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Have Your Bacon and Drive It Too

Posted by michael on from the oink-oink dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Love ham, bacon and/or sausage? Now you can share that joy with your car. Smithfield is going to turn the waste from 500,000 hogs/year into biodiesel. For those of you who don't know about biodiesel check out this site on how to make your own."

1 of 61 comments (clear)

  1. Read Carefully! by dman123 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The hog waste is being turned into methanol, not biodiesel. The methanol, among other things, is then added in the traditional manner to vegetable or animal fat to make biodiesel.

    The headline is misleading and the equivalent of saying that hydrogen and oxygen can be made into beer, neglecting to mention that they are first combined to make water, then used in the traditional manner to make beer.

    Articles like this (the original, not /.) make me shake my head in disgust. The production of the methanol from the hog waste has to stand on its own against the more efficient production of methanol from natural gas sources. I doubt it can.

    Disclaimer: I have a vested interest in biodiesel and this article raises my blood pressure. Go to www.biodiesel.org to learn about what biodiesel is or is not.

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