Cow Dung Under Pressure Makes Gasoline

[demobabe]

And it also makes vanillin too, apparently...

http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70342-0.html

TOKYO -- Scientists in energy-poor Japan said Friday they have found a new source of gasoline -- cattle dung.

Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted .042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat.

"The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders" to reduce the burden of disposing of large amounts of waste, Shibusawa said. About 551,155 tons of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan, he said.

[Hardrada]

1. There might be some use for repug propaganda

after all.

[demobabe]

2. It does make you wonder

...if the same technique could be applied to chicken shit.

[Hardrada]

3. The we would have some constructive purpose

for the books and magazines of the PNAC crowd!

[ReadTomPaine]

4. I wonder what the energy input/output figures are.

That's the key. If it takes too much of that heat and pressure to convert from one to the other, then it's a net loss of energy or a wash.

[demobabe]

6. Good question

They say they need to refine it for five years to make it into something that's commercially viable. So it makes you wonder what is possible... they pressure cook it at 575 degrees - but didn't say how long.

[Maddy McCall]

11. Precisely.

[regnaD kciN]

5. Praise the Lord!!!

The Bush administration has a solution to the energy crisis after all! ;-)

[Lone_Star_Dem]

7. Well what do ya know, Texas' politicians do have a use after all.

I should be able to gather enough BS in this election cycle alone to keep us all in gasoline until the year 2099. :P

[TheWraith]

8. By my calculations

That amount of cow dung would produce about 284,000 barrels of gas a year. Just imagine what you could produce in the US. Hopefully the process is exo-energetic: that they get more energy out of the gas than they have to put in. Otherwise it's a cool but useless bit of information.

[Dr Batsen D Belfry]

9. High Pressure and Heat sounds a bit like

Thermal Depolymerization. TDP is being played with here, mostly at poultry farms, but it looks to be a way of extracting the petrol out of just about anything that doesn't contain metal.

I did a napkin calculation about using TDP in Pittsburgh. If they processed all the garbage each year instead of trucking it to the landfills on the outskirts of the county, the city would generate enough fuel to fill the entire city vehicle fleet for a year, plus they would have pre-processed pure water. This would result in longer life on the garbage trucks, savings of $1.5 mm a year on gas at present prices, and lower water processing costs by adding the water from the system to the public water supply.

Oh, and that doesn't count the additional savings if they added processing the sewage stream, or if they mined the landfills to empty them and return the property to the tax rolls.

DBDB

[nolabels]

10. Just by simple calculations if one could find ways to recycle the energy..

even more efficiently from our stuff we call garbage then there would be no garbage. The earth (in every aspect) has always been efficient at that task. The earth might even do all of us to the point of extinction if we don't get a handle on it ourselves.

[demobabe]

13. Interesting...

Thanks for your info. That's real interesting and I'd like to learn more.

The poultry farms really could use something like this. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Frank Purdue has a zillion chicken farms, and all of the excrement has been washing into local tributaries resulting in fish that float to the surface with open, bleeding bacterial infections. We're talking one to two inch sores on these fish. The fishermen that come in contact with these fish have been getting similar sores and illnesses.

These plants should be required to recycle their poop somehow.

[Hubert Flottz]

12. I've seen people riding around with cows in their trucks and I...

always wondered why! Some of the 18 wheelers had lots of cows in the back I reckon they use more fuel?

The GOP is so full of shit, that if they find this out they will be drilling each other 24/7...Bush would be the Mother Of All Gushers!