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Researchers Make Gasoline From Cow Dung
McDrewbie writes "Yahoo! News has an article about Japanese researchers extracting a small amount of gasoline from 3.5oz of cow dung. The process uses application of high heat and pressure. Hopefully, when more information is released, we can find out how much energy it takes to produce this gasoline and how energy efficient the process is."
Could anyone care to tell me exactly what is new here?
I live in Sweden. Our busses (all our busses, a few cars) doesn't run on fossil fuel - they run on human shit. If anybody would care to go and pick up all the cow dung around, I'm sure it could be used in the shit-to-fuel-factory as well.
Up untill recently they did, however, use cows as fuel: they mixed the shit with animal fat from slaughter houses when they made the fuel.
It is possible to make a number of the products currently made with oil-derived plastics with other things. Cellophane, bakelite, plastics derived from vegetable oils, coal. Alternatively metal, wood, or paper can be used for some products for which plastics are used now. All these need to be looked at in terms of cost-benefit analyses: there is no point in using wood if it takes a huge amount of energy to machine it to replace a plastic part. Design also plays a part, too, in that differences in design may mean less machining required, and so on.
A Load of Manure. html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/04/opinion/04niman
TALK of reducing our dependence on foreign oil through alternative energy sources like biomass is everywhere these days -- even on our president's lips. As a livestock farmer and environmental lawyer, I've paid particular attention to discussion about using manure as "green power." The idea sounds appealing, but power from manure turns out to be a poor source of energy. Unlike solar or wind, it can create more environmental problems than it solves. And it ends up subsidizing large agribusiness. That's why energy from manure should really be considered a form of "brown power."
continued..
Befor this, Carthage never had an issue with a bad smell. The parent post is a little off - it's not a livestock town. It is a big poultry town, and if you got a Butterball turkey, it may have gone through Carthage. However, odor was never a big problem from the poultry plants until they took the turkey remains and tried to turn them into petrolium.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
Coincidentally, the New York Times today has an op-ed that argues this is a terrible idea. The main point of the op-ed is that such power generation would encourage environmentally-harmful factory farming, which is the source of all the dung, by essentially subsidizing their dung production. Dung power would have other bad environmental side effects, too.
Well, in the 1970's, the US did manage to reduce the amount of energy used per person, in a very real way. The problem is that over time, these efficencies led to consumption increases because the prices (real dollars) stayed somewhat stable (due to abundance caused by the increase in efficency), while inflation/increased productivity increased the income of the average American. This led to the massive increase in the size of a house (the McMansion phoneomena, with all the bedrooms, Sub Zero fridges and massive heating systems), cars (SUVs and giant pickups), and most electronic devices going to a standby mode instead of a real shutdown. People say they want to use less energy, but they really, really want more stuff.
There are constant upgrades to electrical power plants, otherwise we wouldn't be able to waste as much as we do and still have basically the same number of base load plants in the country. However, the electrical generation field is a very mature industry. The chance for innovation is very limited within the current structure. At some point the power generators will need to get new plants online, and they'll have to bite the bullet and do it with the existing envriornmental restrictions, because there's just no way, even with the current 1 party rule (in the US), they'll be able to get rid of the restrictions (unless we're at war... Oh, wait... I forgot), or build useful generation plants in less than 1 congressional term.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
What happened is that in doing the cost/benefit analysis of the TDP plant for turkey offal, the analysts were counting on pending U.S. legislation that would ban the use of animal waste as animal feed. (Similar to laws that have been enacted in nearly every other country in order to combat mad cow disease.)
In the end, the law died out (a Bad Thing for U.S. meat consumers - agricultural industry money won out over concerns for public health.), and as a result what was originally going to become biological waste potentially classified as a biohazard which companies would have to PAY to dispose of, the status quo of being able to use animal leftovers as feed for other animals remained. The new oil plant isn't what made people decide to charge for their animal waste, they were ALREADY doing it.
In short, an increase in demand didn't cause the cost effectiveness of the TDP plant in Carthage to fail, but lack of an expected decrease in demand did.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
In india actually dried cow dung is used directly as a fuel in the form of "cow cakes" and is in fact a "traditional fuel"
a de7/india/Woman_cooking.html
C ourses/so191/SouthAsReadings/IndiaEnergySuccess.ht ml
http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/curriculum/socialstd/gr
"Refining" of cow dung has been going on for a long time for even more efficiency is used all the time
Check out this article from 1995 that converts cow dung to methane which is used in power plants and the left over slurry is used a fertilizer..
http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/faculty/hodgson/
I'm Brazilian, living in Brazil. Two points:
Brazil runs most of its cars on sugar cane extract
This "extract" is ethanol, exactly the same substance that makes you go high on booze. It can be produced from almost anything that produces sugar, not only sugar cane.
Besides, most cars down here are run on good old petroleum extract, because alcohol production is somewhat uncertain. However, our gas has 20% alcohol, and every car here has to drink that.
Then again, Brazil isn't run by millionaires who are more interested in increasing their millions than actually imporoving things.
How so very wrong... Granted, we are not quite a Banana Republic, but we are Latin America, and our politicians are not distinguished by putting the People's interests ahead of their own.
Cheers.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Medical Waste: 65% oilt ion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymeriza
Free the fat to fuel America...
"Why didn't we have global warming in 1885?"
/ abruptclimate_15misconceptions.html
Probably because we were just leaving a "Little Ice Age" (1300-1800AD). http://www.whoi.edu/institutes/occi/currenttopics
One problem that I have about "global warming" is the fact that we only have historical temperature records since around 1860. This is about 60 years after the end of the "Little Ice Age". So for 500 years we were in a "Little Ice Age" and now the last 200 years has temperatures of the Earth warming. So maybe the bison and horses are what snapped the cold spell and we are perpetuating it.