomposing pig and chicken manure for years. He claims that the equivalent of a gallon of high-test gasoline costs him only about 3d and that the low-cost methane makes his vehicles run faster, cleaner and better than they operate on "store bought" fuel. Mr. Bate stands beside his famous Hillman in the photo above.
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Detroit and the large petroleum interests keep saying it can't be done but a 62-year-old English inventor has already done it. Harold Bate, British chicken farmer and experimenter, has developed a small conversion unit that makes any ordinary automobile virtually pollution-free. What's more (and hang on to your hat for this one) the Bate converter can also cut your fuel, oil, sparkplug and other miscellaneous automobile operating expenses by a factor of ten! The Bate system accomplishes these amazing feats as naturally as a compost pile by recycling animal droppings and sewage into methane: a Colorless, odorless, flammable gas. This means that, as a bonus, Harold Bate's development just may go a long way toward safely and naturally reclaiming the mountains of waste with which "civilized man " seems determined to bury the planet. Interestingly enough, Bate did not make his noteworthy breakthrough in a well-equipped laboratory or while working on a multi-million dollar research grant. The converter and other parts of the Bate system were developed by Harold from odds and ends at hand as he puttered about his 450-year-old cottage and chicken farm in the heart of Devonshire. To be sure, Harold Bate has invented nothing new in the way of a basic process. Methane has been forming naturally in swamps and waste organic matter since long before man walked the earth and many ingenious experimenters have harnessed this source of fuel in the past (see SOLUTION TO POLLUTION, ELECTRICITY FROGS MANURE GASES and HOW TO GENERATE POWER FROM GARBAGE in MOTHER NO. 3). But Harold does seem to be the first to have actually put the whole idea on a workable, homestead, "anybody can do it" basis.
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more: http://www.green-trust.org/2000/biofuel/batesmethane.htm

[whistle]

1. What about pig piss and pig shit....there are millions of tons of that

....produced every year in the U.S. ? Mix that with the chicken poop and I'll bet it could make rocket fuel!

[Parche]

2. Pigs on the Wing

More crap in 6years that could do a lot of good.............

[whistle]

7. Perfect and limitless supply of pig shit and pig piss

:rofl:

[whistle]

8. Perfect and limitless supply of pig shit and pig piss

:rofl:

[silverweb]

3. There are thousands of examples of this.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=methane%2Bmanure

This is an almost limitless and constantly renewing source of fuel. Unfortunately, it's still considered a "novelty" and is not being used sufficiently or efficiently.

[NickB79]

4. Yeah, except for all the fossil fuels we use to grow the livestock

So no, it is not a limitless, constantly renewing fuel source if you don't have massive amounts of oil and natural gas to run the farms and keep the livestock fed.

[silverweb]

5. Really?

I didn't know shit was in such short supply before we started using petro-fertilizers.

[NickB79]

6. Before we used petro-fertilizers there were far fewer livestock

As there were far fewer humans. Before the advent of cheap fossil fuels, particularly fossil fuels, the world population was under 2 billion people, and they didn't raise thousands of pigs, chickens and cattle at a time on their farms.

[silverweb]

9. That's true.

And we didn't use/need oil for energy, either, and our overall energy use was less.

So with the constant flow of waste from all of our livestock, to say nothing of the same from humans (that now just gets dumped, treated or not, into our oceans and waterways), we should be able to generate sufficient energy to offset a substantial portion of our petrofuel needs.

I'd love to see all of our sewage treatment plants turned into methane generating plants, as well as a generating station on site at every livestock operation.