Japanese scientists have found a way to change cow dung into gasoline. Using heat and pressure, the scientists were able to change 3.5 ounces of cow dung into .042 ounces of gasoline. While this sounds like a tremendously low amount of gasoline, especially for a country with as little arable land as Japan, my wife and I have calculated (without doublechecking mind you) that this amounts to 1.6 gallons of gasoline per year just from Japanese cow waste.
While this would not help as an effective greenhouse gas alternative, It would create the ability for us to lower energy costs. Finally putting trash to actual use is a good first step! Thoughts?
There's a company called changing world technologies that claims to be able to turn just about any waste into the equivalent of a light crude oil. The process is 85% efficient and most byproducts are useful for other purposes. Some dangerous chemicals are even broken down into inert matter by the process. They opened up a test plant in carthage missouri about a year ago that processes the turkey offal from a local turkey processing plant. You can check them out at
ReplyDeletehttp://www.changingworldtech.com/
The process was covered by many notable scientific magazines a couple years back.
While I'm all for biomass fuels (like uberfreki mentioned), I can't help but think that if this technology would become more wide spread, we'd start either:
ReplyDeletea) putting bags under our cows for easy collection and the creation of one of the worst jobs known to man, possibly requiring more fertilizer costs,
or,
b) putting cows in stalls where they will be unable to move for their entire lives -- like those chicken farms.
Either way, I don't know that society is making progress. Still burning oil, more shitty jobs.
Out of curiosity, how did you come by the statistics for the GNP of cow pies in Japan?
Statistics for cow dung (production?) were in the Yahoo article that was linked to in the original post.
ReplyDeleteUPDATE
ReplyDeleteError correction from the editor: The story should note that the Japanese would receive 1.6 million gallons of gasoline not just 1.6 gallons.
apologies