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."

Comments

What is new?

[ozamosi]

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.

Not quite

[Andy Dodd]

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.

Re:Won't all the methane from the cows be worse?

[menkhaura]

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.