Who’s Laughing Now? Scientists Make Crude Oil from Pig Manure

[M II A II R II K]

Who’s Laughing Now? Scientists Make Crude Oil from Pig Manure


April 16th, 2010

Tina Casey



Read More: http://cleantechnica.com/2010/04/16/...om-pig-manure/

Pig manure is one step away from a transformation of metamorphic proportions. The lowly waste product, notorious for its impact on the environment and on human olfactory nerves, is on the verge of becoming an important alternative to petroleum now that scientists at the University of Illinois have developed a process for converting raw pig manure to crude oil. With further development, the process may even yield biodiesel.

- When it comes to providing an alternative source of oil, pig manure ain’t no small potatoes. According to an article by Steve Giegerich in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, one pig generates up to 8 pounds of manure per day. The research team estimates that a 10,000-hog farm could produce about 5,000 barrels of crude oil per year. The bottom line: instead of ending up with a manure waste disposal nightmare, hog farms could see an increase in income of up to $15 per hog.

- The manure-to-oil process uses thermochemical conversion, in which heat and pressure act on organic compounds in a revved-up, tightly controlled imitation of the much longer process that occurs in nature. In order to develop a commercially viable method, the research team ditched the catalyst required by the conventional process, and they figured out a way to keep pig hair and dander from fouling the equipment. The team also skipped the conventional first step, which would be to dewater the manure. Instead, their process uses raw manure containing 80% water. The use of raw manure requires more heat to activate the conversion, but the researchers note that could be captured and recycled with a heat exchanger.

[fineday]

i'm laughing.

[vid]

Two birds with one stone.

[navyweaxguy]

bacon and fuel... the perfect animal

[IMADreamer]

how can one animal provide so much goodness? lol It's official pigs are actually offer more to society then most humans.

[dchan]

I believe that one of the scientists in question looks like this:



http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/sh...=659172&page=5

[The Dirt]

I'm wondering what kind of yield we would get from cow manure? Arguably, they produce way more waste per animal lifespan than a pig, right? They certainly produce enough methane to be significant polluters.

[vid]

Pigs produce more waste per pound of animal than any other livestock or thereabouts; they're omnivores too, so everything is in it and their digestive system breaks it down more, likely making it easier to refine into crude oil. You could probably add any waste to it though, even human, and get a similar result. There are already sewage plants, landfills, and farms generating energy with the methane given off by the waste they store.

It's also worthy to note that this methane is over 20 times more potent as a green house gas than carbon. Every tonne of methane that doesn't go into the atmosphere is worth more than 20 tonnes of carbon, but rarely do you hear suggestions on what to do about it. Everyone is all "carbon this, carbon that". Methane is worse but recycling it into less harmful things is more financially viable than something stupid like carbon capture.

[diablo234]

Originally Posted by The Dirt

I'm wondering what kind of yield we would get from cow manure? Arguably, they produce way more waste per animal lifespan than a pig, right? They certainly produce enough methane to be significant polluters.

I'm sure they could get a larger yield from cow manure than pig manure and I doubt the makeup is any different.

[vid]

Cow manure has more undigested plant matter in it.

[AirGuitarChampion]

I hate to poo on this idea, especially coming from one of nature's wonderful magical bacon producing animals but...

"- The manure-to-oil process uses thermochemical conversion, in which heat and pressure act on organic compounds"

I guess my question is how much heat and how much pressure, and if that energy comes from elsewhere or weather their process is self sustaining... is it a net gain in energy?

Next is the fact pig manure is used as fertilizer in alot of places, if that goes away (or gets more expensive because all the farmers want to sell it for a higher yeild to the oil process) then you're back to using run of the mill chemically based fertilizer? i.e., the same thing that happened to corn prices when ethanol came about?

A better idea IMHO is what already happens with biodigestors. Lots of them around already converting many different types of manure into methane, spinning small turbines for electricity production.

[Nowhereman1280]

Originally Posted by diablo234

I'm sure they could get a larger yield from cow manure than pig manure and I doubt the makeup is any different.

Actually the makeup is radically different. Pigs have a digestive tract that is very closely related to that of humans. We both have extremely large brains for the size of our bodies and therefore need extremely efficient digestive tracts to capture enough energy to power our brains. Humans are by far the most efficient digesting machines on the planet and it shows in the fact that our waste is stripped of something like 80% of the usable nutrients and calories. This means that all that remains is the toxic shit that would normally kill things if left in high concentrations. Since only the toxic stuff is left, that makes our waste extremely dangerous for the environment (for example, human waste will not breakdown for centuries or sometimes at all if left in an alpine environment). Pig waste is very close to ours in composition and nearly as well digested.

Cows on the other hand have small brains and extremely inefficient, vegetarian, digestive tracts. Have you ever seen a cow in a field in real life? They are constantly chewing, even if they haven't taken a bite of grass for minutes. That is because they have several stomachs that take a very long time to digest the grass. Part of their digestive process is chewing the grass, swallowing it into one of their stomachs, then vomiting it up into their mouth, chewing it (called "chewing their cud", that's where the phrase comes from) again, and then swallowing it back into a different stomach to be digested some more. The reason pigs and humans don't eat grass, leaves, or other woody materials is that we don't have the capacity to digest cellulose, the hard material that makes the cell walls of trees and other plants stiff. Cows are very well suited to digesting this material and therefore can survive off of woody materials. This also means that their waste is poorly digested and has very little of the energy and nutritional value stripped from it. This is why farmers must put salt and mineral licks in the fields for their livestock. Licking mineral deposits is the main way a bovine collects minerals since grass has very little.

In short, cow poop is little more than wet grass, human and pig poop is a toxic stew of things that are of very little use to any organism beyond the hardiest of bacteria and fungi...

[STR]

^Cow manure also already has marketable value in the form of fertilizer (for the reasons you go into). Collect it, sell it. Pig crap has no value whatsoever beyond this idea, so is generally carted off at the farmers expense to be buried.

Originally Posted by vid

It's also worthy to note that this methane is over 20 times more potent as a green house gas than carbon. Every tonne of methane that doesn't go into the atmosphere is worth more than 20 tonnes of carbon, but rarely do you hear suggestions on what to do about it. Everyone is all "carbon this, carbon that". Methane is worse but recycling it into less harmful things is more financially viable than something stupid like carbon capture.

Methane is 20 times worse per unit, but we as a society make a whole lot more carbon than we do methane. It makes up for the difference. Most climate reports I've read break down the causes of warming by percentage and anthropogenic carbon is always greater than man-made methane.

[Roadcruiser1]

Pigs are awesome as always. They are great animals. It seems like you can use almost anything from them or anything they create.