The Power of Poop...

It seems as if one enterprising U of Illinois guy has an answer to our energy problems:

ILLINOIS STYLE: UI researcher makes crude oil from pig manure

DAVE ORRICK

(Arlington Heights) Daily Herald

HAMPSHIRE, Ill. - Can the other white meat's manure make black gold?

They say you can't turn a sow's ear into a silk purse, but University of Illinois researchers are working some interesting magic at the other end of the animal.

"We are the first to actually do this," professor Yuanhui Zhang says proudly of his team's ability to turn swine manure into crude oil. He's a bio-environmental engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has led the 10-year research project that recently announced a breakthrough in porcine petroleum.

And we're talking some impressive numbers here:

Now the plan is to move from the lab to a full-sized pilot reactor on a farm somewhere Downstate. Zhang predicts the process could get 3.6 gallons of crude oil a day out of each pig. Illinois brings some 7.2 million hogs to market each year and the nationwide industry is about 100-million hogs strong.(emphases added)

Theoretically, the resulting millions of barrels of crude a day could make a significant dent in America's dependence on nonrenewable, and often imported, oil.

The story goes on to state that things are still in the research stage.  But since Iran only exports 2.5 million barrels per day to the world market, this looks like an ever-so-promising way of saying, "Eat sand and die!"


(Filed under energy madness)