Patriotic US Pigs Volunteer to Contribute 10 Million Barrels of Crude Oil per Day!

I am simplifying the math slightly, but using the simple formula: 4 gallons crude oil per pig per day X 100 million pigs divided by 42 gallons per barrel, that comes to slightly less than 10 Million barrels of crude oil per day, from pig excrement. Yes, professor Yuanhui Zhang, a bio-environmental engineer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says he can get almost 4 gallons of crude oil from each pig, every day.

Zhang's big breakthrough is that he's designed a more efficient process: a continuous reactor. Instead of converting hog waste one batch at a time, Zhang's lab, which is funded in part by the Illinois Pork Producers Association, has developed a method to feed waste continuously into a reactor, which is essentially an industrial-strength pressurized oven. And, Zhang boasts, "We don't even need pre-drying."

Chemically, pig dung isn't as different from oil as one might think. In Zhang's reactor, a process known as thermochemical conversion partially breaks down hydrocarbon molecules that make up most of the excrement, and voila: porky petrol.

Similar but not identical to the black gold it took Mother Nature eons to brew, Zhang's fuel behaves like diesel.

Now the plan is to move from the lab to a full-sized pilot reactor on a farm somewhere Downstate. Zhang predicts the process could get 3.6 gallons of crude oil a day out of each pig. Illinois brings some 7.2 million hogs to market each year and the nationwide industry is about 100-million hogs strong.

Theoretically, the resulting millions of barrels of crude a day could make a significant dent in America's dependence on nonrenewable, and often imported, oil. More at source.

This may be one reason arabs hate pigs so much. They do not like the competition!
:-)