Pig Poop Biofuel
Biofuel is defined as solid, liquid or gaseous fuel obtained from relatively recently lifeless or living biological material and is different from fossil fuels, which are derived from long dead biological material. Also, various plants and plant-derived materials are used for biofuel manufacturing. Globally, biofuels are most commonly used to power vehicles, heat homes, and for cooking.(Wikipedia).
100 million pigs are slaughtered each year in the USA alone, producing 110 million tons of waste. Much of these ends up in rivers and fed the expansion of a New Jersey-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Billions of dollars are spent on waste transportation and treatment, and regulations continue to become more stringent and cost-intensive to satisfy our desire for a clean environment. Meanwhile, we have a growing need for biofuels that would reduce our dependence on foreign oil and the world’s finite supply of crude petroleum.
Now, In a study published recently in the journal Fuel, researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology provided the most detailed analysis yet of pig manure-based biofuel. It’s not quite ready for the road, they found, but researchers now know what to fix. An experimental pig manure processing plant was designed two years ago by Yuanhui Zhang and Les Christianson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. By heating and pressurizing manure, they turned it into crude oil.
Boasting a manure-to-fuel efficiency of 70 percent, the researchers predicted that a single pig’s production-cycle excretions could yield 21 gallons of crude oil and a neat per-pig profit of $10. Multiply that by the millions of pigs slaughtered each year and it’s a multi-billion-dollar industry. And while the amount of oil produced would be relatively small in comparison to total U.S. fuel consumption, every drop counts. That, however, remains hypothetical. The NIST analysis showed that so-called pig manure crude is still quite crude. It’s about 15% water by volume, reducing its energy efficiency, and suffused with sulfur, heavy metals and nutritional supplements — all of which could end up back in the air.
source: livepaths.brinkster.net
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